The Video Game Industry’s Existential Crisis (with Jason Schreier)

27:07So while we've been talking, you've identified what I think are kind of the two primary prongs related strategies for Xbox, which is one is Game Pass and building a subscription business. And then complementary to that is the acquisition wave over the last couple of years, which the acquisition of Activision kind of being the capstone for that spree. I am wondering, do you think that is still the strategy? Do you think Game Pass is still the strategy? That's a good question. I don't know. They recently raised the price of Game Pass to$30 a month, which I imagine will turn some people off. But they also said this year that Game Pass is making, I believe they said$5 billion in revenue it made in the most recent fiscal year, which is not an insignificant amount of money.

28:05I think the belief, they stopped sharing subscriber numbers, but I think the belief is that it's somewhere between 30 and 35 million subscribers that they have on Game Pass. So that is not nothing. Remains to be seen if that'll happen. I mean, I think the big question and the big tipping point for a lot of the game companies is, are they still going to release their biggest games day one on Game Pass? Because that is the thing that really made a big difference, right? So Game Pass, I think when it was first announced and first envisioned, a lot of people talked about it as a tool for the back catalog, right?

28:40So you sign up for Game Pass, you pay whatever it started at,$10 a month. I think there was like a sale for$1 a month at one point, which is pretty crazy. You get access to hundreds of games, and most of them are older games. So this is like an opportunity to essentially play a bunch of games you haven't played before at a really big discount, Sort of like how on Steam, the PC platform, there are sales all the time on older games, and you can get games for very cheap and rack up a backlog. This is the equivalent of that. But at some point, Xbox decided, hey, to make this service more appealing and get that growth up, we're not just going to have older games on there.

29:15We're also going to have new games on there. And in fact, every single game published by Xbox is going to be day one on Game Pass. which means that you were saying bye-bye to all of that revenue of selling a brand new game for$60 or$70 on the Xbox platform because instead customers can just pay the$10,$15, whatever it wound up being a month and get that game and play it and then just have a huge discount on it. So that I think was the turning point. And then I think what I'm very curious to see if Xbox pivots on that strategy and is like, Like, you know what, starting in 2027 or whatever, we're actually not going to put our games day one on Game Pass because we don't think that works anymore.

29:59And so we're going to say bye to that strategy. That's what I'm very curious to see. I haven't heard any inklings one way or another that that's going to be the move. So we'll have to wait and see. But that, I think, is what I'm looking out for is if they pivot in that direction. Regarding the wave of acquisitions, obviously and i think this is especially true about activision things continue to work as always i think this is also true about bethesda right like the the doom games are coming out bethesda put out starfield uh it seems like they're on their normal schedule but overall given the number of studios that they acquired, it doesn't feel like that has resulted in a huge boon of exclusive games for Microsoft, or not even exclusive, because it seems like they're shifting away from that.

30:56But is that a fair read of it? Or again, does it just feel that way because of how long it takes these acquisitions to be fruitful in terms of games actually coming out? That's a great question. And yeah, I mean, I think I was going to say yes, but then also your latter point is also true. It definitely takes a while. And you buy a company like Bethesda, or ZeniMax is a parent company of all that, because it's not just Bethesda, like the Fallout and Elder Scrolls and Starfield Makers. It's also like Arkane and id and some of these other studios. Arkane made Dishonored and Deathloop and id makes Doom and Quake and stuff.

31:37So all these other studios are part of that umbrella as well. And yeah, I mean, games take so long to make now. These days, the biggest games are taking between five and seven years to develop. But yeah, it's definitely a long-term play. That said, yeah, considering how big Xbox Game Studios is, we've definitely seen a pretty paltry lineup of big releases over the last few years. And certainly haven't seen a ton of huge hits from them. Other than Minecraft, which is maybe their smartest investment. They bought that 10, 11 years ago, and it's still making a great deal of money to this day. And of course, Call of Duty, which is still breaking records every single year.

