Former Fallout lead Tim Cain has no need for sugar, so you’ll have to gulp down his words as they are: the video game industry that’s currently being splintered by mass layoffs and widespread threats from generative AI has not and will never be “stable.”
Cain repeats this point until it hurts your ears in a new YouTube video in which he discusses the volatile state of the gaming industry right now. He addresses newer developers and reassures them that their instincts are right – the business is failing and it will never get any better. However, it could get worse.
“Seriously,” Cain says, “if you’re somebody who got in the game industry […] in the last 5 or 10 years, and you thought it was going to be a stable job that would see you through for 30 or 40 years, you assumed incorrectly. You’re wrong.”
The Fallout co-creator was there for the US video game crash of 1983, which evaporated “100% of American game developer console jobs,” he says. He later saw 2D artists replaced by 3D artists as studios started shifting their graphics style in the early ’90s. He watched “the complete disappearance of mid-tier developers” with 50-person teams by the 2010s. Now, Cain is observing the games industry deflate after stay-at-home orders during the COVID-19 pandemic pumped it up to hot air balloon-height.
He’s seen it all, and nothing surprises him. His theory is, “Art itself is inherently unstable because people’s tastes change. It’s why my home isn’t full of shag carpeting.”
Then, “Tech also is inherently unstable, but in a different way. Tech constantly changes,” says Cain. At the moment, every single person – no matter what their job is – is trying to determine how generative AI fits in with either their shifting artistic sensibilities or existing tech.
In the case of video games, for many developers, generative AI is both ugly and unhelpful, but plenty of executives – and our friend Tim Cain – think the opposite. Still, Cain concedes that AI is driving a pervasive, unique instability that impacts production cost, encourages widespread layoffs, and diminishes investor funds. It’s especially pernicious, since it’s being paired with the industry’s COVID-19 comedown.
But devs still don’t have to worry, Cain says, because soon the industry will be a soot-stained pile of steaming rubble.
“Here’s one thing I guarantee will happen,” says Cain. “In 20 years, people that are babies right now are going to be entering the job market and talking about how easy all of you had it. They’re going to scoff at any notion you give them that today’s industry was tough.”
“You guys scoffed at what I talked about in the 80s,” the developer continues ominously. Otherwise, he recommends developers migrate toward another industry with shared skills, or perfect a hyperspecific ability like “all I do is pixel shaders” in order to make themselves indispensable.
“Those are two options if you want to try to plan for the future in an industry that is, was, and will be inherently unstable,” Cain concludes. Now get back to work.