[stuckinhell]

I think indie game development is dead with these techniques. Instead big companies will create "make your own game" games.

Indie games already seems pretty derivative these days. I think this tech will kill them in mid-term as big companies use them.

[chongli]

“Make your own game” games will never replace regular games. They target totally different interests. People who play games (vast majority) just want to play an experience created by someone else. People who like “make your own game” games are creative types who just use that as a jumping off point to becoming a game designer.

It’s no different than saying “these home kitchen appliances are really gonna kill off the restaurant industry.”

[stuckinhell]

Hmm I think it will destroy the market in a couple ways.

AI creating video games would drastically increase the volume of games available in the market. This surge in supply could make it harder for indie games to stand out, especially if AI-generated games are of high quality or novelty. It could also lead to even more indie saturation( the average indie makes less than 1000 dollars).

As the market expectations shift, I think most indie development dies unless you are already rich or basically have patronage from rich clients.

[crq-yml]

The likes of itch.io, Roblox, and the App Store already exist, each with more games than anyone can reasonably curate.

The games market has been in the same place as the rest of the arts for some time now: if you want to be noticed, you have to mount a bit of a production around it, add layers of design effort, and find a marketing funnel for that particular audience. The days of just making a Pong clone passed in the 1970's.

What technology has done to the arts, historically, is add either more precision or more repeatability. The relationship to production and arts as a business maps to what kinds of capital-and-labor-intensive endeavors leverage the tech.

Photographs didn't end painting, they ended painting as the ideal of precisely representational art. In the classical era, just before the tech was good enough to switch, painting was a process of carefully staging a scene with actors and sketching it using a camera obscura to trace details, then transferring the result to your canvas. Afterwards, the exact scene could be generated precisely in a photo, and so a more candid, informal method became possible both through using photographs directly and using them as reference. As well, exact copies of photographs could be manufactured. What changed was that you had a repeatable way of getting a precise result, and so getting the precision or the product itself became uninteresting. But what happened next was that movies and comics were invented, and they brought us back to a place of needing production: staged scenes, large quantities of film or illustration, etc.

With generative AI, you are getting a clip art tool - a highly repeatable way of getting a generic result. If you want the design to be specific, you still have to stage it with a photograph, model it as a scene, or draw it yourself using illustration techniques.

And so the next step in the marketplace is simply in finding the approach to a production that will be differentiating with AI - the equivalent of movies to photography. This collapses not the indie space - because they never could afford productions to begin with - but existing modes of mobile gaming, because they were leveraging the old production framework. Nobody has need of microtransaction cosmetics if they can generate the look they want.

[stuckinhell]

Maybe if you were talking about the generative AI from 1 year ago. The incredibly fast evolution is makes most of your points irrelevant. For example ai art doesn't need prompt engineers as jobs anymore because it alot of prompt engineering is already being absorbed by other ai's.

The chaining of various AI's and the feedback loops between are accelerating far beyond what people think it is.

Just yesterday major breakthroughs were released on stable diffusion video. It's the pace and categorical type of these breakthroughs that represent a paradigm shift, never seen before in the creative fields.

[chongli]

I have yet to see any evidence that would convince me that generative AIs can produce compelling gameplay. Furthermore, even the image generation stuff has a lot of issues, such as making all the people in an image into weird amalgamations of each other.

[stuckinhell]

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/gamegan-research-pacman-annive...

pacman was recreated just AI

[quickthrower2]

But the make your own game games are saleable games. Or at least they will be with enough AI. The Roblox minecraft for example is super realistic.

[angra_mainyu]

I couldn't disagree more. RPGMaker didn't kill RPGs, Unity/Godot/Unreal didn't kill games, Minecraft didn't kill games, and Renpy didn't kill VNs.

Far more people prefer playing games than making them.

We'll probably see a new boom of indie games instead. Don't forget, a large part of what makes the gaming experience unique is the narrative elements, gameplay, and aesthetics - none of which are easily replaceable.

This empowers indie studios to hit a faster pace on one of the most painful areas of indie game dev: asset generation (or at least for me as a solo dev hobbyist).

[stuckinhell]

Sorry I guess I wasn't clear. None of those things made games automatically. The future is buying a game making game, and saying I want a zelda clone but funnier.

The ai game framework handles the full game creation pipeline.

[CaptainFever]

The issue with that is that it probably produces generic-looking games, since the AI can't read your mind. See ChatGPT or SD for example, if you just say "write me a story about Zelda but funnier" it will do it, but it's the blandest possible story. To truly make it good requires a lot of human intention and direction (i.e. soul), typically drawn from our own human experiences and emotions.

[stuckinhell]

Then I'll just update my prompt to Zelda but funnier like Curb Your Enthusiasm style humor.

[owenpalmer]

People who use "make your own game" games aren't good at making games. They might enjoy a simplified process to feel the accomplishment of seeing quick results, but I find it unlikely they'll be competing with indie developers.

[CamperBob2]

Careful with that generalization. Game-changing FPS mods like Counterstrike were basically "make your own game" projects, built with the highest-level toolkits imaginable (editors for existing commercial games.)

[CaptainFever]

Yeah, and if there was going to be such a tool, people who invest more time in it would be better than those casually using it. In other words, professionals.

[mattigames]

Not really, "I" can make 2D pictures that look like masterpieces using stable diffusion and didn't invest more than 6 hours playing with it, the learning curve is not that high, and people already have a hard time telling apart AI art than those from real 2D masters who have a lifetime learning it, the same thing will happen with making videogames and 3D art.(Yeah nothing of this looks exiting to me, actually it looks completely bleak)

[CaptainFever]

I didn't mean comparing it to human-created art, I meant comparing it to other AI generated or assisted artworks. Currently the hard parts of that would probably be consistency, fidelity (e.g. multiple characters) and control, which definitely stands out when compared against the casual raw gens.

[dexwiz]

The platform layer of the "make your own game" game is always too heavy and too limited to compete with a dedicated engine in the long run. Also the monetization strategy is bad for professionals.

[Vegenoid]

There are more amazing, innovative and interesting indie games being created now than ever before. There's just also way more indie games that aren't those things.

[CamperBob2]

For values of "dead" equal to "Now people who aren't 3D artists and can't afford to hire them will be able to make games," maybe.

User name checks out.

[stuckinhell]

AI is already taking video game illustrators’ jobs in China https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-china-video-game-layof...

It feels like a countdown until every creative in the videogame industry is automated.