- Video devlogs were long a shitty way to make a community (I can explain this one in more detail, but in short, the tradeoff between opportunity cost and video quality is a Pareto curve that is bad at all points on the curve, if your goals include both “make game” and “build community for players with devlogs”, the way out is to drop one of those two requirements, either “make YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channel” replaces “make game”, or you build some other audience for your devlogs)
- Good devlogs don’t have that level of detail, to let people easily recreate games
- Most games can’t easily be replicated by LLMs, in short, the people who are good at steering LLMs like that are making their own games.
This is not the first time I heard this story. Sometimes it comes with the lamentation “back in the day people could build communities with devlogs” and no, that was generally not a good way to build communities. It was mostly good streams from YouTubers who were making the game in order to make YouTube content or it was mediocre streams from random devs. Throw in a few people who are famous game devs who choose to stream and get a big audience because they already have a community.
AFAICT this is a fear that some game developers have, that someone will steal their game and run with it, and the stories told are more repeated based on this shared fear than based on realistic scenarios. People repeat it because it’s a good story.
And yes, I’m aware of some situations like 0x10c and the like.
More specifically to AI... A blog on a nice website is no longer a signal for quality so there's just no point in devs investing in that.
The idea is not valuable, ideas are a dime a dozen. The actual value is in your implementation.
It requires discernment, taste, on the part of the user to be able to point the LLM at the weird parts that look wrong.
Even with that, the LLM can only fix most of, not all of, those rough edges.
There's no moat in an idea either so I guess it's down to marketing budget.
It really makes me appreciate how important good game design is. Claude is doing a fine job coding everything I describe, but it doesn't really understand fun, so I need to.
(It's not a great game)
The whole problem with LLMs is that you don't need the detail.
And someone trying to vibe copy another person's game is definitely the type who has no idea of value to add. So many of the slop games the whole concepts are so generic that they definitely just asked chatgpt for everything.
In the modding scenes for some games I play I've seen vibe coded mods where the gameplay additions make no sense and have no sense of balance or fun, with these completely new to the community devs having ko-fi links set up from the start.
An LLM "recreation" doesn't have to be complete or very good. It just has to steal enough thunder to be profitable.
It's it possible for an LLM-created game to be profitable but "unsuccessful?"
For instance, if (on average) if it costs $100 in tokens and time to make a crappy LLM-game clone, but you can clear $200 in sales per game on average, you're ahead.
And the economics of slop mean there are a lot of people in 3rd world countries who will make all that effort for a $100 payout (or less).
My point is they don't actually have to do a good job, they need to make a pile of shit that looks just good enough to trick a few people into buying it.
Scenario one: they’re competing with my game and stealing my thunder. In this scenario my game wasn’t very good to begin with.
Scenario two: we’re going after different customers. They get the customers who want a cheaper game, I’m getting the customers who want a better game.
And that's why we can't have good things...
(This is just gonna keep happening more and more until eventually we'll need something like a patent system for ideas)
So, a patent?