For game dev, I believe that it is remiss to not include mention of the change in the gamer landscape. Ten years ago, it was console vs PC as the big game question... and various studios took bets on one or both sides of that.
Today... it's Roblox vs everything else. Steam has its data at https://store.steampowered.com/charts/ - in the past 3 days, 45 million peak online at once.
Roblox has 150 million daily active users and 380 million monthly active users. https://brands.roblox.com/metrics-insights. Different numbers. Back in August it hit 47.3 M concurrent users (Steam's record at that time was 41.2 M).
As those gammers are growing up... they're not switching to other platforms.
Blaming this on AI doesn't feel like most of the story.
I bought Rust, Conan Exiles, and similar AAA games. But I've been spending most of my gaming time on survival MMOs and idle games on Roblox anyway.
Partly it's because they're easier to get into. It works well on a Mac or even on a phone. Lie in bed, do your three missions, sleep.
Partly because I can play with the kids. No extra account purchases, no teabagging.
I think game devs assume that they're just different audiences, but not really. Just because I like 18+ rated games sometimes, it doesn't mean I wouldn't pay a 6+ rated game most of the time. Who knows, we might see a Civ equivalent on Roblox in time. Roblox is the metaverse that Meta saw a decade away but couldn't capture market share for.
Can you compare daily active users to peak simultaneous users? Seems like apples to oranges. 150 million DAU could easily be the same as 45 million peak online.
Also how believable are both Steam and Roblox's numbers with regard to bot accounts? I have no idea about this, I'm biased towards Steam but based on the HN comments every time Roblox comes up I get the vibes that they are a comparatively less ethical company that might be willing to push the boundaries of ignoring bots for the sake of better metrics to impress investors. Also this isn't data at all but the steam games I play wouldn't benefit from bots, but I could see players of some of the silly little games my kids play in Roblox benefit from having some bot accounts to help you.
Wow. I'm not very clued in lately but I do own plenty of games in GOG, Humble Bundle and yes, Steam. I was just thrilled that Planet of Lana II got released recently.
This is the first time I heard of Roblox. And it's supposedly this huge phenomenon?
There are 151.5 million daily active users on Roblox. (70% growth YoY)
44% of Roblox users are over 17 years old. 56% are younger.
APAC has the most users (29.5%), followed closely by US & Canada (28%). Europe is the third largest market with 23%, while the rest of the world has 19.4%
As of February 2025, the platform has reported an average of 85.3 million daily active users. According to the company, their monthly player base includes half of all American children under the age of 16.
I wonder how sticky Roblox is as the current cohort of kids get older. Of course more kids are being born, but last I checked that number is getting lower.
I'm not convinced the bad market is due to AI at all. That's just a convenient excuse to do layoffs without the bad PR normally involved in admitting you need to do layoffs.
Also, the Open to Work banner has the stink of desperation. Highly recommend disabling it. It's like dating. Act casual.
I think it is both a partial contributor but also overstated for the reason you mentioned. The main culprits IMO are over hiring during the zero interest rate period as well as the never ending increases in the supply of CS graduates.
I believe it's not only the supply of CS graduates, it's their training as well. CS education seems to have changed little over the past 50 years. While the skills needed today are drastically different than those needed 10 years ago.
I have little doubt that if I had an opportunity to use Claude to do my CS homework, I would have used it. It seems that the curriculum should assume that college kids are going to use the latest agents and dramatically increase how hard the homework is.
This is like saying that people are going to the gym with power armor, so personal trainers should dramatically increase how heavy the weights are for their clients.
I think the point is that the banner is more likely to extend your search by sending a negative signal than it is to speed up your search. Fair or not, potential employers often have a negative bias toward people who are unemployed, so indicating that you’re likely unemployed is unhelpful.
It would be far more effective to spin up a placeholder 1-person contracting firm as your current employment even if it's marginal work for pocket change (build websites for a friend or something).
I still strongly feel all layoffs to date have much more to do with interest rates than AI. This may change but I am deeply skeptical of massive RIFs being caused by AI at this point.
Look up FRED data in Interest Rates, SWE job postings over time and then look at the stock price of one of these companies claiming “AI layoffs” over the same time frame (eg. Block). Then read reports of 0 discernible AI impact to US GDP in 2025…
I feel like game dev is an entirely different market to the typical startups. Different investors, different talent, different marketing and market validation. Those who invest have already made their money in games (or "gaming"). The SDLC of an average Steam game is very waterfall.
