"Create custom games in minutes > Press Start" just opens a new tab with... the same page?
1. Games are highly complex systems, so for example adding a fun mechanic from one game to another game can actually make that game less fun, and AI has no way to know, you just have to playtest it.
2. Games are evergreen (people still play and love the original Zelda/Mario/Tetris) and social (you want to share your love of game XYZ with others), so there's literally no reason for anyone to play a purely derivative game, when you can just play the original.
Eventually AI will be able to make perfect assets and all the other stuff AROUND making a fun game, but the game design will always be a human thing. At best, AI will come up with a bunch of game design experiments that a human will need to playtest and provide feedback on.
And I genuinely hope there will be some categories of games/music/books/art where human input is still needed and preferred. Currently I'm already a handful of bulletpoints down on the list of stuff I thought AI would never be able to do, and it's been kind of destabilizing
if we can't even write it down, how is an llm going to be able to ace it?
I’m having a lot of fun creating an “improved” clone of a very old school game I loved.
It takes lots of back and forth but there is definitely (for me at least) to play this derivative game since it adds a lot of levels and stuff that weren’t available in the original.
Without AI I wouldn’t be able to do anything; but with it it can make some changes, I test them and we iterate on it.
So for me AI solves “making a fun game”. It doesn’t “one shot GTA7” if that is your goal but that also sounds boring
*: I don't consider a project you built with an LLM to be "vibecoded" if all the important ideas are from your head, you know what the code is supposed to be doing (domain model is in your head) and you guided the project every step of the way. Otherwise we're all vibecode. So yea, I don't doubt you can create amazing games with AI, but "with" as in "together", not as in "Claude, build me a Minecraft clone, make it fun, no mistakes."
Play a little game, then when you're done it generates a new one based on what you've enjoyed. Repeat ad infinitum.
The last few founders I knew working on variations of the idea finally pivoted out over the summer. It’s definitely one of those ideas that sounds great until you try building it and you realize there’s nothing there. Definitely will get funded again before the year is up!
Haven't followed them too closely, but wouldn't be surprised if they'd added LLM tools to the platform.
Well to your point, youtube already has these little mini games that exist in portrait mode. Seems like something is liminally out there pointing in that direction.
You also have to actively use your game for most games, unlike TikTok videos which you can just watch with your brain turned off.
Let developers use your models and tools and build stuff with it. Why own everything.
Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform.
I often want to play simple games like Pacman, space invader, breakout, tetris or some other random iteration. Sometimes there are non-spammy simple versions of this game but often there aren't. This seems like a pretty cool fix. And if they disappear in the future, who cares?
YouTube started exactly how you described it, some silly thing not meant to be serious and today powers multiple 100M+ businesses using it for content to reach mass audiences.
I read at some point that projects at Google didn't get a greenlight unless there was a reasonable expectation they could be used directly or indirectly by a billion people.
You ain't making sense. Companies need $, and what's wrong with what they do with what they own and can do in this particular case?
My logic is not “don’t make money” but more so pick a lane
They can empower the community and let a PaaS emerge that’s locked in on their APIs for example
For example, did Shopify get into building Marketplaces for E-commerce? No
It isn’t like they would not be able to make money from the gaming industry by being just the layer zero, my beef here is that they’re going one layer up
Whether to empower the company or not via open-source/open-weight etc is based on a company culture, value, and future direction/projection.
And it all depends on the scale.
Google didn't need no HR, no companies normally start with everything in place. AS the companies scale up, they add security team, HR, legal team, etc.
That means more $. Google is 20x the size of Shopify in terms of market cap. Google was loved for their search engines when it was at shopify level initially. REmember decades ago when everyone loved Google search?
This does not mean, Google will keep the same strategies for their direction neither will Shopify. I already hear a lot of complaints from my friends hosting on Shopify on the enshitification.
Anyways, I diregress a bit.
So my point is, at least try to reason about why `hmokiguess` arrived at "Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform". What is too much here in homikiguess's opinion (that is verys subjective, need verification),
You're contradicting yourself, the reasoning for them to have too much was said by you in your own comment, they are 20x the size of Shopify.
Yes. Google does not actually care about search anymore, and the threat that the technology could disappear altogether is real.
Well ok then
This dismissive contemptuous attitude is typical of all big tech, all your value is just reduced to data generator to be mined, without any other regard.
I was able to spin up a couple of games really quickly--a 2D cosy space exploration game, and a snarky sci fi trivia game. I'd say the the writting for the humorous trivia questions and the cosy interactions was reasonable--this isn't a tool that can only do reskins of old school arcade games. In addition to music and graphics it can do text to speech.
