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Dwarf Fortress' creator says the industry's in shambles over AI
- slowhadoken 16d agoIt’s been in bad shape for the last 11 years.
- insane_dreamer 16d ago> now said CEOs can still see an end result that mimics the thing they don't understand—and are able to self-delude themselves into thinking it's replicable at scale, or that it's even producing the same quality as the product they've actually been selling. this is happening across all industries
- mock-possum 16d agoBut will people buy it? (Spoiler: more than you’re comfortable with, yes they will)
- pandaman 16d agoThe article makes note about profits as high as ever, which is true for the revenues. Revenue of the industry used to grow every year until 2020, when it stalled and had been the same for the past 5 years. While revenue remains the same, the cost raises - people want more money due to inflation, benefits cost more, capital costs more etc. etc. So no, profits are not as high as ever, they had been falling steadily over the past 6 years and as the result we see all the layoffs and studio closures. Is AI the reason? I somehow doubt that AI caused the revenue to stall in 2021. In 2021 AI could not even draw hands, least write decent code. What we had around that period was a lot of M&A in the industry. Insane capital went into buying up game studios and even publishers like Zenimax and Activision. Embracer alone acquired ~200 studios in 2019-2022. If I wanted to know why the industry is fucked up now I'd be looking there, not at the AI.
- andrevallee 15d ago[flagged]
- gilbetron 15d agoAI lets people cosplay as whatever field they are interested in. You can feel like a game developer, or doctor, or writer, or artist, and it's fun!
- qw_qrtx 16d agoI have never been a gamer, but I have gained huge respect for gamers, gamer magazines and game developers for pushing back against this AI curse. Contrast this with "open" source where some Gen-Xers who are too tired to program need the AI wheelchair and simultaneously build power in their corporations for selling out everyone else. I fell that also gamers are still able to articulate themselves rather than just spewing corporate talking points all day long.
- ctoth 16d agoYou may wish to check if the screen name JackWeinberg is available.
- tiahura 16d agoThe argument that it is in shambles wasn’t particularly persuasive. “videogames are as profitable as ever” It seemed more like the understandable frustration of someone whose profession is being automated. Schumpeter creative destruction, but not shambles.
- qw_qrtx 16d ago"the industry" also includes "human resources", previously known as personnel or humans. Any why always call critics "frustrated" in order to depict them as weak and spiteful? Isn't the Dwarf Fortress guy independent anyway?
- mcphage 16d agoVideo games are profitable as ever, but they take years to produce, and the mass layoffs makes me wonder who’s going to be making the games coming out in 2-5 years. Also it has required a lot of write-offs from closing studios to maintain this profitability, and that’s not a trick you can keep up for long.
- dexwiz 16d agoProfit in video games as an industry is largely the gambling industry hiding under the another umbrella. I'm not even talking about loot boxes. Just old school gambling games like roulette and slot machines but in a digital format. Once you strip that away and loot boxes, the numbers are great for classic games.
- bhewes 16d agoWorse then gambling at least I can take cash out. These are pure extraction machines. When I was part of a game studio startup all the VCs wanted the loot gambling games, some of the teams they funded hired casino guys.
- spwa4 16d agoYes, then this part was regulated. And so if you allow cash out, you're regulated. The result was not regulated gambling but extermination of cash out options (well, and sometimes very obvious illegal gambling houses).
- newtonianrules 16d agoDoes it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse? Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.
- pavel_lishin 16d agoWere they ever well run?
- ChrisRR 15d agoIt's not a new phenomenon. Companies have been dying for as long as companies have existed
- dfxm12 16d agoI don't go back quite to the 90s, but this has been true across my entire experience working in a few big multinationals (including one in tech). Companies will do what Wall Street wants (Wall Street likes layoffs), and at a certain level, they don't want unemployment to get too low, lest their workers gain too much leverage.
- anonreeeeplor 16d ago[dead]
- martythemaniak 16d agoI'll give you my diagnosis, which is derived from this: https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-that-changed-america https://www.semafor.com/article/04/27/2025/the-group-chats-t... The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alternative viewpoints or dissent are not part of this social circle, and despite their 'conterarian' self-image, there's an immense amount of social pressure to conform. You can can see hints of this outside - for example this site used to see YC folks as regular commenters, but no more. Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies. These people certainly do not encounter normal people in their day-to-day lives. In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA, etc. One guy starts yapping about some snake oil, they all yap about snake oil. There no negative feedback loop there.
- profstasiak 16d agoWe need Dwarf Fortress creator to lead Butlerian Jihad
- tedd4u 16d agoInstead, we got Universal Paperclips ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- slazaro 16d agoWhich ironically is the name of a pretty amazing game: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
- Sohcahtoa82 16d agoAh shit, here I go again. The last two hours of productivity today are toast.
