Larian Publisher to Elon Musk: Keep Your AI-Generated "Cash Grab" Out of Our Industry
While Musk dreams of robots making our games, the publisher behind the masterpiece Baldur's Gate 3 just reminded everyone that games need a soul, not a spreadsheet.
Elon Musk, a man who apparently has some free time to ruin another industry, has decided to fix video games. His AI development studio just announced it’s set to release its first "great game" next year.
The industry is already at war with itself over this shit. Suits at places like EA are practically salivating at the thought of cutting costs with AI, while the new guy at Embracer is worried it'll just flood the market with boring garbage.
Enter Michael Douse, the publishing director at Larian Studios. You know, the studio that a couple of years ago released a little game called Baldur's Gate 3 and reminded everyone what a hand-crafted masterpiece looks like. He took a look at Musk's grand vision and basically said, "no thanks."
Vision Can't Be Coded
Douse’s argument is brutally simple. He tweeted that the industry absolutely does not need more "mathematically produced, psychologically trained gameplay loops".
What we need, he says, are "more expressions of worlds that folks are engaged with".
He sees right through the tech-bro hype to the real disease rotting the industry: a catastrophic "lack of cogent direction". AI isn't going to solve the big problem, which Douse correctly identifies as a failure of "leadership & vision".
A Missed Revolution
He also dug into the industry's past failures. The switch to digital distribution should have been a revolution, a moment where creators were freed from the shackles of physical retail and could connect directly with their audience.
Instead, we traded one set of corporate overlords for another. The industry allowed itself to be dominated by massive companies that see games not as art, but as entries on a profit and loss spreadsheet.
Not Another Tech Bubble
For Douse, this AI frenzy feels like history repeating itself. He compares it to the investor-driven hype cycles around virtual reality and cloud gaming—technologies that were sold as the future but ended up being little more than "cash grabs".
He’s not against AI as a tool. He just thinks it should be used to create a sustainable development model, not just to fire a bunch of artists and writers to make a quick buck for shareholders.
The Ghost in the Machine
It all comes down to one thing: the human element. The guy who helped publish a game celebrated for its incredible writing and character depth seems to think that, you know, humans are kind of important.
Douse put it better than I ever could: "There is no craft without the human touch".
He argues that turning games into "digital, emotionless content is to abandon all resonance... which is why people play!". It's a hell of a statement, and he's earned the right to make it.
So now we have a choice. We can follow the billionaire into a future of algorithmically-generated content, or we can listen to the people who actually created one of the best games of the last decade. I know who I’m betting on.