32:18That game is just kind of like clockwork every single year. It's as reliable as death, taxes, and Call of Duty coming out every fall. So that also turned out to be, well, I mean,$69 million. Who knows what the math looks like there? But from a portfolio standpoint, having Call of Duty in there is pretty lucrative. So yeah, I mean, Starfield certainly wasn't, I don't know about commercial success, but critically certainly was not what they wanted it to be. And we'll see what happens with the next Fallout game or the next Elder Scrolls game and see if that turns out to be worth it. But yeah, to your point, I mean, some of these things like Activision that closed two years ago, it's really still way too soon to tell if that was a good deal for them and what the long-term effects of that were.

33:07Bethesda's ZeniMax was five years ago, and I think it's also pretty early to tell long-term what that means for them and what those studios are going to come out with. But we have seen Microsoft shut down a couple of cities within the Zendimax umbrella. They released some flops. Redfall a couple of years ago was a big flop from them. So yeah, man, I don't know. I think it'll still be a few years before we can really go back and evaluate some of these moves. It also only takes, because the projects are so big and the lead time is so long, it only takes a couple of things to fall through for it to feel like it's falling apart, right?

33:46So you mentioned Perfect Dark. I don't know how long that was in the works in one form or another. But is that an Eidos? That was a company called The Initiative that was started in 2018 to make it. And then they wound up co-developing with this company called Crystal Dynamics. That was part of Eidos at one point. Now they're part of Embracer. But yeah, Crystal Dynamics was a big part of that as well. Right. So it's like you lose a couple of those and suddenly it seems like nothing is happening. But in reality, it's just like a couple of misses. Yeah, that's true. Because if you're a game studio, chances are that most game studios are just working on a single game.

34:25And yeah, if that game is canceled or that game flops, then that's potentially five or more years of that studio's history that is just evaporating. So we talked a little bit about exclusivity. We learned recently that Halo is coming to PlayStation. crazy man cats and dogs living together uh madness but i mean that seems to that seems to be the old like there's no bigger franchise for them to to allow to go multi-platform so again going back to strategy do you think that they're just giving up on they're just bowing out of of of the competition with PlayStation? Is that it? Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think they were forced to.

35:15They just lost that war. And I think they're saying, look, if we want these games to hit that... I mean, them starting to put games on PlayStation lines up with them being told, you need to hit 30 % profit margins. And I think they rightly recognize that the profits that you're getting by releasing other consoles because that is like a lever you can pull that boosts your revenue in a significant way without much in the way of costs. Like there might be long-term costs in terms of Xbox console sales and the brand damage and whatnot. But if you are saying, hey, we're going to put all of our Xbox games on PlayStation from now on, that is a nominal cost because porting a game to another, you're still making the same game.

36:04You're not paying for a new game to be released. porting it is a very insignificant amount of money. And then you are just seeing sales increase a great deal because you're suddenly on a new platform that is reaching tens of millions of players. So that is leverage you can pull to really cut costs, or not cut costs, but at a very cheap cost, boost revenue at a very cheap cost. So of course, if you're trying to get those margin percentages up, that's one way to do it. And so yeah, this is definitely... I mean, they've said that essentially, that this is their future, like they are going third party.

36:40They've also signaled very strongly that the next Xbox console is essentially going to be like a PC. So I think the era of Xbox as a kind of first party console maker that is making exclusive games for its consoles, that era is gone. So the other, I wouldn't call it an earthquake. I wonder if you think it's that big of news, But the other huge piece of news recently in the video game industry is that Electronic Arts, which publishes Madden, FIFA, The Sims, another huge, huge publisher, is going private via what's called a leveraged buyout. I was wondering if first can you explain what that is?