Fair but almost everything in almost every industry is downstream of interest rates. Capital allocation gets much harder in a 7% market than a 2% market.
This post inspired me to donate to the only video game I've played in years, PokeMMO. Btw if anyone here plays my username is ieatpears, send a friend request or whatever, I'd love to play with someone else!
> He has a huge influence on the developer community, and he is deceiving his viewers about what is going on.
The sub bubbles of development are so crazy to hear about. Idk if I ever interact with anyone that gets their development world view from people on YouTube.
Idle thought. Not an economist.
What if the current tech scene is like how the u.s. capitalist class took power away from blue color workers in the 80s, 90s by leveraging cheaper labor in foreign countries? Now, programmers, sysadmins, system engineers no longer have leverage (real or imagined) because the owners just point to AI.
If they could do it, they would. White collar workers don't have any special status that protects them from getting the same treatment the blue collar workforce got. That said, I think it'll play out differently this time.Offshoring blue collar jobs eventually hurt the capitalist class; they lost whole industries to China. Offshoring white collar jobs is a different kind of risk: you end up with IOUs to countries that might not stay favorably disposed toward you when the power dynamics shift.
> Offshoring white collar jobs is a different kind of risk
Isn't this risk also present with offshorting blue collar jobs? I agree that both are bad ideas, but the capitalist class didn't care before and isn't exactly well known for it's long-term thinking.
No real idea why this bubbled to the front page, as it’s just another milquetoast subjective take from a single point of view recapping the same events from their context. Nothing added, no food for thought, just the same old, same old.
We need less folks ringing alarm bells without guidance and more folks offering help in troubling times. This, is not helpful.
I have to wonder how GenAI would have fared if these LLMs had become available anytime before 2020, during the “normal” tech bubble. It feels like the faith in it is as much to slash costs while appearing to be cutting-edge (and thus, worthy of what little investment is still available), as it is because of its capabilities. Where would we be if the tech industry wasn’t in such a dire state due to the end of ZIRP?
What happens to a society where one class extracts payment from another class but the payment only flows in one direction and eventually the latter class doesn't have it, and outnumbers the former class?
What happens when a creative writer pens an influential treatise on economic and politics, but it turns out he was completely wrong on many key empirical aspects of human behaviour, leading to tens of millions of deaths, yet his followers will not see his failure and keep trying to turn over society to produce his false utopia?
Personally, I believe that the supposed productivity gains of LLMs will turn out to be much like outsourcing to India around the turn of the century: managers think it's a great idea to cut costs, but it will also make quality plummet, and there will be a correction back towards sanity. That doesn't mean that everything is all roses - even if the market will get over the AI insanity someday, that's cold comfort if you're out of a job right now. But I do think that it's not going to be "if you aren't on board, then gg" in the long run.
I have already seen multiple CLs from people who are both senior and junior where I know they did not look at the code. I thought, at first, they worked and upon review it looked good but when I synced these changes I found either big bugs that a human would never make or a test would never catch or lots of code repetition.
One example was an engineer who was refactoring some code that ended up doing this:
def execute(jobs):
for job in jobs:
asyncio.create_task(compute(job))
yield await compute(job)
This is very simplified, it as actually broken up into two separate loops and hidden behind multiple nested calls but at some point there literally was a `asyncio.create_task` where the result was not being used.
I looked at this code because we were hitting some quota limits very early for some reason and it turned out we ran 2x the reads we needed to. I refactored this code, 1/2ed the execution time, fixed the quota issues, and took it from ~300 lines to 80 lines.
This was code from a *senior software engineer* with 15 years in the industry. What is very interesting is I see similar bugs from juniors who do or don't use AI.
I am not saying AI can't be useful. On weeks I have had clear tasks set out, while the rest of my team was OOO, I tackled probably 5x the work our team normally accomplishes (this was after all the work was identified, just working). My skip actually said "Wow, we had a very productive week!" so multiple layers noticed the productivity. I think what made this possible was:
1. I fully understood the **entire** task and the end-user needs.
2. The code base was structured "fine" with enough decoupling between components that I wasn't hitting merge conflicts with myself.
3. I self-reviewed all the work before sending anything to other people (opened all the changes in my IDE, read all the tests).
