This is so wordy, I guess it's AI, which is relevant here because it is more or less what has been happening in the game industry, which is chasing low effort instead of high quality. Many of the changes in the industry were about how to make more money without actually trying to deliver a high quality creative experience. Everything from monetization, in-game stores, remake after remake, mobile games, and now AI, it's all in the direction of "how little effort can I get away with" instead of optimizing for "how can I create something with high cultural impact".

The early game industry from the 80s to 00s were about creating cool experiences for gamers, and that has become about how to monetize and extract value from gamers instead. Anyone that is keeping up with social media and games knows that there has been a lot of drama with every AAA game being released because gamers want to go back to a time when studios were delivering creative value and not just another product to consume.

The article barely touches on this, but I agree with most of the other points.