Game industry leaders go head-to-head in GamesBeat’s Crossfire Lounge

It was a night of intense debate and verbal smackdowns at GamesBeat’s Crossfire Lounge, during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco. Dean Takahashi, GamesBeat’s lead writer, hosted three head-to-head conversations, tackling the AI apocalypse, direct-to-player marketing and sales, and the state of the game industry. Round one: AI: Savior or saboteur of game development? The first debate, moderated by Takahashi, featured Simon Davis, founder & CEO, Mighty Bear Gaming versus Dave Taylor, advisor, programmer, futurist and harbinger of doom. The knowledge worker apocalypse in the U.S. is coming, Taylor argued, and AI is hastening doomsday. “There’s about 132 million full-time knowledge workers,” Taylor said. “In two to three years when big data, AI and prompt chains can handle just about any topic reasonably well, we’re going to see a huge collapse in that workforce.” It’s not actually AI that’s directly at fault, he said, but instead the U.S.’s scalar money commerce, a ... Read full article.