4. If something seemed too complicated I refactored it manually.
5. I left the AI chugging for long periods of time on objectively measurable tasks.
I don't think the practice of engineering software is dead. The architecture of your software now has measurable impact on productivity. I don't think thinking about performance is outdated. If you're running code no one has reviewed but is functional you wasting cycles / money. Having domain knowledge still improves your velocity.
Because of these reasons I think there is still marginal value to programmers. Companies which maintain internal talent pools and build tooling to scale the impact of people will probably beat out smaller companies that just vibe code.
Today... it's Roblox vs everything else. Steam has its data at https://store.steampowered.com/charts/ - in the past 3 days, 45 million peak online at once.
Roblox has 150 million daily active users and 380 million monthly active users. https://brands.roblox.com/metrics-insights. Different numbers. Back in August it hit 47.3 M concurrent users (Steam's record at that time was 41.2 M).
As those gammers are growing up... they're not switching to other platforms.
Blaming this on AI doesn't feel like most of the story.
Gamers are dying out(*) - Belluar News https://youtu.be/_80DVbedWiI
Partly it's because they're easier to get into. It works well on a Mac or even on a phone. Lie in bed, do your three missions, sleep.
Partly because I can play with the kids. No extra account purchases, no teabagging.
I think game devs assume that they're just different audiences, but not really. Just because I like 18+ rated games sometimes, it doesn't mean I wouldn't pay a 6+ rated game most of the time. Who knows, we might see a Civ equivalent on Roblox in time. Roblox is the metaverse that Meta saw a decade away but couldn't capture market share for.
Also how believable are both Steam and Roblox's numbers with regard to bot accounts? I have no idea about this, I'm biased towards Steam but based on the HN comments every time Roblox comes up I get the vibes that they are a comparatively less ethical company that might be willing to push the boundaries of ignoring bots for the sake of better metrics to impress investors. Also this isn't data at all but the steam games I play wouldn't benefit from bots, but I could see players of some of the silly little games my kids play in Roblox benefit from having some bot accounts to help you.
This is the first time I heard of Roblox. And it's supposedly this huge phenomenon?
I guess this is what getting old feels like.
https://www.takeaway-reality.com/post/roblox-demographics-st...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RobloxAlso, the Open to Work banner has the stink of desperation. Highly recommend disabling it. It's like dating. Act casual.
I have little doubt that if I had an opportunity to use Claude to do my CS homework, I would have used it. It seems that the curriculum should assume that college kids are going to use the latest agents and dramatically increase how hard the homework is.
Look up FRED data in Interest Rates, SWE job postings over time and then look at the stock price of one of these companies claiming “AI layoffs” over the same time frame (eg. Block). Then read reports of 0 discernible AI impact to US GDP in 2025…
> He has a huge influence on the developer community, and he is deceiving his viewers about what is going on.
The sub bubbles of development are so crazy to hear about. Idk if I ever interact with anyone that gets their development world view from people on YouTube.
You’re pretty much spot on.
Isn't this risk also present with offshorting blue collar jobs? I agree that both are bad ideas, but the capitalist class didn't care before and isn't exactly well known for it's long-term thinking.
We need less folks ringing alarm bells without guidance and more folks offering help in troubling times. This, is not helpful.
One example was an engineer who was refactoring some code that ended up doing this:
This is very simplified, it as actually broken up into two separate loops and hidden behind multiple nested calls but at some point there literally was a `asyncio.create_task` where the result was not being used.I looked at this code because we were hitting some quota limits very early for some reason and it turned out we ran 2x the reads we needed to. I refactored this code, 1/2ed the execution time, fixed the quota issues, and took it from ~300 lines to 80 lines.
This was code from a *senior software engineer* with 15 years in the industry. What is very interesting is I see similar bugs from juniors who do or don't use AI.
I am not saying AI can't be useful. On weeks I have had clear tasks set out, while the rest of my team was OOO, I tackled probably 5x the work our team normally accomplishes (this was after all the work was identified, just working). My skip actually said "Wow, we had a very productive week!" so multiple layers noticed the productivity. I think what made this possible was:
I don't think the practice of engineering software is dead. The architecture of your software now has measurable impact on productivity. I don't think thinking about performance is outdated. If you're running code no one has reviewed but is functional you wasting cycles / money. Having domain knowledge still improves your velocity.Because of these reasons I think there is still marginal value to programmers. Companies which maintain internal talent pools and build tooling to scale the impact of people will probably beat out smaller companies that just vibe code.