My take is that whenever we can break down barriers to allow more creators to enter, it's ultimately better for the entire industry. As a platform we can work on curating and filtering for high quality game content from our users, but that's a problem of curation rather than artificially limiting creation for fear of people making low quality content. Most content quality like many things are power law distributed anyways.
Really depends by what lens you use for "better" (let alone for the entire industry), IMO. I think there is truth in that statement, but only in a historical context when breaking into the industry required a publisher and creating a game required writing your own engine; that truth dwindles as the markets approach (real) saturation. (And there's an argument to be made that those two filters were actually great for filtering people who can create memorable games)
People take pride in craftmanship. If AI can match that, that isn't better for them. More choices (competition) means more money diverted in marketing and ads. That isn't better for game studios and all their non-marketing branches.
All this to say, the more competition there is on the market, the winners end up being marketplaces, not game studios. Music is a commodity at this point. PC/Console video games are far behind that, but walking the same path. Mobile games are not far behind music. IIRC about 80-90% of mobile games development budget is for marketing and ads. There are around 10x mobile games released every year, compared to Steam.
I'm biased because I'm working on my own (PC) game, and I am very grateful to be working on this before the tidal wave hits. It will probably be awhile before AI can match hand-crafted/polished digital experiences.
Just sharing my thoughts as a game developer who grew up in the 90s. This isn't personal, humans will almost always take the path of least resistance. If AI matches expert level output, the outcome is inevitable.
My optimism is mostly for increasing the number of creators of games --> best games get even better, at the cost of introducing more games, some of which may not be good. Marketplaces being the winners is a symptom of the players being the ultimate beneficiary of increased competition (and thus a surplus of both good and bad games).
I actually don't see this as an AI to replace, but AI to enable more people to create games. So ultimately, it still expresses the desire of the creator, who is human.
It's there any precedent of this happening before? If I had to bet I would bet on the opposite, that is that the general population would get fatigue from so many games and would stick to old brands/companies and just ignore games from unpopular sources, the small games that would succeed are those that _cannot_ yet be generated by AI, that is that have mechanics hard to infer from existing games, eventually AI would learn to make those games too but by then the existing game company would have some reputation of its own.
