I agree, in the current ecosystem games are abundant but it's still not easy to find the diamonds in the rough.

Trust signals are going to be quite influential going forward, and that will get exploited too. I think we're going to see the return of high effort, high trust games journalism. Not necessarily as the commercial victor, but as a community we will rally around people and outlets we trust.

This has always been the case. Just because someone made an album or a game or a movie it doesn't guarantee that it's worth your time even if there was effort. Low effort music can be good too, namely by musicians that are really talented. A really talented game designer may be able to make a very engaging game with little effort beyond the initial design.

If you want to test this, find yourself a record store and pick up a few LPs less than a few bucks from bands you've never heard. You might get something really great or it might be terrible.

It will show in your game, and I think that will also continue to translate into a better chance at success even in such a swamped market. Maybe even because it's such a swamped market, players will value the games made with passion.

If you took the time to throughly learn an engine, would you spend so much time wrestling with it afterwards?

I agree, taste, story and art direction will continue to cohere into successful games. Studios making high volume shallow games never had these, and they probably don't want them just because AI showed up. They are filling a specific demand in the industry.

I heard him say that too. And he's probably right. But it's more like every knitter now has access to an automated loom.

Oddly I feel AI is getting me off the endless learn new tech churn. I was looking at a few odd ball programming books on my shelf, graphics programming from scratch and retro game dev (c64 edition and nes editions) and thinking I might now have time to work through these instead of learning technology x.

https://www.retrogamedev.com/

https://gabrielgambetta.com/computer-graphics-from-scratch/

And I'll be manually coding as I want to learn!

> Programming will continue to exist as a hobby, not as a profession.

How is that a good thing? Sounds insanely dystopian to me. Especially considering all the other jobs that will be affected too.

knitting machines don’t generate the design from a prompt, and neither does industrial knitwear production facilities. In fact, knitting machines have quite a lot of manual input that goes into the final product, including careful programming.

The problem is your passion is for the LLM workflow and not the games, and the end result is going to be a powerful way to generate mediocre games.

This comment screams someone who wasn't around during the rise and fall of Atari 2600 games or Commodore 64 games. More was certainly not better back then either.

It becomes a problem for everone when spaces meant for meaningful work become overrun with an awful stream of endless mediocre slop that someone quickly generated without giving it a second thought. The problem here is not that it is fast and easy. The cardinal sin is that it is fast, easy AND bad.

Because you use steam and the play store and ... to get games, and there will be so overwhelmingly much slop you can't find anything.

I've switched to emulators, a bluetooth controller and zero android games (and zero ios games on my work phone). But yeah it was/is horribly enshittified already. And what people predicted did happen.

The fact that the app store allows updates means existing games get systematically worse. Even the games I used to enjoy, and bought 5 years ago, like collossatron now have ads after every play.