It's still an experiment, simultaneous impressive, and frustrating, with rather unexpectedly low prompt compliance. But, beta.
It really doesn't seem to like shifting from multiplayer to solo play. It seems like you ought to have a strong opinion upfront. (again, early days)
It's natural to think of this quick and easy tool for playing game, but I suspect part of the eventual value will be learning tools and "self gamification" I could imagine doing a variant of my trivial game for memorization or language learning.
Edit: It’s for training. RL on playtimes, ideas, etc. Just rushing towards a world where we have no value to each other.
Anyway...
If you are interested, there is also an open-source way to do exactly this and it works with your existing subscriptions and local models too - your data is kept private on your devices.
You can make the game, stream it directly from your AI hub or play it locally on your devices. You can cast it on the TV while converting your phone into a controller (with haptics support) or you can connect physical game controllers for local co-op.
https://github.com/pdparchitect/noodle
The README does not talk about this feature but you can find videos in my twitter account.
Is it really just that they give kids nice shiny imaginary points for playing longer?
Do you really think Google cares about gameplay in the same likes of, say, Nintendo?
I'm a bit worried that Google Slides-games will fall out of fashion now ;(
I also didn't bother with in-app game dev for now since I figured your local agents will be better. So for now you just develop locally with a CLI and your favorite subsidized model.
I put together a site a few months back to play around with 3d assets from Sketchfab and animated characters from Mixamo as an experiment: https://gobananas.co/
I upgraded, same message. I downgraded, they kept the money because now I have a month of a plan that I didn't need to check something I still don't have access to.
The Sandbox one is a lot more mature and better thought out:
Looks like they forgot to create a "Not available in your region" page, which makes me wonder whether they made this over a weekend.
> To keep the experience safe and welcoming, every published game undergoes safety screenings aligned with our Community Guidelines, along with user reporting.
Kind of cringe. I mean I suppose its one thing to stop people making CSAM but safety screens make it sound like you can't have any sort of mature game? Gore, violence, drugs, suggestive themes or nudity etc all disallowed or something? Everyone has to make a T for Teen game?
This looks like it might be very useful indeed!
Then, of course, there's the fact that all of the start and access buttons just open the same page in a new tab.
Now, I don't think Google Playground is the best demonstration of this point, given it's intended to be quick turnaround. None of what's shown in the demo video is particularly thoughtful. But it still is a good indication of things to come.
The more games you play, the more you understand and appreciate what makes a game good, and how hard it is to come up with a game that is original, enjoyable to look at and fun to play. Lots and lots of games created by professionals don't even excel at any of them. Meanwhile indie game developers are never limited by their programming skills.
I'm not looking forward to all the slop that comes out of this.
> CONTENT ACCESS LIMITED To access Playground, you’ll just need to verify your age. Confirming you’re old enough helps us keep the platform safe and secure for everyone.
Im not sure how to justify the feeling. Maybe it's that I expect more than entertainment out of creative works (which I consider games to be), but this... Corporate slop firehose seems fundamentally empty in a way that raises goosebumps, like a black mirror episode.
I could see microgames creep into social media feeds maybe. That's what this allows for. Games that might be novel for a few minutes. Some folks will put in the effort to make a modern multi-hour game here but very few, like their player-base.
Also, prototyping! Maybe it's good for that (just don't share it publicly).
If you are disgusted by this, the resources spent on AI adult content would make you mad. But why judge what other people choose to do.
There's an episode of President Curtis where USA is running out of energy and the final solution is to (spoilers) tax AI porn.
And I don't have a problem with AI _assistance_ in creative work either.
What horrifies me is the picture of someone absentmindedly placing a half formed thought into a textbox and people consuming it, no deep thinking at all involved in neither creators nor users. It's the mental equivalent of the wall-e humans.
You may analyze why do people seek such a thing and feel compassion. and what should humans do instead? Why? Is there an objective answer?
I had an idea for a small game for ages, never the time for it and now i'm vibing on it randomly because its fun.
How much finetuning/prompting would you allow me until you think its reasonable? One prompt? Or a certain amount of resources i put in?
Don't get me wrong, i'm curious on when you think a certain quality is reached. I ask this myself too. Like i have a lot of experience in the area of game development, game mechanics, programming and usability. Now the game itself i adjust constantly because i have a lot of strong opinions.
