I’m not opposed to automation in video game design, which has been part of it for a long time and gen AI would just be another form of it, so I don’t see why we should oppose its use as assistance. That said, I’m not convinced automation is the make or break in the problems you outline. As far as I can tell, the biggest problems facing the video game industry are capitalist ones: Terrible management (sometimes just bad at leading, sometimes systemic abusive and sexist problems), terrible working conditions (little to no unions, crunch normalized, temp work normalized, people’s “passion for making games” taken advantage of to get them to burn themselves out just to get paid less than equivalent work in other industries), investors wanting more money from customers than exists in the world (endlessly worse monetization schemes that drive development toward making predatory design instead of making a fun game), etc.

I actually think player expectations have little to do with it and believe that largely originated from games “journalist” publications that were carrying water for corporate talking points, whose aim was to shift the blame from company to player, especially surrounding questions of cost. One of such arguments that got repeated was the idea that the price of games had to go up because of how expensive they are to make. But then this argument would cite things like mocap, which is not necessary at all to make a good game and there were people fawning over 3d games when they looked like this. Although I’m sure there’s the occasional “entitled” player who has unfair expectations, my experience is that players are largely way way way more forgiving than I think they should be for their own good and put up with borderline abusive situations at times, where a company puts out mediocre, buggy work and the players pay anyway because they’re so personally invested in a game/franchise/etc.

I think we can make a better argument for gen AI assistance by saying that like other forms of automation, it can (if used in the right way, under healthy working conditions) reduce busywork and allow people to put more of their time into the parts of work that they enjoy.