[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.

[famouswaffles]

>Given the number of people who want to make games—if code is the bottleneck

Game development is not a zero sum game. There can be multiple bottlenecks or difficult hurdles.

>and LLMs can really make you hugely more productive, I’d expect to see an actual explosion.

Well growth was double the previous year. Maybe you might not call that an explosion, it's still a very noticeable uptick.

[sarchertech]

It is possible that LLMs boost productivity by 2x-10x and there’s another bottleneck that limited the growth to a few thousand games.

I think it’s much more likely that LLMs don’t actually boost productivity all that much.