

The problems start if it can take on a lot of the junior work. If nobody can enter the industry, nobody can get the experience required to do the real engineering.
Open-source and personal work may be the only way to enter the programming field in the next decade.
Now for the real question: is it actually IRC or just an in-game IRC-like interface?
The greatest hacking game of all time, Uplink, has an actual IRC client that you can buy and install on your in-game systems.
IRC pops up a lot in less obvious places too. The in-game chat in Warframe is IRC, but it handles all the server and channel connecting, locking you out of connecting to arbitrary servers.