So I was prototyping with claude code and Godot engine, and I thought it was weird that this specific category of AI isn't as big as video gen creative suites. Like theres big names like runway and higgsfield but when it comes to video games there's no major company trying to make a one stop shop using AI to make video games. I'm sure it isn't because of a lack of trying, I'm sure developers thought about it as one of the first things to automate.

If I had to guess there's a couple reasons:

1)Quality-making a good game requires extreme attention to detail all of which is non coding related. The animations on idle characters, how the background characters look, the sound design and clever story. 90% of gaming is art

2) backlash from players. I think this is an important factor but not the dominant factor. For reasons like games like Slotbound have had amazing positive responses despite being ai generated as long as they are high quality. On the flip side reputation does matter for major studios so adoption can be slow.

3)No money in the industry. Most game studios aren't raining in money, therefore making video games would be an expensive and time consuming hobby that got slightly easier, but is still difficult. A normal prosumer simply doesn't have the time nor dedication to make an project that is going to take months of their time

These are my guesses, but I would love to hear responses from people in the industry or people who have attempted this idea or VCs who have their own thesis on the market.

p.s. this isn't a lazy attempt startup research, I'm seriously just curious

You can prompt any cinematic shot in video.

Theoretically you should be able to prompt any cinematic shot in a game too, right?

The difference is the video is a single data structure mapped purely over to pixels, where the game is often a file system, a rendering engine, a codex of lore and art, and then layers of application logic to produce each data structure that maps to the pixels. So you have a mountain of production behind each render.

Yet, crazily - they will get it!

And probably soon. So get your hopes up, it’s not here yet but exactly what you’re asking for is around the corner, probably from an outlet like Unity.

I tried to do 2d game gen before. My current thought is game is similar to long movie, people invest their 2hr time because of quality. To get that level of quality of that large amount of content coherently is beyond current AIs capability.

Oh I want a new hypothesis:

4) Video games can't compete with tiktok/insta. The attention economy is limited, without more players or more spending in the market, its not as sustainable to create more video games

My initial thoughts are Cursor is already generalised to build all software, and Games are just a subset of all software. So it’s probably good enough.

Also point 3 “No money in gaming” is probably the main factor. There is orders of magnitude less money in gaming, than in SAAS. Think of how much money businesses pay for even basic software.

I’d also say performance is so critical and specific to every game, that getting AI to manage & architect it is fairly difficult (slop kills performance). This is nowhere near as big of a concern for most SAAS (slop friendly)

Even with all these reasons, I still think it’s worth trying to build!

video games is just code so you use code ai agent? huh?