I tried to read this, but this post was so obviously written by AI, it made it hard to proceed. There's a few human written paragraphs written in the first person that have a jarringly different flow form the AI written portions.

Core topic seems worth discussing but I gave up halfway thru after reading too many LLM-isms.

If making game assets got really cheap (because of AI or whatever), the budget would just be spent on marketing. In theory you can spend infinite amount of money on marketing.

Plenty of games have failed for lack of content.

Sorry didn't read it, because the title screams "survivorship bias".

The "a Game" in the title is unfortunate. The author seems to have only heard of AAA games (or in the case of Skull and Bones, AAAAA), but that entire industry is becoming less relevant by the day. Many of the top earners come out of the indie to AA cohort now.

At that level, using AI is extremely tempting because we often entirely lack the capacity for whatever it can slop out. Personally, I can resist the temptation because I do employ a human artist, and even if he's not great at some particular output we can still produce something good enough.

But many, many more games never came into being at all because there's just a programmer, or just a designer, or maybe a team of 5 with just one artist. Not existing is certainly a failure, no?

So, now we're seeing a flood of terrible slop from solos churning out their first game. All the noise sucks for everyone who has some expertise and an existing team. I think it's going to suck a lot worse for all of us -- indie, AA and AAA -- in a year or two when some of those slop producers actually become good.

This part seems really true: "If execution becomes genuinely cheap, then being wrong becomes cheap, and a studio can afford to explore more directions before committing to one. Run six prototypes instead of two. Kill five of them in week four rather than month fourteen."

This really is huge. My own plan for the future is to make multiple vibe coded/art prototypes and then redo the chosen one from the ground up.

I can think of quite a few games with extended development cycles where they scrapped what I originally wanted and eventually released a game that, while still decent, "underperformed" because it was essentially tasked with turning the profit of two or three games instead of one.

Gosh, just finish the first game and ship it. Then do the same rework you were going to do and ship that too. I will happily enjoy both cakes.

It's crazy to think that the leadership of multimillion-dollar publishers and developers operate with the same conviction and decisiveness as an unfocused art student.

Holy what kind of writing is this, obviously there's a lot of stuff written by a human but then roughly interleaved is clear LLM garbage.

You can't "fail" if you don't ship. /s