37:25Absolutely seismic. Yeah, one of the biggest pieces of news of the year for sure. Yeah, so an LBO, I mean, this is kind of one of those finance mechanisms that when you explain it to people, they're just like, what? How is that legal? Most notably captured by the iconic nonfiction book Barbarians at the Gate about one of, I believe one of the first LBOs or one of the first high profile LBOs, RJR and Nabisco. go. And so especially what this means is you, usually a private equity company or a group of firms, are saying, we are going to buy this company. And to do so, we are going to take out a loan from the bank.

38:08We're going to say, hey, JP Morgan, we want to buy this company. We're going to put up X percentage in our own cash, but we also want to buy it with Y percentage of debt. And so we're going to take out a loan from you. And then we are going to put that debt on the books of the company that we just bought. And so in this case, you have a purchase that is about$55 million, and they are taking out$20 billion in debt. I believe$18 billion or so is going on the company's books, and then there's some$2 billion in other assorted debt mechanisms. It's a very complicated financial transaction. But something like$18 billion is going to be on the company's books.

38:51So what that means is that this new privately owned EA is suddenly going to be responsible for paying the interest on that insane amount of debt, which could come out to a billion dollars a year. And so a large part of EA's revenue is going to paying off debt, which again, just like with Microsoft, means a whole lot of cost cutting. And it is almost certain because every single LBO leads to layoffs, it is almost certain that next year when this deal closes, EA will shed a lot of jobs and the carnage will continue in the games industry, which has really seen tens of thousands of jobs be lost over the last three years.

39:34Yeah, I was going to ask, how would you compare the 30 % profit margin goal to this burden of the debt that EA is carrying now? Are they pressuring the companies in similar ways? Yeah, kind of. Yeah. I mean, at the end of the day, it's just more pressure on you to do things cheaper, cut costs, and make more money in whatever way you can. And yeah, I mean, we'll see those manifest in different ways. I think the pressure on EA is going to be a little bit different because now they're a privately owned company. And so, first of all, they don't have to be transparent like they did before. We're not going to see earnings calls from them anymore.

40:16We're not going to see transparent bookings, revenue numbers from them anymore. And also, I mean, who knows what Saudi... With Saudi Arabia, which will be the largest shareholder in this new EA, is such an X factor because they have a trillion dollars in their sovereign wealth fund. And if they really wanted, they could also swoop in and be like, oh, actually, we're going to just pay for this and swoop in with our own money. So who knows what they have in mind here or what they want to do with EA. I don't know. I don't know if this is a purely profit play or a cultural play. I have no idea. So that's a big X factor.

40:55But traditionally, what we've seen in cases like this is just a whole lot of cost-cutting, a whole lot of job-shedding. I certainly would be worried if I were an EA employee when this deal closes, which I believe they had said at the beginning of the next fiscal year, which is June or July of next year, something like that. You mentioned in your piece about this that you think that this is a signal for trouble in the video game business more broadly. Can you explain why that is? Yeah. If you are EA, which had been looking for some sort of merger or deal for the last couple of years, if you are EA, you don't do a deal like this unless you believe that$55 billion is your peak valuation, that you're not going to get higher than that in the next couple of years.

41:45Which means that most likely you are looking at the market and saying, hey, this is a mature market. We are not going to see the kind of double-digit growth rates that maybe we saw a few years ago. When it seemed like the games industry was just exploding and finding all these new markets like mobile was such a huge boon to the games industry's revenue because suddenly people could sell games to a billion new players who just play games on their phone. And EA took advantage of that. All the big companies took advantage of that. So we're not seeing that growth return anymore, at least in EA's mind.

42:19And so they're saying, yep, we want out of here. That's a big part of this. Another big part of it, I mean, of course, is that consolidation is always bad for these industries. It always leads to layoffs and worse prices. And I don't know, this week, I don't know if you're a football fan, but I was trying to watch Monday Night Football on YouTube TV and couldn't because YouTube and Disney are having a dispute. And so Disney's channels are no longer available on YouTube TV. And I was just thinking, this is like millions of people cannot just turn on the TV and watch football because these two companies that are each worth many, many hundreds of billions of dollars cannot agree on something.

