[theahura]

most flash games were horrible too! You had to go through a load of crap to find games like boxhead, motherload, or bloons. I'm a big believer in volume here. You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer, but before, the former was a prerequisite for even getting started. The beauty of AI tools applied to games is that you can just focus on the latter. Over time the gems will rise to the top

[Zanfa]

> Over time the gems will rise to the top

I’m not sure this can be assumed. Discovery was already one of the biggest hurdles when releases were bottlenecked by human output. Increasing output 10x is only going to make it worse.

Same as with Google, where they’ve lost the SEO war against AI spammers and valuable content has become close to impossible to find.

[RicardoLuis0]

while SEO has made search worse, i don't think it's the core reason why things are impossible to find, i think it's simply the fact that, over time, google has been butchering the ability to search for exact terms in favour of "natural language" searching, which makes simple things like "how do i make an orange cake" or whatever return useful results, but makes any actually technical query return a lot of pure garbage

[soulofmischief]

A man of culture! Motherload was great. There really were a ton of great flash games, both on corporate websites like Cartoon Network, on popular sites like Newgrounds, Armor Games, etc. all the way to the back alleys like Albino Blacksheep.

These communites established a generation of modern animators and game developers. Maybe we'll see the same from the youth of today who use these tools and create communities around it.

[cardanome]

> You don't have to be an amazing programmer to be an amazing game designer

That has been true even without AI.

Solutions to create games with barely any programming knowledge have existed for a long time. You can create a full featured Unreal Engine game with just using its visual scripting language.

Lots of amazing games have absolute dogshit code. It doesn't matter. You can write super simple, procedural code without any fancy abstraction and just get the job done.

Programming is the easiest part of game dev.

Plus you don't have to be a solo dev. Sure, just being a game designer might be hard but if you bring artistic skills to the table as well then you are golden and can partner up or outsource the programming if needed. Honestly people with an artistic background often do much better than people from a software engineering background who are used to overcomplicate things.

So no, programming was never the hurdle and AI doesn't help here. It just helps people to produce more slop faster.

[kg]

This presumes that people will have the time and the patience to wade through the slop and find the gems. Right now people do that with the tide of low quality human-authored games to find the gems but when there's 10x or 100x as many low quality games will people still have the patience? I hope so, but I don't know. We're already seeing a huge uptick in the number of games being released every year on Steam and most of them don't get more than a handful of reviews, positive or negative.

[theahura]

Not all the things that are good will rise to the top, but most of the things that rise to the top will be good. We've gotten pretty good at ranking systems as a species at this point, I'd say

[SpicyLemonZest]

It really depends on what kind of "good" you're optimizing for. I'd point towards Instagram as a good counterexample: their signup page says that you can "See everyday moments from your close friends.", but most Instagram users see very few such moments, because the algorithm points them towards ragebait reels and thirst traps. If there's a 100x explosion of games, I think it's very likely that organic discovery will simply stop functioning, and nearly all gamers will find themselves leaning on algorithmic recommendations that aren't aligned with what they'd really like to play.

[no-name-here]

But for your IG example, isn’t that probably because although most people may claim they want to see everyday moments from friends, people in real life actually click more on the “thirst traps” etc?

[SpicyLemonZest]

It is, but I don't think you can infer a revealed preference from that. It's perfectly consistent for someone to want to avoid thirst traps because they know they're too inclined to click.