I wonder if Google will put out a free model with the ads already baked in.

If you mean releasing model weights: They won't, because they know the "shill something" vector will get abliterated immediately. And they can't use trade secrets or copyright to stop it, either, because they released the model themselves and you don't need to redistribute weights, just an adblocker LoRA.

But there's always more stupid shit to work on, so it just increases noise to signal in the app, no?

Making software for users? Who even does that any more?

It's crazy to me that we're seriously discussing these things replacing all workers when they still cannot do proper addition.

I can see a world where these tools stay popular but I don't think they'll be able to be used without someone holding responsibility for their output.

Diablo 3 and 4 would be massive examples? Hell Divers. Monster Hunter, perhaps?

Online head to head games like Street fighter? Maybe RTS games like Dawn of War?

Pay Day.

Seems like all of these would be hit and will move to freemium or subscription.

You'll just get subscription games with a free year subscription code in the box. If anything I bet it will accelerate the death of free multiplayer.

> Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.

After the first comment this really reads like "only Sith deal in absolutes."

Who?

EA was famously sued ~20 years ago for not paying overtime. They lost and had to reclassify roles to non-exempt and paid up. It impacted hiring decisions for non-exempt/hourly roles (especially QA), encouraged more outsourcing, but this didn't eliminate crunch then, and it hasn't eliminated it since.

That's really my point: overtime-paid crunch is still found all over the place. EA, Activision-Blizzard, Sony's studios, Com2uS, 343 Industries (even with "priority zero"), outsourcing groups like Keywords Studios... They all have crunch stories but they also all make use of both overtime-paid roles and exempt salaried roles during crunch time. If overtime pay eliminated crunch, we'd expect to see a stronger separation in overtime-eligible workers not experiencing crunch, and crunch concentrating entirely in exempt roles. Instead, crunch appears in both.

Furthermore, over the last 20 years, crunch has decreased in both. I think that's better explained by things that directly affect the underlying reasons for crunch like changes to production practices (i.e. patching instead of going gold) and better management practices (i.e. less waterfall methodology). On indirect pressures, it's a broader mix with competition from the rest of tech, cultural backlash against crunch, and sure overtime classification changes. Explicit overtime pay increases the cost of crunch and thus incentivizes figuring out how to reduce it, but it doesn't directly reduce it itself, and certainly doesn't eliminate it.

At least in this case non-exempt employees are getting compensated for their extra hours. That seems more fair; the company gets what it needs, but has to pay for it.

Reclassifying people as exempt in order to eliminate OT pay is a garbage move, though. Something unionization presumably could fix.

I think you're conflating has crunch and has non-exempt employees with everyone is getting crunch OT. It is simply not the case.

Certainly exempt FTEs are crunching and not getting (directly) compensated for it. But the above comment's "overtime pay makes crunches disappear" claim is also simply not the case, just given the still-present abundance of crunch time for non-exempt employees who do get overtime pay.

Non-exempt employees are typically cheap enough to not care about the OT pay. The lower limit for the exempt employees is around $20 per hour.

Any OT pay above that is typically negotiated by unions in the current market.

Hourly pay rate with OT. That'll clear up the crunch or at least compensate the workers.

The world is not that simple, let's say you do pay overtimes, the salary in this industry is already low, will that be worth it to the employee?

I mean, that's what collective bargaining is for, no? Get the hourly rate and overtime terms to a level that the employees are happy with.

Supply of folks who want to work on a game is higher so wages suffer. Pay is not influenced by talent or merit alone.

That and they used to be able to waive a mythical shipping bonus but if it was ever true, I don't think its really something to count on these days.