43:05And this is what media consolidation looks like. It looks like millions of people not being able to watch Monday Night Football. So that's the type of thing I think about. or you look at what's been happening with Warner and Discovery and AT &T over the last decade and how miserable that was for everybody involved. This consolidation always leads to bad, bad things. And so, yeah, I mean, I think that the games industry, if you are a big company or if you are someone trying to pursue a career at big companies in the games industry, a professional career in the games industry, this is all pretty scary stuff.

43:38All this M &A, all this consolidation, Xbox buying everything, EA now going private. I mean, it used to be that you had a bunch of publicly traded game companies that were all competing and all fighting for talent and all reporting and earnings calls and being transparent about what they were doing. And now it's just one. Take-Two is the last one standing out of all the old traditional gaming giants. It's really crazy. EA is gone. Activision is gone. THQ throwback is long gone. Ubisoft is in its own kind of misery worlds. Yeah, it's really crazy. Yeah. First of all, not a football fan, but you're not allowed to be apathetic about football in Philly.

44:23So go birds. Nice. It was your hated Cowboys who were playing on Monday night. So maybe it's good news that Philly couldn't watch that. Yeah. That was going to be my next thing. I was going to say when I reported on video games more closely, it was like if you were to imagine a pyramid of the biggest players in the space, it's like maybe you have the console manufacturers at the top and there was a lot of trouble there as we've discussed with Microsoft. And then under them, you had these gigantic publishers Activision, I would say the big three it's like Activision, Ubisoft, EA. Right? Or like the giant one.

45:05And Take-Two, right? So out of all of those it's like Take-Two is sort of like last man standing. And it's unrecognizable as an industry. Yeah, well, so let me actually, let me tie this back to the thing I mentioned at the beginning of this show, which is that I see games moving a lot more like book publishing. And there are a lot of parallels there. Book publishing is really interesting, right? Like you have, just like games, a very small group of big companies, and two of them tried to merge, or have merged. Penguin Random House was a merger. So I believe it's four or five massive book houses.

45:43And those are the ones that are responsible for most of the books you see in Barnes & Noble, at your local bookstore or whatever, because they control most of the market, the big guys. And those book publishers are releasing a lot of books every single year. Most of them flop. Most of them don't sell a lot of copies. And then there are a few humongous hits that help subsidize everything else. the kind of the Court of, what is it, Court of Roses and Thorns or whatever, or Fifth Dragon, all these like big romantic, books like that, like the humongous hits, right? The Housemaid is a good example.

46:20Freedom of Fadden's The Housemaid. Those are the books that just like subsidize it for everything else, the kind of the Call of Duties and Grand Theft Auto's of the world. And then you have the self-publishing world, which is what a lot of like the games world looks like too, where because anyone can just write a book and put it up on Amazon, there are more books released every week than anyone could possibly read. And we're seeing a similar effect in games where because Steam, the largest gaming platform, the PC gaming platform, has become this platform where anyone can release a game. And because the tools have gotten so good and so accessible and approachable that anyone can just download Unity or GameMaker and just make a game on their own if they have the talent and the wherewithal and then put it up on Steam, It's kind of like the self-publishing market where you probably won't get noticed, but you can put your thing out there and see if people like it.

47:10And occasionally there's a big viral hit that nobody saw coming. And you can even point to Roblox as an even more democratized example of that because Roblox is this tool that a lot of people, many millions of people, mostly children, use to make games and then release them and play them. So that's kind of a similar thing to what we're seeing. And then what we see in the book world is that it's very hard to make a living writing books unless you are the author of one of these million unit sellers. Or unless you're, I don't know, married to a doctor or something like that. It's very hard to sustain yourself writing books.

