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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 think it is in any way hyperbole to say that these days, anyone with the level of drive needed to learn to write songs and play guitar, could put in the same amount of effort (or less!) and make a game of note. So here we are, games enters it's "music" era.

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?

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.

This change certainly supports a future filled with rough, personal, non-commercial, games of all sizes, built for friends and communities. All of which adds up to a deeper understanding of games and play. If a more mainstreamed cultural literacy of that stuff matters, that's a positive.

So i guess there it is. Please don't shoot the messenger, this is just what i'm seeing out there, and I think it's important to grapple with. i'd love to hear any other lessons y'all think we should be pulling from other arts as we weather this new turbulent era in games.

I think one important area where games deviate from music is addiction. I don't think getting addicted to music is common, but getting addicted to games is, and that may be the most widespread negative consequence of this new reality. The ability to build a hyper-tailored addiction.

i dont think this is true at all! i listen to the same song over and over and it gets stuck in my head and i think about it all the time. i think everyone gets addicted to music but the mechanics of what that addiction looks like and the impact of it are really different

Yeah, I thought about that distinction right after I posted it. The difference has something to do with required attention and likelihood of isolation.

In the free-to-play space, there has always been a lot of personalized addiction design, but the cost has restricted it to only the highest-paying whales. It makes sense that as the costs go down, they may start to target people who are paying less than less.

I think there are (and are going to be) a lot of negative externalities to these tools, and a lot of them necessitate real meaningful regulation. But I guess what I'm trying to figure out in this thread is what lessons artists (game devs) can take to prepare for building sustainable careers.