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Comment by azraellzanella | Hacker News Reader

Impossible not to think about this -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

My take is that whenever we can break down barriers to allow more creators to enter, it's ultimately better for the entire industry. As a platform we can work on curating and filtering for high quality game content from our users, but that's a problem of curation rather than artificially limiting creation for fear of people making low quality content. Most content quality like many things are power law distributed anyways.

Really depends by what lens you use for "better" (let alone for the entire industry), IMO. I think there is truth in that statement, but only in a historical context when breaking into the industry required a publisher and creating a game required writing your own engine; that truth dwindles as the markets approach (real) saturation. (And there's an argument to be made that those two filters were actually great for filtering people who can create memorable games)

People take pride in craftmanship. If AI can match that, that isn't better for them. More choices (competition) means more money diverted in marketing and ads. That isn't better for game studios and all their non-marketing branches.

All this to say, the more competition there is on the market, the winners end up being marketplaces, not game studios. Music is a commodity at this point. PC/Console video games are far behind that, but walking the same path. Mobile games are not far behind music. IIRC about 80-90% of mobile games development budget is for marketing and ads. There are around 10x mobile games released every year, compared to Steam.

I'm biased because I'm working on my own (PC) game, and I am very grateful to be working on this before the tidal wave hits. It will probably be awhile before AI can match hand-crafted/polished digital experiences.

Just sharing my thoughts as a game developer who grew up in the 90s. This isn't personal, humans will almost always take the path of least resistance. If AI matches expert level output, the outcome is inevitable.

My optimism is mostly for increasing the number of creators of games --> best games get even better, at the cost of introducing more games, some of which may not be good. Marketplaces being the winners is a symptom of the players being the ultimate beneficiary of increased competition (and thus a surplus of both good and bad games).

I actually don't see this as an AI to replace, but AI to enable more people to create games. So ultimately, it still expresses the desire of the creator, who is human.

It's there any precedent of this happening before? If I had to bet I would bet on the opposite, that is that the general population would get fatigue from so many games and would stick to old brands/companies and just ignore games from unpopular sources, the small games that would succeed are those that _cannot_ yet be generated by AI, that is that have mechanics hard to infer from existing games, eventually AI would learn to make those games too but by then the existing game company would have some reputation of its own.

The good news is we've probably already been there and past it. Something like 50 new games release on Steam every day, 45 of them are probably garbage, and out of the five remaining ones the best one probably won't get noticed and the developer will quit making video games to go do something that pays rent.

So a new easier way to create games won't really make things meaningfully worse, I don't think. Especially because the quality bar will be quite low, it's not really going to crowd out the 'good stuff' that people are generally looking for. The store shelves (so to speak) are already so crowded that they are no longer how people find good games.

Just like YouTube, in the beginning, the quality of user-uploaded videos may not have compared to cable TV, but the experience of empowering everyone was very novel and eventually led to more people joining in. Ordinary people became familiar with video-making and storytelling. Now, look at YouTube – it has a lot of high-quality content and production standards that rival cable TV. The difference is that talented individuals don’t need a TV station to be seen by the world.

In the same vein, Rosebud AI initially gives more people the opportunity to turn their ideas into games. Then, through rapid iteration, both users and we grow together, continuously improving the quality of the games

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