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Comment by sarchertech | Hacker News Reader

Look at steam releases. May 2025: 1727. May 2026: 1875

A year over year increase matching the same trend that has existed since 2017. The same pattern holds for every month this year except March (where there was an increase year over year of about 600 games).

If you’ve ever been to a game dev forum, you’ll see that there are at least 10x as many people who want to make a game as there are people who have made a game (it’s probably much higher than 10x).

If games were easy to vibe code, or if AI speed up game dev 10x, I would expect it to almost immediately show up as a flood of games on Steam.

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I wonder if there's also another aspect: Games have to be fun for humans and this involves a lot of trial and error with actual humans in the loop.

You can't just spin up a bunch of claude agents to implement a game for you, because implementing a new feature requires that you playtest it with a fairly fine granularity as it's being implemented.

You can save some time implementing various subsystems with llms, but at some point the dev cycle will turn into: tweak things, build, play, rinse and repeat.

I'm sure asset flip and friendslop games will become cheaper to make with ai tooling, but if you want to make a genuinely good game, it will have to involve humans actually playtesting it during development.

Also, game audiences are brutal about games that are flawed, and even more brutal if they think it's shovelware. If you're selling games on Steam, something with "Mostly Negative" reviews isn't serious competition (at least not unless it's part of a long established franchise with a big marketing budget).

And sports management sims are one of the most brutal of the lot. Slop might get you something that superficially looks like a sports sim (a decent third party UI library would get you quite some way in the past), but what fans actually care about is perceived realism, game mechanics, balance/challenge etc (and in real world sims, "how has my team been represented?") and that's a design decision, play testing, parameter tweaking and user engagement exercise, not a feature-adding one.

Thing is, Steam already was flooded with shovelware - I suspect a percentage of new relelases includes plenty of AI usage that was previously made in other ways (e.g. using asset libraries)

roblox studio has deep generative AI integration, it has absorbed many users both creators and players during the time period you are measuring. steam grew so little despite digital audiences growing so much.

Yeah it was flooded with shovelware. But I’m not talking about people who want to publish asset flips for a quick buck.

I’m talking about all of the people out there who have ever tried to make a game or never got started because it was too hard. In my CS cohort years ago, pretty much everyone there got into programming originally because they wanted to make a game.

Games definitely have the highest ratio of I want to make a game to I have made a game of any type of software. If it was suddenly easy to make “your game”, Steam would explode.

But still how many of these games are successful?

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