I’m surprised not many people talk about this, but a big reason corporations are able to do layoffs is just that they’re doing less. At my work we used to have thousands of ideas of small improvements to make things better for our users. Now we have one: AI. It’s not that we’re using AI to make all these small improvements, or even planning on it. We’re just… not doing them. And I don’t think my experience is very unique.
I think people need to get used to the idea that the West is just going backwards in capability. Go watch CGI in a movie theatre and it's worse than 20 years ago, go home to play video games and the new releases are all remasters of 20 year old games because no-one knows how to do anything any more. And these are industries which should be seeing the most progress, things are even worse in hard-tech at Boeing or whatever.
Whenever people see old systems still in production (say things that are over 30 years old) the assumption is that management refused to fund the replacement. But if you look at replacement projects so many of them are such dismal failures that's management's reluctance to engage in fixing stuff is understandable.
From the outside, decline always looks like a choice, because the exact form the decline takes was chosen. The issue is that all the choices are bad.
You're just getting older and looking at the past with rose colored glasses. No one is going backwards in capability. It is about how accessible and cheap the thing is. In the 90's, a license to install Maya or 3D Studio Max, or Lightwave was extremely expensive, those products were not promoted nor available to the general public. They would cost tens of thousands of dollars, for the software alone, not to mention the hardware.
Today it is a commodity. So we are flooded with low effort productions.
With that being said, we have more capability than ever, at the cheapest cost ever. Whether businesses use that wisely is a different story.
There will always be outliers. I see many comments with people who derived value from whatever they perceived as something uncommon and unique they could do. Now AI has made those skills a commodity. So they lose their motivation since it becomes harder to attain some sort of adoration.
In any case, going forward, no matter what, there will be those who adopt the new tools and use them passionately to create things that are above and beyond the average. And folks will be on HN reminiscing about those people, 30 years from now.
But for example Toy Story (1995) had a budget of 30 million. Today's Disney box office flops have budgets closer to 250 million.
I think that’s the rose colored glasses again. What made you choose Toy Story as an example rather than Waterworld or Cutthroat Island?
Because the thread was discussing CG becoming a commodity and Toy Story was the first thing that popped into mind for 90s CG; I have a vague recollection that it was the first feature-length full-CG film.
I only checked its production budget while writing my comment.
Actually, I picked the first CGI movie from the 90s, and it just happened to be good and very cheap.
But more importantly, the other half of my point was that $250 million ought to be enough to pay for a high effort production. It's not like "well Blender is free now so of course theatres are flooded with amateur CG films since their production has been commoditized".
It was the first full CGI movie but others had been using it before that, Jurassic Park used a mix of CGI and puppets for e.g.
Correcting for inflation (I used this tool by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm), 30M USD in nov. 1995 would have a purchasing power equivalent to roughly 62M USD in feb. 2025. This is below half the budget of Moana 2 (150M USD, released in nov. 2024) for instance.
There does seem to be a sort of sampling bias thing that I've only recently noticed, that I think does come from being older now. I started to get back into old retro games I used to play, and I can't help but realize how many games back then were really bad, like not worth playing at all, and I just cherry picked the good ones. And being older, I'm not into gaming anymore, or really much of a consumer at all besides essential goods, being younger you do consume more entertainment products, like games. So I think there's definitely some sampling bias going on here where things look like they're getting worse. Or it could be both things, like it could actually be getting worse, but also not as much as it looks like because of this sort of sampling bias thing. Like having to have multiple accounts, like a Switch account plus some special Switch account and/or another account to play a game, or you buy a game and then there's an online store as well, or you buy a game in person but you can't get a copy digitally, or you buy a digital copy and you can't get a physical copy made for you for a flat fee, or that increasingly people don't actually literally own things anymore and it's all subscriptions or some sort of permission to use, or that a lot of games are just remakes of older games, or that you can't play single player offline, or that you can't transfer or give your digital game that you "bought" and "own" to someone else (less it be a physical copy, obviously), etc.
I mean, I see no issue with comparing high profile old games with high profile new games. The thing is thst there's less high profile bad games becsuse... Well, back then when you put in that money you werre trying to go for quality, I suppose.
It also was because development budgets were microscopic compared to today, so a bad release from a dev team of 5 people and 12 months won't bomb as badly as a 500 person 5 year "blockbuster" release. So yeah, Superman 64 was laughably bad but didn't sink a company the way Condord or even a not-that-bad game like Saints Row would.
Economy is different, as is the environment. There's still quality, but when a game flops, it's a tsunami level flop and not just a painful belly flop.
I would never use the official inflation numbers (they underestimate the actual inflation). It's easy to see that the most expensive movie ever made back in the day has a much lower budget that the most expensive movie made now, even adjusted for the official inflation rate.