47:50And I think we're going to see a similar phenomenon happen with games where it's like, you want to make games? Sure, have a good time. And you might even be able to reach people. But trying to make the next hit game is kind of like trying to win the lottery in the same way that trying to write the next hit book is trying to win the lottery. So I think that's the model that we're moving more towards, where maybe it's a little bit harder to actually have a sustainable career. Maybe not. I mean, games, to be fair, still make a lot more money than the book's business does. But the oversaturation of video games is just so reminiscent of what has happened in the book world that it's hard not to draw the parallels there.

48:31I can definitely see the parallels when it comes to the quantity and what we sometimes call the discoverability problem, which is definitely true for books. but I think it gets complicated because I suppose as a reader I can't tell the difference when I'm reading a book if it came from someone if I'm reading it on an e-reader whether it came from somebody who self-published on Amazon or it came from Random House and with video games which I think they're more like movies in this way where it's like yeah it's like I could pick up an iPhone and shoot an indie movie but if you want to bring like the vision of oppenheimer to life right it's like somebody needs to get behind it with like a giant check right it's like if you want to make lawrence of arabia right it's like somebody has to like accept your crazy vision and fund it and the video games that uh i love indie games i love all kinds of games right but it's like the thing i think we grew up with is like a lot of that right it's like that we and that's what made it so exciting i think in the period that like we grew up along with the games where it's like there's this feeling that it's being pushed forward and it's like every year it's like oh my god it's like i can't believe that uh this is possible now right and and and what was driving that is companies investing millions of dollars into these giant bets and being like let's take a swing with like a halo let's take a swing with a half like like let's make like let's take these huge expensive bets and in in the process like we've said um we will discover new technologies and and so on and i feel like there's less of that happening and it's like i don't know it's like eventually somebody it's like it feels unless we kind of stagnate and level off in a way or the industry does, it's like if somebody is not, if people are not taking those huge bets, we're just going to, we are going to stagnate, right?

50:38It's like we're going to, it's going to become a less exciting space in my opinion, right? It's funny you say that because when I play the big budget games, I feel like this is so stagnant. This is like everything else I've played before. And when I play the indie games, I'm like, holy crap, this is blowing my mind. Because the big budget games, because their budgets have gotten so humongous, they have to hit the checklist and appeal to as many people as possible. Because if you're making a$200 million game, you have to reach tens of millions of people to make a profit or hit that 30 % profit margin.

51:09And you can't do that unless you, or you think you can't do that if you're a big publisher, unless you do endless focus testing and market research and make sure that this appeals to all people possible. That's where we're seeing a lot of the kind of the stagnancy, I think, in my opinion, as someone who plays a lot of new games. And to your point also, I mean, I think that we're seeing a lot of high-end looking games from the indie space. One of this year's best rated games is a game called Claire Obscure Expedition 33, which I mean, if you looked at that compared to some high-end game from EA or whatever, I don't think you'd be able to tell much of a difference, at least from a graphical perspective, maybe from a scope perspective.

51:49Maybe those games are much, much bigger, have a huge open world or something, but graphically, it's harder to tell. And then also, I mean, you have a lot of indie games that despite the fact that they're just made by a couple people and maybe they look 2D or they're not super fancy graphically, they're still selling many millions of copies. One of the most popular games of this year was Silksong, which is a 2D animated 2D game that looks like a cartoon. So yeah, I mean, I think it's a different world. I think to your point, one important role that the big companies play in the same way that the book publishers do is as a bar for quality.

52:28And so I think the thing that you're often worried about if you are interested in checking out self-published books is like, well, I mean, this could just be crap. And there's no one reading this. There's nobody editing this and deciding, okay, this is good enough. Which also, I mean, the flip side of that is that it's also people gatekeeping other people's creativity. So there is kind of like a dual double-edged sword there. But yes, let's say that the quality bar is there. big companies have, over the last few years, have lost so much trust with their players by releasing games that are full of bugs and broken and flawed in so many ways that you can't even trust EA or Activision or Take-Two to have that quality bar the way that maybe they did in the past.

