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Comment by loufe | Hacker News Reader

Other comments have mentioned it, even in this thread, but I am fairly certain the biggest change this will bring about (very, very sadly) is games and software from big companies being hosted server-side and streaming in content like some video games now do.

This is the future I always wanted, full control over the hardware and software I "bought" but I think we will end up lamenting our moment of empowerment in one way as the time we lost even more agency in the end.

Personal computing is increasingly under threat by government and big corporations, we all need to be vigilant and fight back.

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If AI progress continues on a similar trajectory for even just another six months, we will just be building the games and software ourselves.

When people with no prior experience, including teenagers, can produce a polished game by investing a few hundred hours of their free time to do the creative part, what do we need Ubisoft and co. for?

Kids already grew up playing lofi Roblox so this seems like the obvious future. There’s already so many free games on the App Store and web

Most of the free games on the app store and web are complete garbage. I haven't visited the Roblox child casino personally, but what I've seen of the games there were trash-tier too.

Roblox being trash tier is my point though. Obviously trash is selling like crazy AND we can do much better now

I mean to be more clear I have a friend all excited about making really nice games and now realzing he’s one of a bajillion others so no one is gonna pay for it (less you’re awesome at marketing in which case call me )

I really hope that highly polished and great games will still be loved and supported by players. We've seen problems with shovelware before, but the gems usually managed to get enough attention to be successful.

Children especially are extremely tolerant of complete garbage (I have similar concerns with animation) but I think targeting older audiences, respecting players by avoiding typical player-hostile bullshit (ads, in-game purchases, time gates, etc.) and really putting in the effort to make something special will still attract players.

It's going to be very rough for anyone trying to make simple arcade/flash/mobile style games. People will probably be able to vibe-code those games themselves well enough, but games with a well crafted story, amazing art and music, and satisfying gameplay will still offer unique experiences that you won't be able to just prompt your way into creating.

AI has the potential to give gamers something to play with for a while, but eventually people will get tired of poorly made AI reiterations of games they've already played and they'll want something new and actually creative. AI games aren't going to kill that demand for the same reasons AI won't be the end of books or movies. Making something that's really good takes talent and creativity and AI isn't capable of that. Most people generally aren't either. Even talented and creative people aren't interchangeable. If A Song of Ice and Fire is never finished I can ask AI to write the ending for me, but it's not going to be satisfying. Nothing stops me from writing the end for myself right now, and I can even make anything I want happen, customize the story and text for my exact preferences but it still wouldn't stop me from wanting to read whatever GRRM finally manages to release.

> Making something that's really good takes talent and creativity and AI isn't capable of that

I agree. You need to constantly inject taste and creativity via a lot of testing, feedback, and iteration.

With current technology, this still takes months to years of effort, depending on the scope of the project.

I feel that when you say AI game, it sounds like slop produced near autonomously in a single weekend.

There are other ways to fully use AI for software implementation and asset generation, but still apply standards.

One can spend a full day refining a single gameplay element to tune it into something enjoyable, or to explore and select assets that look great. This can happen with just prompting and testing.

Many skip the effort, and it currently of course results in a bad, barely working product.

> I feel that when you say AI game, it sounds like slop produced near autonomously in a single weekend.

That's most of the project I've seen people post about at least. Either actual clones of simple games, or just dreams of saying to AI "Make me red dead redemption but with pirates!" and expecting something playable.

If you spend enough time with AI you likely could come up with a great game. It'd probably take longer to explain to AI what you want, correct what it gave you, explain how you want to teak it, then correct that, etc. than it would just to code it yourself (for those who can code) and as the project grows there's a risk of it becoming unmanageable unless you have AI hyper-compartmentalize everything to fit each function within the limit of what it can keep track of, but that's going to have impacts on performance and maintainability too.

It may not be the most efficient way to do it, but as long as you put in enough time and effort on design, are willing to spend the time forcing the AI to get it right, and don't settle for less than what you envision, it could work.

In my opinion it's an order of magnitude faster with AI.

That things come out perfectly working without need for QA and refinement cycles when writing the code manually seems very unlikely, and the case where coding it yourself is faster than explaining the task to the AI does practically not exist.

> as the project grows there's a risk of it becoming unmanageable

I suspect that what you said there is not based on actual experience but rather something you imagine. In my personal experience AI has shown no issues working efficiently on projects with even 500k LOC.

Making games is extremely hard. The programming is the easiest part. Your comment really undersells how difficult making a good game is.

