Edge issue 428 gathered nine industry leaders for a feature it calls Crash 2.0. Sweeney's contribution was pretty tense.
"There's an unprecedented wave of investment in building AI systems and data centres, based on the belief that they're going to have a really transformational role in the economy," he told Edge's Alex Spencer. "The scale of the economic opportunity there means they can outbid the entire entertainment industry for all the components."
Then the part everyone quoted is "We're getting the short end of the stick, and the prices of RAM and storage are quadrupling, and not necessarily stopping there. We should expect there's just going to be a continual supply crisis for all gaming-relevant hardware for the next three years."
He calls it an unexpected, severe disruption, and the worst crash since the 1980s.
The turn
Sweeney is whose company put AI-generated content into Fortnite, including a skin that promptly became the worst-rated in the game. He has been the industry's most prominent AI advocate for two years.
In the same conversation he appears to regret the NFT push Epic accommodated when Steam banned it, saying everyone was ripped off in the process.
Two problems, not one
Sweeney splits the crisis into external and internal.
External is the component issues. Internal is AAA development costs, which he puts between 250 and 400 million dollars per game, which is extraordinary.
Shawn Layden's answer, elsewhere in the feature, is that studios should get comfortable making 50 million off a game rather than 500, and create lean teams.
Satvat, whose layoffs tracker projects over 14,000 job losses this year, is among those conceding the industry was too optimistic about AI replacing larger teams.
The fix Sweeney doesn't believe in
More domestic manufacturing, reducing dependence on Nvidia and overseas supply.
He admits the timeline problem himself, "There's no Moore's Law for construction equipment." Fabs take years. The crisis is three years long by his own estimate.
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