[deadbabe]

A developer who can build a game by hand in 24 hours could probably build and publish something very polished and professional on Steam within 3 days using LLMs, which leads to some kind of software Fermi paradox: where are all the games??

[Profan]

The part of this that always confuses me is like nobody's aware gamejams exist, this has been a thing long before the LLM craze and people have been producing decent games on very limited timespans already, but people are forgetting how insanely high the bar is now, LLMs do not even remotely begin to fix the problem of your competition being incredibly stiff.

Just look at something like ludum dare and all the top entries (out of thousands of games submitted) are all usually quite polished given the timespan.

[sarchertech]

> are all usually quite polished given the timespan

The open secret is that they might not start coding or building assets until the start time, but they have spent a lot of time thinking about the ideas before then (even when the "theme" isn't known before hand people tend to make ideas fit theme with tweaks), which just speaks to the "code is not the bottleneck" thesis.

[MarceColl]

For one datapoint, I've participated in many gamejams and I've never ever spent any time beforehand thinking about ideas.

[sarchertech]

How many big game jams have you won/placed very highly in though?

[deadbabe]

Game jams typically require games to adhere to a theme that is only known the day of, and the best entries will make a game specifically around that, not just adapt some pre-existing idea to it.

[sarchertech]

The themes are so open ended it’s very easy to adapt most game ideas. Games that win tend to be the most fun to play not necessarily the ones that fit the theme the best.

[sheepolog]

As a Steam-based game developer, I am starting to use AI more and more in new projects for asset generation (images and text) as well as some help with code. Here are some of my ideas for why we haven't yet seen a huge increase in steam game releases due to AI:

1: Even with AI, it's a lot of work to make a full game. When most people think "I have a cool game idea", they're usually imagining something polished and non-trivial, possibly 3d. You could make a short text adventure in a few days with AI, or a very simplistic 2d game, but anything more ambitious (like 3d) is going to take a lot more effort.

2: Releasing on steam requires you to pay $100. I imagine this is a substantial deterrent for "3-day projects", unless you think it'll sell $100 worth.

3: There's more to game development than creating assets and writing code. The author of the article recreated an existing game, which sidesteps one of the most difficult parts of gamedev: design. Creating a compelling game is surprisingly difficult. Granted, you don't need a compelling game in order to release on steam, but I myself have made many prototypes over the years which I've abandoned because the idea just wasn't as interesting as I thought it would be.

4: I've made a few prototypes with AI assets, and one issue I frequently run into with image generation is: it still takes a fair amount of work to generate the same character in different poses, facial expressions, outfits, etc.

5: There is still considerable prejudice against using AI to make game assets. I think some people (myself included) are hesitant to release a game with lots of AI generated assets at the current moment, for fear of public backlash. Eventually that will calm down and it will become more socially acceptable to use AI to generate game assets.

I am bullish about AI improvement over the next decade, and I think we'll gradually see all of these issues resolve themselves as AI improves. But at the present moment, it's not quite as easy as the article makes it seem.

[Mars008]

> 5: There is still considerable prejudice against using AI to make game assets. I think some people (myself included) are hesitant to release a game with lots of AI generated assets at the current moment, for fear of public backlash. Eventually that will calm down and it will become more socially acceptable to use AI to generate game assets.

This is mostly from artists themselves. Most people are ok with even fully generated content if it's fun and interesting. Anyway, solo developer cannot afford even single artist, musician, writer.

That's where LLM helps. I recently tried GPT5 for story telling. Gave it a single image (in a bar, women, man, and a gun) and asked for a short story. Then asked for the next part 6 times. Every time at the end for illustration. The result was consistent and readable. Images generated had even similar faces. Remember, that was a problem with earlier models. I'm sure this will be used fill Amazon's bookshelves.

[TechSquidTV]

I've been "able" to make likely decent games for a number of years now. Code and 3D I could potentially have covered. That's no longer what scares me.

