Where did you get that 50 cent statistic from? The closest I could find was a dataset from 2006-12 where the median per-capita income was $4k. Even if you extrapolate to working 40h a week and 52 weeks/year (which you can’t, because there’s some correlation between having lower income in this dataset and working part-time), that is still around $2/hr.
I don’t agree about the “people don’t care that your game doesn’t have AI” part. Games that have AI disclosure have significantly worse sales on Steam than ones who don’t.
Yea I do agree but most of the gamers who actually stream games mostly only care about how good the game is. If it's AI but has a solid storyline and gameplay then it would most probably be a success compared to a game which was created by just "Make a cool game " prompt
I would argue the decline of techno-optimism started long before LLMs became widespread. If you think back to the late 2010s, the first bricks were starting to fall already (Cambridge analytica, Google’s 2018 … thing). Crypto, NFTs, Web3, etc were held with general negative regard in the beginning of the 2020s, and the tech CEOs like Musk/Zuckerberg/Bezos had all accumulated negative image by then.
In https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-hourly-earnings I could not find a single country even close to what you have said, except for Burundi at $0.6/hr. The rest are all $2 and up.