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Ok im gonna say something here that is going to draw a lot of different feelings from everyone, and I want to be clear i'm not "in support of this" or "against it". i'm just saying it as an observation that seems true to me: I think with the latest frontier LLMs, the “music” era of games is upon us

For years we have been talking about games going in the direction of music (in the sense that there’s more great music out there than anyone can possibly engage with). This trend has driven down prices, made it harder for developers to find audiences, and turned distribution platforms into soup.

But one thing that has always been true about games that was not true about music (or a lot of the other arts) is that games are just incredibly hard to make. As my friend Frank Lantz famously said, "games are operas made out of bridges". (sorry to drag you into this thread @flantz.bsky.social).

But that is clearly over. It is now fairly trivial to make any game of any complexity within the bounds of complexity that matter for most game ideas. You can build the bridge part in one prompt (and people are, all across the internet, to widely varying degrees of success and quality)

Obviously it still requires some real work to fit the bridge into the opera, but I think we’re kidding ourselves if we ever thought that was the bit that kept everyone who wanted to make a game from actually doing it.

I don't really know what that means. It's probably not great for the businesses of most of the people I know (or me?), but I do think we've been creeping up on this for a while so it shouldn't be much of a shock.

When I think about lessons to learn from the music industry, i see that what matters most for stability and success are: attention and community-building. I don't really know more than that. Maybe someone else has some thoughts?

there's never been a better time to be yourself and not chase trends. that's the silver lining. and it's what authentically builds community and generates authentic attention. not to trivialize it - it's hard, it can be a slow burn, and it's always a risk. but we all knew that going in.

I know this has been a bummer, but if I am looking for a positive, even though this is bad for individual developers, I do suspect that this is good for games as a media. When I look at the arts, the parts of it that are the most in-culture are the ones that anyone can easily pick up as a hobby.