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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Is this your first hand experience?
If you consider that "producing a polished game" then I can produce a polished game with a DVD burner and a Steam account.
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 )
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.
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.
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.
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.