More and more indie games rely on a well-optimized, unique mechanic (factory builders, voxel engines, etc.) and pushing that to the extreme.

Trying to vibe code such algorithms generally yields results that are not suitable for realtime gaming performance. I’m sure they’ll get there, but saying “make it fast” without carefully directing the algorithm design causes LLMs to add hack on hack on hack, creating a slow, spaghetti code monstrosity.

From all I have seen measurable performance improvements are what AI excels at.

Is this your first hand experience?

I think the issue is not that the LLM can’t optimize a straightforward algorithm but that what makes an algorithm successful in a game is much more nuanced than big O notation, especially where visuals are concerned.

My kids less than 10yo both, each have already created their first video game through prompting. It is actually pretty amazing to watch them explore their creativity - and how they interact with AI is fun too. The younger one always starts with "Dear AI, I want you to..."

This is an opinion that is only plausible if you completely devalue video games as an art form.

Will you prompt the movies you want instead of watching a movie made by someone else? Will you prompt the novel you want to read? It’s nonsensical in other art form, it’s nonsensical in video games too unless you go for the lowest common denominator friendship or similar.

Hardly. I argued that we could see a shift to such art being produced by individuals or small teams rather than large commercial studios.

It’s nonsensical that anybody would not want a bespoke chair. IKEA is just a fad.

If it’s functional, good enough, and the price is right people will prompt generate games and share them with or without the gate keeping game industry.

There’s a lot more to this world than software developers.

Yes, games are not furniture. I have no idea wtf if a game is functional even means?

What is the gatekeeping in the games industry?

Quality free game engines have been available for years. Being a game developer has gotten so accessible that the market is completely jammed with titles and discoverability is very difficult.

I get the feeling from your post that you feel “ability to write code” was something put in place by “gatekeepers” but not only is that not what “gatekeepers” means, but software developers make up a small part of a game’s production team.

I don't believe that the analogy works. Art and media have been communal experiences for ages. Creating some bespoke music for yourself that only you listen to might achieve the goal of having something to listen to while working but it'll never be able to create dialog between listeners or create dialog between musicians.

Also, it should be really clear from the past decade or so that the games industry is not especially gatekept. Not only are there bazillions of indie games on itch or steam, many of the most loved games of the past decade are tiny indie games!

> When people with no prior experience, including teenagers, can produce a polished game

There is zero indication that that will ever happen. It takes a lot more to create a polished game like Assassin's Creed than telling a chat bot to "make it fun" while using stolen game assets. It's cute to watch mario run around in call of duty (https://www.dexerto.com/call-of-duty/call-of-duty-fan-create...) but most of the AI mashups people are putting out like that recently are basically unplayable garbage. It's fine, it's mostly for laughs and likes/views anyway, but the idea that people with zero experience in making games are going to be vibe coding games that are worth playing and on par with the best Ubisoft titles is ridiculous

It's certainly already possible to implement fun games with Opus 5.5 today, with no prior experience.

The idea that this will next year be possible for more polished 3D games with a larger scope is far from ridiculous.

If a community of users get together on Discord to collaborate on a project, I see no reason why this should not work.

Do you have any that you enjoy playing? I've tried a handful but every time my response is mostly... "Wow, really cool that someone made this." Then about a minute later I leave because... it's not fun and there's no "soul" in it (hard to describe).

No, I also only tried some to see if they are running.

I'm thinking more of the technical capability. I tested some Chinese browser game that played like an old GTA and it worked decently well on my iPhone.

Evidently the tools are good enough now.

I believe the issue is that there's a lot of people who just release slop. Both for games and regular software.

To build a decent product you need to invest months into testing and refining. Clearly many skip this in order to ship barely working garbage.

For the capabilities of eg. Opus 5.5 to diffuse into actual products rather than just demos, it's going to take some months.

I'm sure some readers are thinking that I'm just moving the goalposts into the future here, but it's the truth. For the games that were made with AI and which already are making money, I found that many are projects started already last year.

I myself have been working on a commercial mobile app for the last six months, targeting a release this week.

Building a good product still takes time.

But the point of a game is to be fun. If the question is "why do we still need game studios" then the AI creating something that can boot and look reasonable is not actually answering the key question.

The key question isn't whether the AI autonomously generates fun games or whether every game created with eg. Opus 5.5 is fun.

The answer would be no, obviously not.

The question is whether AI enables the general public to build fun games with no prior experience and with a fraction of the previous effort.