Having a good and semi unique idea, is a rare. If I had a great game mechanic idea, the rest would be trivial.

Say you do get a good game loop together that you feel will be successful. You will also now need to loop in art teams for artistic direction, music, character design, etc. A good game loop isnt enough, it needs to be presented in an equally interesting and unique way.

Finally, there is the risk. There is a massive time investment in making games, and you are catering to an audience that is not only accustomed to pirating but finds it morally righteous to steal your work. This is why app developers prefer to make iOS apps. The customers are accustomed to paying and have little interest in pirating.

post-launch and even before that, your job becomes paying and convincing streamers to play your game constantly in the HOPE people start to notice it.

All of this stress and work to hopefully just make an ok amount of money. I have so many excellent games in my steam library by indie devs that gave up after one or two very successful games. And I doubt it's because everything was going so well.

[hackable_sand]

I highly recommend making a game and then reviewing your comment.

[jayd16]

This is like asking "where are all the very polished and professional LLM books."

[hiAndrewQuinn]

About 50 games are released on Steam every day. How much higher are you suggesting this number should go?

[famouswaffles]

I'm not going to say this is all LLMs but Steam game releases have exploded.

https://steamdb.info/stats/releases/

[mattmanser]

Still seems to be roughly following the pre-AI trajectory though.

Which is really easy to argue it's more down to Unity + successors making game dev accessible as it starts in 2015.

No huge spike since Claude code got released or anything like that.

[famouswaffles]

>Still seems to be roughly following the pre-AI trajectory though.

Not really. The jump from 2023 to 2024 is bigger than the jump from 2019-2022 in raw numbers and 2020-2022 in %. So the jump of 3 to 4 years happened in a single year.

[sarchertech]

But as of August 2025, we are on pace to see fewer games in 2025 than in 2024.

Also the jump in 2024 is only around 10-15% more games than we would have expected from the previous trend. Assuming all of that is directly down to AI, I wouldn’t call that an explosion.

From what I’ve seen, most of the growth was in NSFW shovelware and was just people noticing a business opportunity. This also explains why the number it takes in 2025 isn’t showing similar growth.

[famouswaffles]

>But as of August 2025, we are on pace to see fewer games in 2025 than in 2024.

No we're not. Use Wayback machine or whatever and this year is 1k+ ahead at the same date.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240822090931/https://steamdb.i...

>Also the jump in 2024 is only around 10-15% more games than we would have expected from the previous trend. Assuming all of that is directly down to AI, I wouldn’t call that an explosion.

How many games do you imagine can be released per day even with the help of current Sota LLMs ? Nevermind the fact that you have to pay $100 to distribute your game on Steam. You're not making a game you'd pay $100 to distribute in 3 days, LLM help or not.

But fair, exploded is probably overstating it.

[sarchertech]

There must be a huge push end of year.

>How many games do you imagine can be released per day even with the help of current Sota LLMs ?

Given the number of people who want to make games—if code is the bottleneck, and LLMs can really make you hugely more productive, I’d expect to see an actual explosion.

My experience is that neither of those assumptions are true though.

[zerr]

Delegating all the fun of making games to LLMs and leaving only the boring part for yourself puts you in the infinite procrastination mode.

Watching LLM generating the code doesn't help with producing the dopamine.

[brookst]

Some people think the fun part is the requirements and gameplay, and code is the boring part.

[Xss3]

Games dev at my alma mater was split into two courses, bachelor of science (which focused on the technical side) and bachelor of arts which focused on 3d modelling, animation, concept art, etc.

Both groups wanted to make games.

[rustystump]

This is because LLMs are not good enough. Seriously, the bottle neck is still code, art, sound, etc.

There are a bunch of games made using heavy gen ai but it is usually for art and dialogue. Most players can tell quickly and drop the game. Games are fundamentally creative things and most interesting art work was not done in 5s with a prompt.

[macleginn]

LLMs can't help much with assets?

[risyachka]

This.

