If incompetence were revenue, they’d be a Fortune 500.
Publisher: GameSpot
GameSpot took a lucid interview and turned it into apocalypse porn. The headline is a clown horn: “End-of-Days” meets “AI is about to rewrite everything.” No, AAA isn’t dying. It’s dealing with cost and risk like every other mature industry. If you want to scream extinction, show cost curves, ROI trends, greenlight ratios, failure rates. Otherwise it’s just breathless stenography in a bigger font.
The article never tests a single claim. No counterexamples. No data. Not even a skeptical studio lead or a pipeline engineer to say what actually speeds up and what snarls. It parrots quotes and calls it coverage. And no, “triple the industry in five to seven years” isn’t analysis. It’s daydreaming without a spreadsheet. If incompetence were revenue, they’d be a Fortune 500.
Mahoney’s points about costs and timelines are fine. They’re also old news to anyone who’s shipped anything. What’s not fine is pretending AI erases the hard parts. AI helps with grunt work: rough assets, QA triage, tagging, some scripting. It doesn’t design systems, balance economies, fix netcode, run live ops, or handle certification, compliance, and localization. It won’t save you from platform rules, server bills, or angry players.
The quality take is just as shallow. Waving away AI slop by pointing at early Photoshop is cute and wrong. Tools don’t create taste or judgment. They amplify it. Quantity is trivial now; what still costs blood is direction, iteration, and ruthless curation. And don’t hide behind “the market will reject poor products.” Discovery and monetization routinely make mediocre stuff profitable. That’s the problem.
Then there’s the presentation. The layout is sloppy, the tone is overwrought, and the edit reads like it was assembled by hysterical sous-chefs hacking off context to serve a panic stew. The whole thing lands like a therapeutic scream, not journalism.
Mahoney’s interview is worth reading. GameSpot’s recap turns signal into noise. Readers deserve reporting with spine: challenge hyperbole, add numbers, bring counterpoints. Otherwise, stop flogging the siren and do your homework.
