[doctorpangloss]

game development for steam and mobile audiences became so inaccessible due to Unity, iOS and Android's complexity & evolution, a lot of "game" development was programmers engaging in an intellectually curious but otherwise meaningless engine-twiddling circle jerk of sorts. people with good game ideas were not necessarily able to tackle the complexity of those engines - and, based on how bad the games on Roblox are, they aren't using alternative platforms either. they just have had to spend an incredible amount of time to develop something. for everyone else, there is already basically zero audience for most games, so we're going to have heard about, "I made a Rust ECS game engine that runs on a Wiimote" or whatever, because there's an audience for blog posts on hacker news.

then claude code swung everything back in the other direction. things are accessible again. does any of what the article says matter anymore? games are the ultimate, "if it looks good and works correctly, it is good" software product, nobody is going to care if you use [field: SerializeField] or records or whatever.

so yeah, will Claude Opus 6 mail you a check every month? who even needs Unity?

[jayd16]

What a strange take. Self publishing stores and cheap capable engines make things less accessible? I think you're saying this is because its hard to stand out with game design?

But then AI will help good game design stand out? Wouldn't it make such a problem much much worse?

[doctorpangloss]

This isn't complicated.

We're reading a post about engineering. Why? Why aren't we reading posts about game design? Why does engineering even matter for games?

The status quo is, if you are good at engineering, you can ship games, even if they're bad.

If you're good at game design and bad at engineering, before Claude code, you will not ship any games.

So engineering mattered back then.

Unity is very hard to use. If you want to make a game on Steam or iOS or whatever you need to know a lot of engineering.

Okay, now you don't. Claude code can engineer for you.

Now game designers can ship games. Do C# features matter to them? No. So does it matter for shipping games anymore? No.

Will this help them make money or get distribution? Time will tell. Very different questions. It is a CERTAINTY that you don't need the developers as much anymore.

If Steam had an easy way to turn photoshop files or board games into product SKUs, it would also be a different story. It doesn't. The App Store doesn't. The Switch doesn't. Are you getting it? They are still really complex to deploy for. Unity is hard to use. We put up with engineering stories because it was meaningful. Now it's not so much anymore. Now it's, what helps GAME DESIGNERS ship games? C# features? Not anymore.

[gamblor956]

There are hundreds of sites devoted to discussing game design and literally millions of posts.

This isn't a game design forum, it's a tech forum, so the focus is on the tech part of games.

Unity is very easy to use. If you want to make a game for Steam or iOS it is almost as simple as drag-and-drop, then selecting Publish from the main menu. The difficulty in getting a game on Steam or iOS is in the administrative roadblocks thrown up by the stores themselves, not the engines. You don't need to ever deal with C# in Unity. If you have difficulty using Steam, neither programming or game design is for you.

Claude and vibe programming don't lead to shipped games. They lead to crap that nobody wants to play because they aren't games. They're just poorly performing tech demos with bad art because they can't design games. They can just copy parts of other games without understanding why they work...but based on your comments about turning board games into software games it appears that is what you actually want.