[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.