Reject the Talkie!

"Sound film is kitsch! Reject the Talkie!" German Musicians' Association, 1930

That was a real protest slogan. About 35,000 musicians who played in the pits of cinemas lost their jobs a hundred years ago because of it. Sound film threatened, and eventually destroyed, an entire profession.

Not really a tragedy, you might think. We all know how great cinema turned out. Right up until the MCU arrived.

I see the same parallel between that "new technology" of sound film and today's AI.

I can count the lines of code I have personally written since reasoning AI took off last November on two hands. But as Louis C.K. once said: "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy." His bit about sitting in a chair in the sky, complaining because the broken WiFi ruined his flight, that is us with AI.

In my industry, the game industry, people are getting laid off on a daily basis because of AI. And what do they do next? Either they complain about AI-generated slop and its missing soul on Reddit, or they finally go and build the game they always wanted to make. This time, with AI.

Steam has 15,000 new games listed this year already. At that pace, it will pass last year's release count by 10 to 25%.

Are all of these new games bad? Some yes, some no. When I tested Claude Code for the first time two years ago, it was really, really bad. The games it spewed out were abysmal. Plenty of people looked at that and said, "See, I knew it. AI is bad and soulless." But over the last couple of months, that has changed. The quality is climbing steadily, almost daily.

Three things will happen, I think.

People will come up with more ingenious game ideas than ever. The number of games released will explode. And Steam will get less relevant for small indie studios, because with that flood of releases nobody can deliver the eyeballs anymore. These studios will make less money overall.

Will players accept games made with AI? In my opinion, the majority already do not care. It is the game designers and game critics sitting in the musical pit (and on Reddit) who are doing the complaining.

For anyone with a ton of ideas in their head, great times are ahead. Lucrative ones? No.