- anonreeeeplor 16d ago[dead]
- munificent 16d ago1. Human attention is a finite resource. 2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever. 3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media. You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually. Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone. Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
- _s_a_m_ 16d ago"art"
- lackoftactics 16d agoThis seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle. How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.
- ryandvm 16d agoDamn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.
- archagon 16d agoIt's pretty clear to me that the primary value-add of AI is as an enshittification accelerator. (At least in the commercial sector.)
- hax0ron3 16d ago>They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job. If AIs get just a few times better than they are now, the CEO probably actually will be able to press a button that makes a good quality game. The problem for the CEO is that every other CEO will be able to do the same thing, so what will be the distinguishing factor? The buying without a job part isn't necessarily a devastating problem for now. Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI, so there is a cushion period in which there is still a large number of people who have jobs. >Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don't understand. I'm no big capitalism fan, but this sentence is funny. The author just had to put in a dig against capitalism, mildly qualified with the "and likely a long while before that". What do you mean "likely"? Lol. It's absolutely obvious that this has been true for a long while before modern capitalism.
- MattDamonSpace 16d agoNot to mention “labor they don’t understand” is only possible with specialization and modernity. Back when everyone was a farmer, yeah sure everyone understood the job
- hax0ron3 16d agoI think that even back in early farming days, there were usually some guys who were good at using spears and didn't know much about farming who would go around taking part of the farmers' output. If the farmers were relatively lucky, the guys with the spears would stick around and defend the farmers from other guys with spears in a long-term arrangement of trading protection for material goods instead of just roaming around robbing farmers without giving anything back.
- Ancapistani 16d agoYep. We call the former “states” and the latter “gangs”. The difference is subtle.
- square_usual 16d agoIn the first paragraph: > While videogames are as profitable as ever on paper And the linked article is about revenue going up YoY, not profit. And then it says: > It's remarkably dissonant with, say, the current 'Xbox reset' which has Microsoft cancelling games and looking to ax studios left and right Xbox in their own earnings report said their revenues dropped by 7% YoY. Yeah OK, I guess games journalist are as bad as they've ever been.
- deleted 16d ago[deleted]
- prophesi 16d agoAre there sources for this? I'm seeing an 11% increase in revenue from their 2025 Q4 report[0], and still a 1% increase in their 2026 Q1 report[1], the off-season for the videogame industry. Hardware revenue's falling, but it's propped up with their Game Pass and game sales. [0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2026-Q1/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/investor/earnings/FY-2026-Q1... [1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/fy-2025-Q4/press-release-webcast https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/fy-2025-Q4... edit: Tarn Adams is also an indie game developer, not a game journalist. Dwarf Fortress is highly influential in the indie game scene.
- square_usual 15d agoYou can search "Xbox revenue 2026" and one of the first results is this: https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/xbox-revenue-falls-7-fy26-121105743.html https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/articles/xbox-revenue-f... Note that I said "YoY", and the numbers you're citing are quarter to quarter (and on 2025 Q4 don't include the Xbox Hardware division, only their content division). The points I've quoted come from the article, not the interview with the developer. I didn't go that far down because clearly the person taking the interview doesn't know what they're talking about.
- prophesi 15d ago
- QuadrupleA 16d agoLove this quote, seems to apply to all software these days and maybe business generally: "They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job."
- madrox 16d agoIf you take away the cynical edge, though, if this actually happens we're talking about an age of mom-and-pop businesses in industries that have not traditionally had them. It can't/won't be all software, but mom and pop stores were only about serving their neighborhood to begin with.
- sleight42 16d agoLOL no it won't because mom and pop won't be able to afford to run a business and no one would be able to afford to buy from them either.
- tptacek 16d agoI say this with all possible respect, reverence even, for what Tarn Adams has accomplished and what continues to work on, but there may be no worse messenger for the problem of disintermediating game designers and creators from actual code authorship than the author of Dwarf Fortress. It's an amazing game that succeeds in spite of and not because of its code. Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started with DF, that game would be a broad cultural milestone today, and not just a nerd affectation.
- krapp 16d agoThere is no universe in which Dwarf Fortress becomes a "cultural milestone." It's core concept and gameplay would never appeal to the mainstream. The premise that the only thing holding it back is not using an AI seems far fetched. How much game code have you looked at? If it shipped, chances are it's a goddamn mess. People made memes about Undertale's thousand-line switch statement. But it isn't the code quality that makes a game (unless it breaks, if it works literally no one cares) but the design and intent behind it. Using an AI wouldn't result in anything as unique or as innovative as Dwarf Fortress. It would just get something forgettable and mediocre to market faster.
