I’m assuming in some areas where it is just busy work with coding or modeling that it might be beneficial for AI to do the bulk of the work and have people come in and clean it up. This would alleviate workloads on developers so they could work on making the game better rather than doing tedious tasks that could otherwise be cranked out by an AI.
I mean the reason we are seeing massive layoffs right now is due to the fact that companies were over highering after COVID because profit margins were up tremendously and if you’re a publicly traded company, line must go up. Things have started to level out again and companies see that the growth they thought they had isn’t sustainable so they’re cutting loose ends. I’m not saying what you said is wrong here and what they’re doing is right, but what the industry is experiencing now can be attributed to growing pains of the capitalist structure we’re in.
If anything the mass layoffs of developers might be a blessing in disguise because they could potentially rally together and make their own indie company or join others, which IMO indie games have a much brighter future than the huge conglomerate gaming corporations we have now (looking at you Microsoft).