The most sobering statistic I've seen is that the entire combined amount of consumer spending on AI products is currently less than the revenue of Genshin Impact.
It certainly does but B2B revenue can also be much more "fake", in a sense. i.e. if Microsoft spends $500 million on OpenAI, which makes OpenAI spends $500 million on Azure... where does the profit come from? There have been a few interesting articles (which I unfortunately can't look up right now) recently describing how incestuous a lot of the B2B AI spend is, which is reminiscent of the dot-com bubble.
Well, Genshin Impact is at the forefront of predatory B2C business practice. It is a gacha game, engineered to extract as much money from its prey as possible.
On the other end, most AI company can afford to be generous with their user/consumer right now because they are being bankrolled by magic money.
The real test will be when they have to start the enshitification. Will the product still be enough to convince consumer to spend an amount of money guarantying a huge margin for the service provider ? Will they have to rely on whale desperately needing to talk to their IA girlfriend ? Or company and people who went deep into the whole vibe coding thing, and can't work without an agent ?
I think it is hard to say right now. But considering the price of the hardware and running it, I don't think they will have to price the service insanely to at least be profitable. To be as profitable as the market seems to believe, that's another story.
Regardless of your feelings on Genshin/gacha (which I agree is predatory), the point is that the revenue of a single game developed by a few hundred people is currently making more money than an entire industry which is "worth" trillions of dollars, according to the stock market, and is, according to Sam Altman, so fundamentally important to the US economy that the US government is an insurer of last resort who will bail out AI companies if their stock price falls too much.
Isn't AI just as bad if not worse here? I'd bet there are far more people who have been duped by ChatGPT (and others) to think it's their friend, lover, or therapist than people who are addicted to Genshin Impact.
I would be curious to see how it compares to the combined revenue of gay furry gacha games and VNs. Are we talking parity, multiples, or orders of magnitude? Anything other than the latter would be a bucket of cold water.
The money is in business licenses. Why only look at consumer? Consumers are mostly still using the free version which exists to convince employers to pay.
