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atlantic
lordnacho
Reminds me of the Life of Brian where the Roman officer catches the graffiti and does the whole Latin lesson.
parkaboy
I just have to link it here, because it's so good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdqXT9k-050
iakov
Turns out grammar nazis were a thing in ancient rome! Hilarious, I need to check out the movie, thanks for laugh in the morning.
chrisweekly
hahaha thanks, it'd been decades since I saw that
jan_Inkepa
Google translate gives "ludus mortuus est". 'Ludum' (vs 'ludus') possibly comes from the game jam 'ludum dare' (where 'ludum' is okay because it's meant to be in the accusative - the object of 'dare' - 'to give/make').
CobrastanJorji
Indeed; I assumed that the goal was to reference the game jam.
But I ended up thinking that the title was a failure not because of grammar but because it makes my mind autocomplete the phrase in a way that the article does not intend. I see "Ludus mortuus est" and I immediately want to respond "Vivat ludus!"
waveBidder
not sic semper tyrranis?
yawboakye
> and mortuus also takes the nominative, because it's a nominative complement.
this is wrong. mortuus, dead, is the perfect active participle of morī, to die. its adjectival in nature, hence the attribution via esse. not too different from english. although in latin one is more likely to write ludus mortuus. the est naturally is implied.
hackyhacky
I'm not sure what you're objecting to: it can be a nominative complement and and a perfect active adjectival participle.
thaumasiotes
No, it can't be both of those things. On one analysis, it is a complement to the verb est; on the other analysis, it is the verb.
Mortuus est is always going to be analyzed as the 3rd person singular perfect passive† indicative form of morior, "has died" or just "died", not "is dead". That's what combining the participle with esse means.
Now, mortuus could just be a non-participial adjective instead. You could form a sentence that way that looked identical, ludus mortuus est, and it would mean "the game is dead", which just happens to be semantically identical with "the game has died". You can't be dead in the present without having finished dying in the past, and you can't have finished dying in the past without being dead in the present.
So we make the assumption that mortuus est is a verb, and not a predicative verb phrase, just because morior is a very common verb and this is a normal way to use it. The assumption is analogous to the assumption in English that when somebody says "time flies like an arrow", they are talking about the rapidity of the passage of time, and not exhorting the listener to apply stopwatches to flies the same way they would to an arrow.
† To the extent that morior is a passive verb. It isn't -- we call it "deponent", an active verb that takes grammatically passive forms, like the English verb to be born -- and so mortuus est is just a perfect active form.
masto
I guess it's irony to use an AI translator to come up with the title of an article about how AI is taking our jerbs.
kibwen
There's no existing market for Latin translator jobs, because everyone knows the best way to translate a Latin sentence is to translate it poorly and wait for someone to correct it in the comments.
nescioquid
I recommend never providing unsolicited Latin advice unless the phrase has been tattooed in flesh or used as the name of a legal entity (e.g. "Atlas Obscura").
tyleo
While I empathize with the message about layoffs, the tone of this article is too hyperbolic for my tastes, “Game development is in an extinction level event crisis, and it is entirely self inflicted.”
The games industry makes more money than music and movies combined. It’s no where close to extinction. It does have all the problems of any entertainment industry though where the creators love the product and put up with unfair wages, hours, and personalities at the cost of their own well being.
Telemakhos
The opening of the story really undercuts the hyperbole:
> There are approximately 330,000 people who work in the video game industry.
> 9,000 of them have been laid off in 2023.
> 3,000 more of them have been laid off this month. You know, the one that's only half over.
That's a four percent reduction. Meta cut thirteen percent in November 2022, and it still exists, as does Twitter/X, which has notoriously cut far more staff. A four percent reduction is probably just beginning to clear out some dead wood, not the sign of impending extinction.
spenczar5
Yes, it is quite literally not decimation, which would be a loss of 10%.
empath-nirvana
Yeah all the layoffs all across tech are 100% a result of raising interest rates, but everyone wants to frame it with whatever their political ideology is (oh, it's DEI, oh, it's capitalist profiteering, whatever).
People didn't like inflation, but they loved inflated salaries. When people said "tackle inflation", they meant "lower prices", but didn't really consider that their salary increases were _also_ a result of inflation.
When you pull money out of the economy, companies cut spending and the single largest expense of tech companies is "salaries", so of course they're going to cut salaries.
The end result of this should all balance out, but in the mean time, everyone was mad about rising prices and didn't complain about rising salaries, and now they're mad about falling salaries and don't complain about falling prices.