What I said is that some of the successful and therefore likely fun games made with AI are projects already started like late last year.

Considering that it still takes months to build a good product, these capability improvements are diffusing relatively slowly.

It is imaginable that models available in early 2027 can allow individuals or small teams to produce games of AAA scope, taking care of the technical aspects.

You still wouldn't expect to see a finished product until later that year, unless the AI developed something resembling taste and creativity, which today still needs to be injected by us. Not to mention stronger capabilities for evaluating visual work, motion, and physics.

I mean there's a lot of side quest slop in best Ubisoft games, agents generating better content in future isn't our of question for the development pipeline at which point clone me a reasonable assassin creed 15 with roughy xyz story might be good enough. Shared mainstream tv culture died with streaming fragmentation, people playing different versions of games which stop being canonical is not unforeseeable.

The AI in these examples is mashing up existing IPs: the models, textures, animations and sounds are all pulled from other games. They're not made from scratch.

If you consider that "producing a polished game" then I can produce a polished game with a DVD burner and a Steam account.

I think we could have a scenario where commercial games massively grow in size and complexity, making cloning them unreasonably expensive.

There is no doubt that a new wave of game UGC is coming, the barrier to technical execution keeps getting lower and lower. But when it comes to fun, soul, and polish, experienced and talented people still have a huge advantage, because such qualities are hard to verify.

> Personal computing is increasingly under threat by government and big corporations, we all need to be vigilant and fight back.

This is a very important observation. This is fundamentally about personal computing and the power to control the hardware and software we use for our work.

I recently reread "What The Dormouse Said", by John Markoff. Superb book that describes the tension between the developers of prototype personal computing on one side and distributed computing on the other. Interestingly, the need for distributed computing was motivated in part by early artificial intelligence research.

What we're seeing today IMO, is the reemergence of distributed computing. We saw it first with storage but we're now seeing it with compute itself. Given that excellent personal hardware has been available for several decades, it seems like madness to change course.

If the progression of AI continues, we might actually have LLMs re-create games from scratch just through watching them. They can already createe pretty accurate games from memory, imagine what happens if they get 10x as intelligent and capable.

It's exciting and kind of scary.

Games were getting cracked anyway, it doesn't make much difference financially. A lot of games have online content as well which you can't access through this.

I agree that they're going to try; however, can they succeed? I do wonder whether AI reverse-engineering could be done even in a case where the only streams you have are video, audio, and input.

Naturally, decompiling a binary would be simpler comparatively, but for models of sufficient capacity it seems the 'simpler/complex' axis has been shrinking.

The speed of light and the state of the internet doesn't permit many games to be effectively streamed; even great systems like Nvidia's, optimized to within an inch of their lives, feel laggy and weird for a large chunk of users.

It is more likely that we will see a cambrian explosion of games that obviates the need for big company games in the first place. Big gaming companies are big because they need lots of developers, producers, artists, QA, and management and executive suites to manage those. You can even today get code, assets and QA for a tiny fraction of the price you have to pay humans, and that will apparently only get 'worse' for humans over time. It's going to be a very intriguing next few decades.

Wr the streaming, totally agree. People already complain about the latency from wireless keyboards and the "low" 60fps at 4K. Streaming can't match local quality/latency, especially over wifi which is what almost everybody has.

I would argue this actually pushes up the desire for such games. We'll be inundated with games at decent/good games, and our standards will adjust. Maybe something an imperfect analogy would be watching a decent tv series at home but going to the movie theatre for a Dennis Villeneuve movie.

> This is the future I always wanted

Why would this be the future you want?

Future is referring to the title.

forgot the second comma after '"bought"'

> games and software from big companies being hosted server-side

At least as far as games are impacted, that wouldn't matter to me whatsoever.

I mean triple a productions have been complete dumbsterfires for over 10 years now. I don't recall a single high budget game since 2015 that was just good, and while gta6 will break records, it's still almost certainly gonna be a mid game overall.

And saas in software has already been the default for way over 10 years, so not sure what you man by that.

I think the large studios who have the willingness and resources to do that are also willing to contribute to the ongoing enshittification of our digital experiences. I think small indie studios will continue to flourish.

Really? How? Marketing became impossible because of you show your work before it launches, and gets popular enough, script kiddies might use AI to clone it (poorly) and put it on the store before you can even finish the game. Demos are becoming dangerous too because of decompilation. I don’t know, man!

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