The gatekeeper attitude about AI game creators is just snobbery and ignorance of how most of the big games came about.

Most of the iconic game makers of the past 30 yrs started out hacking out their own indie work or grinding in QA before they got a job on the development team.

Most of what they knew about games came from playing them and being observant students and passionate fans.

LOL started as a Warcraft III mod made by a solo modder which in turn was based on ideas from a StarCraft mod. He and later other community modders built DoTA.

Riot’s founders were two MBA students who were huge DoTA fans who were frustrated with how big game devs would “ship and forget” their games and who also thought DoTA could be much bigger if you didn’t have to buy Wacraft III to get it and it was free-to-play instead.

None of these people had prior professional game making experience.

Fast forward two decades and now the people who were hired by those founders who didn’t build the game in the first place now want to sneer and condescend to AI creators who are doing exactly the same thing with modern tools. Safe to assume that if Riot’s founders had AI in 2006 they would have used it.

My son went to USC’s games program so I don’t want to be a hypocrite about this but I’ve always raised him to understand that game making is an entrepreneurial trade for strivers. Btw, he started out as just a fan too. Everyone starts out as a fan.

I think it’s great that we have a professional class of people who can make games for a living. But the corporate creature comforts have made the industry arrogant and lazy. We have a generation of people who have never been entrepreneurs who want the stability of a professional job and feel entitled to their spot.

But entertainment doesn’t work like that. It’s a business than rewards talent, vision, grit and what’s new and in with culture. Financial backing and strategic advantage can insulate you for time, but eventually, you thrive or fail at the whims of the audience. And there’s always someone younger, hungrier, and more in touch with today’s gamers than you are willing to take your spot if you get too comfortable.

AI game makers are just the latest iteration of that cycle.