53:15And so that, I think, has had a huge impact too. You're gambling just as much when you buy the latest EA game that it's going to be high quality and not full of glitches as you are when you buy a new indie game made by two people on Steam. So why not check out the indie game, especially when the indie game is going to be$5 and that big game is going to be$70. So yeah, there's a lot of factors here. I think the tools I mentioned earlier, like Unity and GameMaker and all these other tools that are out there, I think really have democratized game making to the point where a lot of these smaller companies really can get in high-end graphics despite the fact that they're really small teams.

53:55It's easier than it ever has been to make a game that looks just as good as anything on the market, even if you're not a humongous team. It's just that the bigger companies, I think, are filling their games with more things. Checklists and open worlds and 400 hours of gameplay. And I'm not even sure if that's what people want. I don't know. There's still going to be major hits. Don't get me wrong. Battlefield, the new Battlefield was a massive hit. Grand Theft Auto next year is going to be probably the biggest entertainment launch in history. but in the same way that I don't know, the new Dan Brown book is always going to be a hit, new Stephen King book is always going to be a hit, it's like you have your heavy hitters but a lot of the stuff below that is not quite where it was, where your options are limited, you go to GameStop and you just buy whatever new game EA has just released because there aren't a lot of other things to get and they're the gatekeepers and they've decided that this is what we're going to put in stores Nowadays, you can go on Steam and find dozens of new games every single week, all of which look really cool.

54:59So yeah, I mean, from a player's point of view, I think things are better than they've ever been. There are more cool games released. I've been playing more cool games, more interesting games, more unique games, more innovative games. To your point about R &D, more technologically interesting or gameplay-wise, mechanically interesting than ever before. Like 2025 is one of the best years for games themselves of all time. It's just the problem is if you want a career in the video game industry, working on bigger projects, getting health insurance, getting a paycheck, it is harder than it's ever been to make that feasible.

55:36I definitely agree that it's been a fantastic year, especially like the past couple of months have been really fun. I want to make a hard pivot to talk about AI because it's all we talk about. It's all everybody talks about. And it's something that is working its way through the industry. It's working its way through all industries. I really... Something I really appreciate about your reporting is that it really gets down in the trenches with game developers. And by reading your articles over the years, you get a real feeling for what is difficult about the job and what kind of challenges people face in pretty technical details.

56:23I learned a lot about workflows and certain developers by reading their stories. And naturally, a lot of what you covered is about crunch culture and video games and the amount of work that it takes to ship a game and how that can really break people and break companies in some cases. And when companies, especially in tech, started to adopt generative AI, that reporting often came to mind where I was like, well, I were very critical of AI. I see all the problems with it. I wouldn't want to use AI to generate my articles or anything. But as an outsider, it seems to me like, I don't know, If you need to generate a ton of 3D assets for a background of a video game, it's like, maybe this is something that could really help with game development and maybe help with crunch and help with all these logistical problems of just how do we produce the massive amount of labor that it takes to ship these games.

57:29But not only have I not seen anyone in the industry talk about it in that fashion, other than executives that are very high up and are not in the trenches. There was a story that came out in Business Insider recently about how EA is very aggressively pushing its employees to use it and not everybody being thrilled about it and not working perfectly. And I guess all of that is in order to ask you, as somebody who is very familiar with development and the issue with crunch, it's like, do you think this is applicable or helpful at all to developers? Are you seeing or hearing any of that? So when AI started popping up, when everyone started talking about AI, I have tried to keep an open mind.

58:13And I still, to this day, try to keep an open mind, despite a lot of the vitriol that is online, on Blue Sky, on podcasts and stuff about AI. And so therefore, I wanted to experiment with it. And I've played around with ChatGPT. We have tools at Bloomberg. Bloomberg encourages reporters to use ChatGPT not to write things, but to help them in whatever way possible. And I would never use it to write anything for myself. But I decided, okay, you know what? Maybe I can use it for like, I don't know, something as simple as creating a budget. And so the other day I was like, hey, ChatGPT, I want to put together some financial planning.

