The lower the barriers to entry, the more competition game developers face, often by teams willing to charge little or nothing. Look at the app stores on mobile: 0.01% of apps make back their development cost
Steam had almost 9000 new games added to it last year, and the average revenue of each fell by almost half a couple of years ago
From an economic standpoint, perhaps. Consider the hobbyist.
If these tools had been available when I was a kid, my tile based RPG could have had the graphics I always wanted it to have. Instead, it never got anything more than map tiles (primitive ones at that). I had no talent or skills for asset creation.
Nobody played that game other than me, and (once) a couple other people I knew. That was fine, I made it for me, not others. But I would really have been happy to have access to assets.
Yes, creating art itself will have a lower barrier to entry, just like learning to code in Python has a lower barrier to entry than Assembly. But any software engineer will tell you that most of the challenges don’t come from writing lines of code, they come from building things that can scale at scales. Building a big thing in a big organization means having good communication and project management systems. Those things haven’t been taken over by AI (yet).
Suddenly, he’s got a cheap option for getting some basic art for a simple turn based game, card game or similar.
If a game of his takes off? He’ll have to hire artists to keep up with the increased workload.
AI will move barriers of entry lower, not higher.