Automation is what we do as the Smart Ape, we use tools to make our jobs and lives easier.
And there has been a massive rise in the power and potential of our tools as technology has progressed.
There has also been a trend, the better the automation system the less work or workers needed to produce more things.
The flip side of this is unfortunately less pay for more output. If workers got paid for what they produced compared to a couple of generations ago we could retire a lot earlier or work a lot less.
Now game development is complex and multi-skilled and from a blank slate it would take huge teams years to make games.
Game engines like Unity are automation in and for the games industry, each year they make it easier and faster to make games.
And like prior automation you can make more with less work or workers and still pay the same per worker and/or hour.
People have talked about an indie apocalypse or the huge rise in the number of people able to make games, and the impact this is having on the games industry.
Is this just the dawn of automation within the games industry and how much more powerful will game engine automation get?
We doing this again? How many times do you want to do the automation apocalypse thread?
True. Automation dramatically increases the output of a workers. Meaning less are required. Historically those displaced workers go on to create new industries and opportunities.
Wrong. Current manufacturing workers get paid an incredible amount compared to their predecessors. It doesn’t scale linerly with increases output. So it’s less pay per unit produced. But its dramatically more then it used to be.
Plus buying power scales up with automation too. Manufactured goods are cheaper then they have ever been. Which means real income, or the amount stuff a person can purchase at the end of the day, has skyrocketed.
If we as humans were willing to accept the lifestyle of our great grand parents, we could probably get away with working one day a week.
Game dev is still a very new industry. Expect more and more automation over then next few decades.
But remember the big studios will also see this automation improvement. The AAA studios will always be able to outdo the indies in scope.
More content is never a bad thing in AAA. The emphasis just goes from grunt work to curation. It means games become bigger and more bombastic, not studios becoming smaller.
There will definitely be a massive increase in procedural generation systems, both by indies and big studios. It will be used to push the level of detail in future games. For example, lush forest scenes could be full of detail by combining procedural generation and GPU instancing. Procedural terrain systems could take a simple 2D map and generate lush, detailed 3D landscapes. There will still be a need for artists to design the building blocks of those systems, but there probably will be less need (in the future) for manually placing each item in the scenes.
Been done several times before and is more random musing and speculative fiction than about unity or game development in general. Too random and broad. Closed.
