While I do believe it can be helpful to reduce the burden placed on developers (giving them more time with family, less crunch, shorten development cycles, and significantly reduced budgets by way of less development time and smaller teams per game to increase output), it has the potential to seriously disrupt livelihoods.

I think the people most at risk here are staff at Infinity Ward, Treyarch, Turn 10, and any expansion heavy titles (Diablo, WoW, StarCraft, and 343i. Anything that is a live service or incremental in its iterations are ripe for minimal effort and maximum returns.

Knowing Microsoft, this will be an amazing move for shareholders and executives, and absolutely horrible for labour. Unfortunately, I suspect a skeleton crew with grave pressure to produce new ideas will be milked, then they'll be replaced by trained AI.

As things take shape, I really believe this is Microsoft's Russian roulette moment in the gaming industry: if they are allowed to fulfill their vision with AI and people don't push back, it's game over. Nevermind publisher absorption, I think we're talking about IPs from other manufacturers. An approach with AI-generated content is undoubtedly the most profitable because you have far fewer mouths to feed. Sony and Nintendo would not be able to compete with that output and breadth of content...or, people push back and boycott their products and the AI dream fails spectacularly, which probably gives Microsoft far less incentive to even want to keep things up (how sustainable is it to have these massive publishers and studios with their games on a subscription service if costs keep ballooning?).

Bit of a defining moment. Might be seen as hyperbolic. That's fine. But there needs to be attention paid to reducing the human burden without pulling the rug out. I do not trust Microsoft at all to be decent about this. I expect them to do something horrific, then after a months-long strike, Spencer comes out and says he didn't know this was going on, and they (might) correct course, followed by a price hike to XGP.

A strike in the gaming industry is inevitable.

You can do both with quality standards