Yes and they’ll try to use more LLM slop coding to fix it, except it’ll cause the codebase to balloon way beyond any possible ability to contain it within a context window, so LLMs will hallucinate more slop and the whole edifice will come crashing down.
Lord of the Rings is second to none. The amount of development that went into it is staggering. It’s as grand and epic as any of the ancient works of mythology, and that’s what it was intended to be.
Somewhat, but not formally. Epic did keep those 1000 staff on Fortnite until now. They would’ve laid them all off years ago under the Hollywood model (gone as soon as filming completes).
It would be a win in the short term for the developers who unionize but I think it would be a long term loss. The AAA games industry is already in a pretty precarious position. Hollywood (which I think is a preview of things to come for game studios) is practically moribund.
The issue is that the bar keeps getting raised on production costs. That means spending more and more money up front which involves bigger and bigger risks. This in turn leads studios to take fewer and fewer risks in gameplay design, story, and all the other innovations that people want.
At the same time, the indie game world is getting better and better at innovating and capturing more of the many small niches that people are looking for. This further adds to the pressure on big studios to spend more on artists and level designers. It’s a vicious cycle!
I think unionizing will lead to the closure of a lot of game studios for the above reasons, so those developers may find themselves in the indie game market (which offers zero job security and is really feast or famine in terms of success).
I feel like that would change video game development to be like filmmaking. In Hollywood, everyone working on a movie is unionized but jobs are not steady. You have to get a job on each movie separately and once filming wraps up you’re out of a job again.
Game publishers seem to already want that sort of model anyway. They don’t want to hire 1000 people full time. They want temporary workers until the game releases, then a small staff for maintenance and updates.
I highly recommend the books, if you can find time to read. I know a lot of people have trouble settling down to read these days (myself included). I wish I read more!