But will this ever be something i might release for free and people get a benefit out of this?
I do think I have a general principle, which is: once we have a new capability, we can use it to reach further or to reach the same places with less effort. Reaching further seems objectively good; reaching the same places with less effort is more of a gray area.
I realise there's an argument for democratization, for reducing friction to put creativity in the hands of more people. Say you're a great artist who could make beautiful games but don't know how to code, you might use AI as a crutch to enable you to express your art. Same if you're a coder or have great ideas about game design but don't have graphics available to make the whole product happen.
If AI is covering all fronts though, we're throwing the baby with the bathwater here. There's no talent allowed to shine, no message that can now be better delivered, no idea better expressed. it's all wrapping.
and notice how the message from google is not 'reach more people', or 'let your talent shine'. The message is 'type a whim from your couch and you'll get it instantly'. Quick empty dopamine, no quality involved.
Every person decides what to do with their saved time. Some people may want to use a ready made game, others may prefer to write a story or alter the script of the game. The ones who play a ready made game may express their creativity in areas not related to gaming.
You are judging people for not doing what you think they should do. As if your role was to be their social engineer.
We are in the ara of commoditization and we just have to learn handling it.
And its not just AI 'slop' making it so, its also A LOT of peole having acess to so much more.
The indiegame scene got crazy. As soon there is one new game concept, hundreds of small adjustments to this idea are popping up.
The sorting game thing? Has now a lot of clones/variations.
AI adds more of this for sure, but its not the underlying issue.
>Playground launches today for users in the U.S. (18+)
Please hire some QA instead of embarrassing yourself this bad
Happens when I click Press Start. Did Google kill this before they shipped it?
[1]https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/ai/playgrou...
oh playground... you were so young :'(
Big tech already controls the distribution of traditional platforms so they are building AI platforms to make sure they keep control of the distribution of new forms of content, including that for AI games now that they're easier to make than a YouTube video.
But inevitably these products (and the competitors they will inevitably spawn) put us closer to a future of arguably dystopian, AI-driven hyper-entertainment world, even if no one inside the companies meant to do that. I can only hope in that future many people still appreciate human-made games, and even on these AI platforms genuine human ideas (assisted by AI) can still bubble to the top.
As for game quality, these look close to Opus 5.5 one-shots to me, maybe even a little worse.
I played a few editors picks. "Westbound Frontier" is a kind of RTS. On mobile all the windows open on top of eachother and the text is very hard to read. The amount of resource required to build the first building after town hall was way too high by and you had to wait ages to do anything. There was an infuriating AI sound track singing "ooo-wee-ooo". 0/10 from me, broken and not fun.
Next I tried volcano run, a 3D infinite runner. Not my kind of game but a nice aesthetic and it actually worked. After about 30 seconds though the graphics changed to a really low contrast mode (night?) and I couldn't see the rocks I was supposed to dodge. 2/10.
Honestly genuinely a bit shocked Google launched this. It's obviously not ready, the "Editor" who picked these games should have known that. I am not sure if this is some kind of set of skills for Gemini or a fine tune or just a prompt but it certainly feels very low effort and embarrassing.
Every "AI + Google" product is pretty much like this, impressive to people who basically have no other skills than "talking about stuff others click on video links for" but falls apart to any sort of quality checks, and most of time isn't even internally consistent and coherent.
Let the slopocalypse commence.
I was out after the slurping sound in the first 1-second.
"Friend-slop" has already proven wildly successful, and significantly lower effort than AAA games.
Combine this with the fact your game will be stolen and put into Roblox, it really feels like we're approaching a era of just rapidly produced games that live for weeks rather than years.
Obviously the end-game is for the companies to automate all the text, games, and software so you just go to their feed and pay them a monthly instead of individuals making making this content.
> significantly lower effort than AAA games
I think you meant lower budget.
You be tripping if you actually think AAA soulless that has filled with agenda is better
- Click “Start Now”
- Prompted to log in
- AutoFill with credentials (good and ok up until this point)
- Get prompted for password
- Get prompted on whether or not I want to store this set of credentials
- Get prompted to open the YouTube app to verify my credentials
- Open the YouTube app
- Get hit with an advertisement
- Click the X, Click “Verify”
- Go back to the browser
- Get prompted to add a third factor of authentication
- Click no
- Get prompted if I want to add face scanning to my account
- Click no
- Get redirected back to the site (FINALLY!!!)
