There’s a possibility the profit margins could just get that juicy. You could have a skeleton crew work on a game for a shorter amount of time and get it out there making money.
This is pure speculation, and a very iffy one at that. Large game companies keep betting on larger and larger projects, distancing themselves from niche genres. It’s a huge leap to go from “maybe they will try to make smaller games with AI”, which is already speculation, to “indie devs won’t be able to survive if they don’t use AI too”.
An AI can’t condense all of your inspirations and personality and meaning in the same way a drawing tablet can’t. It’s all in how you use it.
The tablet can be a neutral medium, an AI is trying to condense the outwardly obvious stylistic choices of countless other artists, without an understanding of the underlying ideas that guided them, while you are trying to wrestle something somewhat close to your vision out of it. I suppose that’s like being a director, but it inherently means the result less personal. What decided the shapes and colors? What decided the wording and tone? Who can say.
People with fewer or no skills might get the helping hand they need to fill the gaps in their knowledge and get started.
I’d say today there are easy enough tools that getting started is fairly easy, but there’s some merit to that. Still… that bumps with the uncomfortable possibility that if AI is widely adopted, there will be less game developer and artist jobs available. Sure, more people could get their start, but could they actually get any further than that?