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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
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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.