https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware...
Basically, if the tools are even half as good as some proponents claim, wouldn't you expect at least a significant increase in simple games on Steam or apps in app stores over that time frame? But we're not seeing that.
Charts I'm looking at show a mild exponential around 2024 https://www.statista.com/statistics/552623/number-games-rele...
Also theres probably a bottleneck in manual review time.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Uy2aWoeRZopMIaXXxY2E...
The shovelware software is coming…
GitHub repos is pretty interesting too but it could be that people just aren't committing this stuff. Showing zero increase is unexpected though.
App stores have quality hurdles that didn’t exist in the diskette days. The types of people making low quality software now can self publish (and in fact do, often), but they get drowned out by established big dogs or the ever-shifting firehose of our social zeitgeist if you are not where they are.
Anyone who has been on Reddit this year in any software adjacent sub has seen hundreds (at minimum) of posts about “feedback on my app” or slop posts doing a god awful job of digging for market insights on pain points.
The core problem with this guy’s argument is that he’s looking in the wrong places - where a SWE would distribute their stuff, not a normie - and then drawing the wrong conclusions. And I am telling you, normies are out there, right now, upchucking some of the sloppiest of slop software you could ever imagine with wanton abandon.