- shevy-java 16d agoThis seems to be miss the topic. Isn't the topic about AI and how damaging it can be? I am not sure why you want to discredit the messenger; the message appears to be correct. That should be a better focus. > Had Adams been able to use Opus or Sol when he started with DF, that game would be a broad cultural milestone today, and not just a nerd affectation. Well, that is an assumption. You have to demonstrate this claim. Right now I do not believe that claim.
- Supermancho 16d ago> the message appears to be correct. "in shambles because of AI" no. It's the same as it always was.
- stryan 16d agoI don't think there's a way to really say a comment like this "with all possible respect" given the (albeit meager) content of the article. Either way, I'd be much more willing to bet that if Toady had Opus/Sol/whatever we wouldn't have Dwarf Fortress, we'd just have Rimworld: perhaps a technically better game, but not !FUN! in the same way Dwarf Fortress is fun.
- shevy-java 16d agoAI is very disruptive. I'd wish people would stop boosting Skynet.
- bigstrat2003 16d agoMore accurately stated, people's reactions are disruptive. The tech itself sucks and doesn't do any of the things boosters claim it does.
- chias 16d agoThe number of dickovers[1] this website pops up while you're trying to read the article is truly astounding. I gave it my best shot, but after the third one i figured I'd probably gotten enough of the gist of it and gave up. [1] https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/what_is_a_dickover
- daemin 16d agoThe one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.
- ThrowawayTestr 16d agoUnrelated but are there any games using LLMs or ML for the NPCs? I really want enemies that adapt to the player.
- hackable_sand 16d agoRelated, but we've had multiplayer for decades now.
- joegibbs 16d agoI did it for story events in my grand strategy game (Fall of an Empire) with a set of finetuned local models. It doesn't affect performance (for most people) since the game is bottlenecked on other things. Players seem to like it, there are some issues since the models are so small they are more prone to hallucination, and you also have to give them preset topics or they go on the same track again and again. I haven't been able to use it for more than events since the tokens per second aren't high enough - I would like to use the models to e.g. generate actions for characters based on their history of interactions with other characters, but that ends up taking so much time that the player never gets any events. I also did a demo of an LLM-powered NPC, I think the issue here is that you need more than just the LLM in e.g. a 3D RPG where you can actually go up and talk to the character. You can generate the text, but from there you also need to generate speech, from that you need to dynamically generate realistic facial and body animations that match up with it - this means you need 3 or 4 models chained together in a pipeline.
- AshamedCaptain 16d agoRight until you release it and a minor gets the NPC to talk about rape or something.
- Ancapistani 16d agoI’m in the front of the line for the Tarn Adams fan club, but I don’t think he’d be my first pick for advice on the state of software engineering. DF is exceptional in many ways, not all of them uniformly positive.
- bob1029 16d agoGame dev is the last thing I think will be genuinely disrupted by AI. It can do everything at the edges with superhuman ability, but the core magic happens in the scene where all the disparate systems come together to provide the final experience. Working in arbitrary world space is pretty much the hardest thing I can imagine asking an LLM to do. I also think things like animation, sfx and mastering will never be disrupted meaningfully at the AAA level.
- madrox 16d agoWhen we've used software to disrupt other industries to deliver more with fewer people we called that a good thing. And it is, because consumers tend to win. Games are a hit-driven business, so they're going to feel the squeeze faster than, say, SaaS, but it's coming for all of us. Software is now being disrupted. Reap the whirlwind. I worked at a (very) well known media company in Hollywood during the Netflix disruption. This really doesn't sound all that different from a Hollywood exec mocking internet media in the early 2000s. People are trying to understand it and leverage it. Quality is bad. Then one day you wake up and it's taken over, because it kept improving. Setting aside the debate on AI use in the creative process, even if models never get better there are years of optimizations to be done on the tools/business side. As a gamer, I'm actually excited for it. I want more diversity in games beyond what the current indie scene provides. If we can give smaller teams the horsepower to make what was considered AAA 5-10 years ago I will be quite happy as a consumer.
- archagon 16d agoIt's a huge mistake to think that indie teams would make better games if only they could balloon their projects to AAA-size. Some of the most meaningful and engrossing gaming experiences of my life have come from 1-3 person teams, especially over the past few years. Meanwhile, the vast majority of AAA titles just feel like time-filling entertainment chow to me: fun-shaped but ultimately pointless. I would strongly argue that artistry and auterism is nearly impossible to preserve beyond a certain game size; the experience can't be focused by definition. In any case, many of the most talented indie game devs are rejecting this technology outright.
- goawaydang 16d ago[flagged]
- radnor 16d agoare you serious? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shein