58:48I'm going to plug in some numbers for you. Help me piece this together. And it started doing it. And I was like, wow, great. This is awesome. It's saving me a lot of work. It's making this database for me. I don't need to go to Excel and spend an hour plugging in numbers. And then I realized that it had just flubbed the math so badly that it just made up an extra$30 ,000 in my budgeting. And I was like, wait a minute, you just fucked that up. What's going on here? And it made me realize that not only is this just completely filling Google search results and all sorts of other new AI tools with just complete hallucinations and made-up nonsense, it is also incapable of getting just basic functions right without filling them with incorrect things, without getting things wrong.

59:37It can't even do math without getting things wrong. At one point, I was really curious. There's a test in the NFL, not to bring up sports again, but there's a test called the Wonderlic test. And I was like, hey, Chachi PD, generate the Wonderlic test for me. And it's like 50 questions, like trying to measure your football IQ or whatever, or like your IQ in general, basic math questions and whatever. And at a certain point, I was doing this test through Chach APT, it would start being like, I would type in A as the answer because it was correct. And it would be like, no, A wasn't the correct answer.

1:00:07The correct answer was B. And then it would say the value that A was, except pretend that it was in B and just get that completely wrong. It would be like, if I were to say the answer is A, 60, it would be like, no, the answer was B, 60. so like I have found in my own use that AI is just completely useless because it gets so much wrong all the time and no matter how many versions of chat GPT have been released like it still just keeps getting things wrong if you're trying to make a video game which is one of the most complicated possible pieces of software whether you're trying to generate art or like write code or do design or whatever else.

1:00:49To use this generative AI that is just so flawed seems like it would cause a lot more problems than it fixes. It seems like it would create, it would be like a time loss for you in the net. So I'm a parent. I have two small kids. And one of the things about parenting that's really interesting is that a lot of times you'll be watching your kid do something and you'll want to step in and do it yourself because you can do it so much quicker and more efficiently than they can. like emptying the dishwasher or cleaning up their toys. But as a penguin, you have to find a balance. And maybe sometimes you can do that, but a lot of times you have to let them do it because the only way they learn is by learning.

1:01:27You're not going to be coming behind them and making things faster. They have to do it themselves. And AI kind of reminds me of that where you're watching something slower and worse and less efficiently doing something and you know you're going to have to do a better job afterwards. You know you're going to have to clean up after that toddler tries to clean up that spill. But you let them do it anyway because they're learning. Except the difference is that you don't need to teach the AI. The AI is not a child that you are raising and trying to teach how to live in this world. It's just a useless tool.

1:01:57It's just something that is doing a worse job than anybody could. And again, I don't want to go all full Ed Zitron here because I really have tried to be open-minded and will continue to. I'm still open to. Just the other day, I got a pitch from someone who was like, here's how I'm using AI in this really positive way in game development. And I was like, sure, tell me about it. I want to hear more. As a reporter, I believe very much in just listening to people and trying to be as open-minded as possible, even about things that are controversial. But in my experience and the experience of the people that I've talked to about this, it seems like it causes more problems than it solves.

1:02:34Yeah, I'm really fascinated by how hard the video game industry is going to try to adopt this. And I look forward to... Well, every industry, right? It's not like... I haven't seen a single industry that isn't talking about their AI plan on earnings calls. That's the latest fad. That's how... I mean, that's what's propping up the entire US stock market. The entire economy is propped up by this. Yeah. So, yeah, looking forward to your exposés about that happening at various video game companies. Jason, thank you so much for coming on. I'm going to leave that there. As a reminder, 4Four Media is a journalist founded and supported by subscribers.

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