In conclusion, (too much) inflation is bad and we should stop doing that.
Loughla
>falling prices.
Where?
empath-nirvana
Currently mostly energy and things whose prices depend mostly on energy like airline tickets, but inflation _generally_ doesn't end with prices falling over all, just not going up any more.
ajmurmann
Yeah, prices should stop increasing quickly, but not fall. Nobody wants deflation.
bee_rider
I wonder how the market will shake out…
Generally I see AAA studios churning out Boring Shooter: 2024 Q1 edition. Pay $70 for the same engine, some balance tweaks, and a new map. But their games are pretty because they are the only ones who can afford to buy millions to make assets.
Indie games are, of course, where all the interesting mechanics are invented.
If AI makes it easy to generate assets, why won’t the AAA studios feel the pain first? Of course, everyone would love a stable job, and it is really sad when they lose them. But the management just contributes coordination. Maybe we’re heading toward a world small teams can leverage AI to fill their skill gaps, they can make some actually interesting games, and the AAA studios can go extinct. The game shattering Steam records was made by like 10 people apparently, and I think they didn’t even use AI (as far as I know).
None of this puts food on the table now of course, but the future could be better.
lmm
> If AI makes it easy to generate assets, why won’t the AAA studios feel the pain first?
Because, as you said in your first paragraph, the AAA studios' USP is that their games look better. They have skilled artists, and for the moment generative assets aren't going to be able to match that - and they don't have to, for most purposes. Indie games using procedural generation is already a tradition, it's just going to kick up a notch, and then the low end of AA will start using it, and so on; I'm not saying this stuff won't eventually make it into the AAA games, but it's going to get there from the bottom up, and the low/middle-end - those studios that just barely kept a few artists on the payroll at the moment - will be the first jobs hit.
> None of this puts food on the table now of course, but the future could be better.
It'll be better for creative and original people. But those who were just getting by churning out good enough are in for a rough time.
ajmurmann
> Generally I see AAA studios churning out Boring Shooter: 2024 Q1 edition
This seems very selective. Shooters seem to take up a fairly small portion of released AAA games these days and it's easy to find AAA games that don't fit this at all. We all know about Zelda ToTK, Baldur's Gate III, Alan Wake II, Mario Bros. Wonder, Hi-fi Rush. All games that came out last year, are AAA games and take risks and don't fit what you criticize at all. We even had debates about Dave the Diver which is a game from a major studio, but kept getting falsely celebrated as a indy hit.
If anything the "boring shooters" like Cod and Medal of Honor are taking up less space these days. Fortnite might have started out as a shooter and is massive, but at this point it's hard to tell what it even is.
JKCalhoun
> Generally I see AAA studios churning out Boring Shooter: 2024 Q1 edition.
And I would not be surprised if this formula comes crashing down hard and people simply stop paying $70 for the same crap.
It's happened before to too-comfortable corporate gaming companies and I won't be sad this time either.
nottorp
> churning out Boring Shooter: 2024 Q1 edition
Lovely description of current AAA drivel. Permission to reuse? :)
I used to call those "Battlefield of Honor of Duty", but I think that name combination isn't current any more.
bee_rider
I actually had Call of Fortnight instead but I figured didn’t want to argue about a particular brand, hahaha.
karaterobot
> hope you liked the games of 2023 because that's all folks [...] Game development is in an extinction level event crisis
Okay, we'll wait and see whether games are really dead this time next year. That's an easy one to confirm, since he gave a prediction and a timeline. We can just wait a year and see if he's right, or if he's being hyperbolic to the point of inanity. Being really generous, I'll interpret his prediction as weaker than stated and say that the prediction is confirmed if there are 25% fewer games released this year than last.
hoistbypetard
I didn't read the prediction as saying the number of releases would go down. Just that we were sliding into an area where the majority would be shitty AI-generated games.
jknoepfler
I struggled to find anything of substance in this article. How did 2023 differ from 2022? Why does laying off 5% of the AAA workforce (which part?) correspond to an AI apocalypse in 2024? What is this article actually arguing, and why should I care?
For example, the author opines that
> Games in 2024 and 2025 will be a few labors of love, from indie developers or the few good AAA development houses still running, and piles upon piles upon piles of AI-generated vomit that will make people nostalgic for the days when most of Steam's catalog was Unity Store asset flips.
> And gamers won't buy them.