You may as well buy a shooter game starter pack or whatever that can save you >1year of coding, no llm needed.

Code is not a hard part.

Making mechanics fun and good assets is what is hard and takes forever.

Sure you can use llm to write a generic game, but its easier to find same game on github and just use that code, why would you write it again with llm.

[deadbabe]

Why not just copy the mechanics of an existing fun game?

[sdwr]

If it's identical, you made a clone. If it's evenly slightly different, the design needs to be rethought. In a good game, the mechanics, assets, and game loop harmonize. Change one piece, and the balance shifts.

[shortrounddev2]

Many people do and then sell nothing

[Jensson]

Wargroove copied almost everything from advance wars and put it in a fantasy setting, yet it sold much more than most indie games. Copying most values and mechanics from another game wont make a massive hit but it doesn't sell nothing, people who like the mechanics a lot will buy it to play with them some more in a new game.

[shortrounddev2]

If you copy a nintendo-platform game which hasnt gotten any love in a long time, put effort into it, and sell it on PC, then yes, you can sell a lot. Harvest Moon hasn't had a good game in over a decade, which is why Stardew Valley was so successful. Similarly, Pokemon has been neglected for generations and there have been a few successful games in the genre, like coromon.

But if you mean copying an already successful PC game with AI Slop assets and putting absolutely no thought into what makes the game good, then you probably should work in a field you actually care about instead

[schaefer]

But image generation and cloning a visual artist’s style is one of AI’s apparent strengths.

So it’s interesting to think about what the gaps are between fulfilling a single prompt and completing a project.

[shortrounddev2]

AI generated assets look like dogshit

[3036e4]

Incidentally so do many cheap games.

[qnleigh]

This is a great analogy. There's a wider Fermi paradox here regarding business productivity. Where's the 10x economic output?

[znort_]

in the stock market?

[Ekaros]

That misses huge parts of games. Actual content. Could be story, could be levels, could be features, could be item design, could be balance.

All of these take time and many of them are iterative processes where you might not even know if it fits or is right before multiple tries.

[maloga]

I think the reason is because you have to pay a non-negligible amount of money per game you publish, and most don't expect to make that back. In my case, making money wasn't my goal, as I explain in the article.

[mattbuilds]

I’m sorry but the difficult part of making games isn’t the coding, it is making something that is appealing and enjoyable to play. An LLM isn’t going to help with that at all. How is it going to know if something is fun? That’s the real work.

Also the idea that a dev who could making a game in 24 hour would create something professional and polished in 3 days is a joke. The answer to “where are all the games” is simple: LLMs don’t actually make a huge impact on making a real game.

[socalgal2]

Easy! Ask the LLM to play the game and if it’s not fun to try again. just like when you ask it to compile the code and if it fails to try again

…Joking…. For now

[rustystump]

This is almost on the money. Making something fun often requires coding, art, sound etc to bring the fun out. So in fact coding is the difficult part, along with all the other stuff needed for something to be fun. Imo tooling like ue blueprints and visual scripting is in the coding bucket.

[mattbuilds]

I’m not saying coding is easy, but when it comes to games it is the easy part. Lots of people can code, very few can make something actually fun. Knowing how to code (or how to use an engine/blueprints/visual scripting) is just the start. It’s like making films. Everyone can record some videos on their phone, but it takes much more than that to make something people want to watch.

[rustystump]

That analogy is more accurate for LLM vibe coding than real programming which i think proves my point. Not everyone can code. Actually code. Ideas are bountiful compared to the required skill to bring them into reality.

[all2]

If they're like me, they finish something and then sit on it for a variety of anxiety inducing reasons. I've got a state chart library I'm sitting on that I'm quite hesitant to share...

[leetrout]

Share it!

[tonyedgecombe]

Yes, these LLM’s need feeding.

[all2]

Given that it's human directed AI slop, they'll be feeding on themselves.

[shortrounddev2]

Code is not the hard part of making a game

[jama211]

Creativity is the hard bit yo