- Still not logged in
- Get prompted to log in again
- Leave site in anger/disbelief
Seriously, what is going on.
the slop games fall to the bottom to services like these while good games would rise to the top and go to well established platforms.
What I got was a Vampire Survivors style "run around in this square area while enemies spawn and swarm you" game. Which is funny, because I have seen several game engine tutorials that build exactly this type of game[0][1][2].
I asked for a variety of possible "builds", including melee and spell castors, and said that not all builds should be viable--some combinations of stats should just not work. I also asked for a variety of spell schools with different pros and cons.
What I got was a game with no way to perform melee attacks, but there were melee oriented stats I could choose to upgrade. All the spell schools felt the same, they would shoot a basic projectile, or have some sort of wide area burst attack. The ice school froze enemies in place--how original. The controls were a bit awkward and for the first 5 minutes I didn't even know what spell school I was using. Sometimes the colors would change, which I think meant I had switched to a different type of magic, but I don't know. It all felt the same.
I asked it to fix several things, and then it worked for several minutes and changed literally nothing about the game--well, actually, it did change the game from being 5 levels long to 4 levels long, even though I didn't ask for that to change.
So I prompted it a second time to fix several things, which it mostly did, but it also changed the speed of the enemies and made them way to fast. I didn't ask it to change the speed of enemies, it just decided to change that on its own and introduced new problems in the process.
I get the impression it has no idea what the essence of a Zelda game is. This is "The Legend of Zelda" here, one of the most popular game series of all time and a classic. There have been several 2D entries in the series and they all have the same essence, but the AI was not able to capture any of that. It seemed to instead latch onto a very minimal Vampire Survivors essence and do a poor job at even that.
[0]: https://www.gdquest.com/library/first_2d_game_godot4_vampire... [1]: https://www.udemy.com/course/create-a-complete-2d-arena-surv... [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgvLbahJOTA
Google Playground is a destination, currently, with no monetization. So any gamedev effort and ideas we contribute into it are collected by Google.
EDIT:
It is offered as "for funsies with your pals in America, bros!" and it looks a lot like it's almost a feature in the Google Play portfolio which makes me think this wasn't thought through fully.
So Google doing something strategic here which is not clear to me.
- are they training their AI?
- are they collecting user feedback for an eventual commercial launch?
- are they building hype?
Why did Google spend the money on this?
If it's a great idea and the execution is fine, why not?
Eg Angry Birds. There are real world examples I have.
Why not?
edit: And about "your game" rhetoric, I'm talking about us more than me, unless you think that I specifically, NCR100, cannot create a game that is worthy? Why?
Where's the hope? Is there a presumption that AI generation is bad, full-stop?
Do you specifically assert that everything done with AI has no compelling quality to it?
I was taught that the tools do not make the artist.
When I sit down to build a product, a website, an app, middleware, servers, embedded apps, I expect to be paid if it is for a company. I will use other people's designs and patterns in my effort. I will work with everybody at the organization, even though who have, 'ideas'. It's my literal job as a Creator to make that slop compelling.
Why is the involvement of AI during creation a guarantor of non-compelling?
We are 4 years in and so far literally nothing with compelling quality appeared yet, no game, no app, no book, no music. Every vibecoded shit is slop with rare exceptions of barely acceptable quality.
Quality is more about people and processes, AI won't replace humans for product development but currently countless people and corporations are dreaming about that. What makes this more interesting is that the person that prompts the AI loves the result because it matches their perception of what is good but as most people don't have good taste and understanding of product development, it sucks.
Ironically, the people that could create good things with AI, designers, creatives, are the people that dislike it the most.
- This is google experiment, meaning you're sadly likely invest more time in the product / community than google will from this point forward. (That's just my "fool me once" voice talking.)
- There really won't be much advantage to building in their playground vs building directly with any of the frontier models.
- Interest and distribution will be challenging because the bias is towards building your own game vs playing the games others make.
```
Gaming will undergo the movie industry cycle of 2010-2025.
First, Only AAA (GTA-6) or micro-indie games will make money. mid-budget games will get eaten out. <---2010 Hollywood
Until, people get AAA exhaustion and game creation keeps getting cheaper and cheaper.
Then a single auteur makes a mid-budget game with a recognizable aesthetic, that makes AAA money.
A studio (A-24) realizes that auteur curation is profitable, and builds recognize-able identity.
The studio (A-24) starts churning out reliable hitters, that people buy because of the studio more than the game itself.
AAA stagnates, hires the most recent auteur to make their next AAA game with full control.
If it goes bust, then AAA tries again.