The only games I cared about in 2023 were from indie developers or labors of love. But... "gamers" bought them. At least I did. Am I a "gamer"? Are the titles I care about going to suddenly fail in 2024? I don't see any evidence for that in the article. Will sales of titles I don't care about fall in 2024? I don't see any evidence for that in the article either.
I didn't buy any Unity Store asset flips or AI generated nonsense or NFT-powered whatever or gacha b.s. or Call of Duty 20XX: Shootie-Person Redux, and I wasn't planning on doing so in 2024. Should I be concerned about that industry?
I don't put much value in the EA/Activision/Blizzard/Tencent/etc. gaming shops. I haven't for a long time, though. If the market somehow killed those studios, I'd struggle to call that a bad thing? Should I think differently?
pprotas
> And gamers won't buy them.
There is an even darker possible future: gamers WILL buy this AI generated crap. And the executives know it, since gamers have been buying their low effort budget cut pre-order alpha crap for years.
zecg
> gamers WILL buy this AI generated crap
Sure, to me personally it really doesn't matter how the assets are generated, gameplay is what matters. However, I will buy AI generated crap with good gameplay / design for 20€ with no DRM and no grinding, no microtransaction bullshit and no always-online.
ReactiveJelly
Then the repugnant conclusion is not that gaming is dead, but that games are made primarily for teenaged boys and most of us have aged out of the target audience, so games simply aren't made for us anymore.
ajmurmann
It's like those low-quality socks made on automated looms all over again...
JKCalhoun
Not at $70. If it's that easy to sell AI-generated druck to the masses then hundreds of shops will open and the prices will fall to free (with in-game subscriptions).
mtlmtlmtlmtl
People buy new FIFA games at prices like that every year, and usually the only thing that's changed since the last game is updated player stats and some cookie cutter "new features". Unless there's a new console out, in which case there may be a jump in engine quality.
If people are willing to pay $70 for what is essentially just a database update...
nasmorn
FIFAs achievement was licensing the original kit and players of basically every professional football team on earth. They monetize that fandom
bwestergard
The situation in game dev not so different from Hollywood before unionization, where the workers who produced the content could be barely scraping by while the films they worked on created tremendous profits for studio heads and investors. As in the old days of Hollywood, workers' passion for their work was weaponized against the,
GaggiX
The fact that this article was written the day before the release of Palworld makes it a bit funny, we're not even a month into 2024 and there's already a game that's the third all-time peak game on Steam for concurrent players, the highest if you don't count free-to-play games like CS and PUBG, and it's also the most played game at the moment.
So far, the doom and gloom prediction that games are almost dead doesn't seem to be true. At the end of the day, the only thing that really matters about your game is whether it's fun or not, and almost no one would care if a game used AI if people found it fun to play.
meheleventyone
Any predicted death would be years out anyway, Palworld got started in production years ago after all and AI isn’t about to take over major elements of game production anytime soon.
dusted
> Game development is in an extinction level event crisis, and it is entirely self inflicted.
Looking at modern gaming and the modern games industry, I'm finding it pretty hard to be sad about it though.
The best games were finished before they were put onto physical media, to be owned and played forever.
I'm entirely okay if the rest of the future was only peoples passion projects.
zecg
From the perspective of gamers, it's actually better than ever. UE5 means a single dude can make his roguelite with no compromises, AI means he can also make passable assets. It's just Ubisoft and EA and the other shitty conglomerates that are going to have to downsize and I for one am looking forward to it.
jacknews
If compensation is all about performance bonuses, and then only when projects are successful, projects should just become collectives. There's no justification for having an 'owner' in that case.
netbioserror
I’m unimpressed with AAA game studios and the game dev employment pipeline. People KNOW that there’s a perpetual supply glut of devs lied up around the corner, but still peddle their labor in a buyer’s market. They KNOW they’ll work on giant over-produced design-by-committee games that are awards-bait or gambling platforms and little more. They KNOW these companies are publicly traded and that accountants at public companies value creative vision and institutional knowledge at absolute zero. They KNOW indie is a saturated market with very few inspired designs that can be profitable even if the conditions are right.
Working in game dev and then complaining about the conditions looks like running out in the rain and complaining it’s wet. I have next to no sympathy for the unionization activism. A huge part of how marketable your skillset is comes down to the nicheness of the domain, or at least how applicable your skills are to various niche domains. Game dev is not niche, and you’ve all made your bed chasing this dream.
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The title should be "ludus mortuus est", the game is dead. Ludus takes the nominative, since it's the subject of the sentence. And mortuus also takes the nominative, because it's a nominative complement. Google Translate will only take you so far.