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Comment by autoexec | Hacker News Reader

> 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

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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.

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