If it goes boom, they pick the next auteur for their next AAA game. <---Hollywood is here in 2026
```
You're leaving out the social and mobile games that made astronomical amount of money in early 2010s like Farmville and Candy Crush.
In fact, the 2010–2026 era proved that non-AAA games, smaller mobile studios, and independent developers could achieve higher profit margins than traditional big studio projects.
Moreover, indie game market has never been as strong. AI will accelerate and democratize this trend further, as upfront development costs is reduced.
I think it is a “yes, and…”
Though what do I know.
Maybe we need yet another word for this kind of development. It's going to be way more common.
Side note: I feel like I could only get this far with Opus 5.5 level models and tooling (cloud agents). No chance I could get to this point without rolling my sleeves up and helping with the technical side with earlier models, and no chance I could get this far pretty much only using my phone.
I'm basically paying Anthropic for both the experience of building a game with a team of decent engineers (it's been exhilarating), and the game itself. It's been incredibly fun. I would never pay this money for something to one shot it for me. This current level has been such a sweet spot of pretty much every ask being nailed and it still feeling like it's my own creation. Something one shotting it for me would kill most of the fun and feeling of "I did this" ownership.
I am fine with vibe coding by now. It captures the spirit quite well, if the vibe of the direction is good, you have a rush with one shotting amazing features - if the vibe is gone, it became a slob hell with the model going in circles. But this is not random for me, but depends how much I follow the architectural decisions (and not "great, go on"). So I would rather introduce "slob coding", for mindless prompting without control of what is happening.
- easily distributable, i.e there is a very clear way to play it fairly quickly
- it doesn't feel like slop even though it's vibe coded
- it's super fun
I predict that will be games, very very few, but there will be some that hit that inflection point likely through Twitch streamers picking it up. But I also predict that they will be a flash in the pan. Even fewer of the already few, the ones that will be here to stay will likely need to turn into an actual mini studio and take the development/customers seriously.
Most of them will be fun projects that die the day they get released simply because building a decent looking vibe coded game is commoditized. Maybe some fun twitter engagements, but nothing more.
This is by far the hard part. The complete rulesets for most games[0] would be smaller than a prompt necessary to turn that board game into a computer game[1].
Anyone can draw some counters and a board, make up some rules. Making those rules interesting, let alone fun, is so much of a problem that many published board games get house-ruled in various ways[2].
The AI-made games I've noticed (clichés, the AI can't help it) have been at the median level of the old Flash sites, but with less variation: fewer total disasters, but also nothing amazing.
While this isn't great, it's also not nothing: I wouldn't be surprised if one of the current ones goes through an iterative refinement like Bloons TD did.
[0] not all: I was obsessed with Star Fleet Battles as a young teenager, these days I describe it as "A computer game written about ten years before home computers had enough memory to store all the rules", which is why each turn takes 2 hours, one of which is counting out boxes and using that to fill out a spreadsheet as you work out how much power your ship has and how fast it's going and which equipment you can use, and distributing weapon damage on some target is worked out with the help of an A4-sized printout that functionally implements a dice-driven state machine.
[1] Unless the prompt was "here is a photo of the rules, turn it into a video game", but I count that as cheating, "a picture is worth a thousand words" etc.
[2] My main house rule for Star Fleet Battles, these days[3], is to simplify the 4+ kinds of power source into one. I can appreciate the world building of "an impulse engine can't divert antimatter to a photon torpedo", but it's not actually fun to keep track of this.
[3] I've played it like 4 times in the last 15 years.
Exactly! The fantasy is the game with an audience of N=1, or N < Dunbar.
The platforms are conflating this obvious use case with "make a viral game that not even I care about". Which has an audience of N=0.
Maybe that's not the point? Mario-maker is an incredible game. You can play shared levels, but the fun is all in building. Sometimes building is the game.
Perhaps it's their culture of letting engineers experiment with stuff during work hours that also led to Gmail, Maps, etc. and the mobile game ad market is certainly big.
I guess this mainly competes with mobile games, most of which are mediocre at best and aim to get a few "whale users" to spend inordinate amounts of money on coins, gems, or whatever in-game currency.
Maybe the theory is that those games are so easy to vibe-code that completely democratizing it will lead to enough of a flood of games?
And a few will stand out and become Candy Crush-sized successes?
Or perhaps it's the idea that if you can have millions of extremely niche games, each may have a few hardcore fans because it caters to their specific interests (the same way Kindle Direct Publishing enabled hyper-niche literary genres)
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