So the votes are in from last week’s survey.
The overwhelming response, roughly a third of the votes across all the socials, was to talk about Entertainment as the beachhead for AI. I wish I could award prizes. I guess the real prizes here are the friends who voted along the way. Thank you for that. By the way, I am now unblocked on what to post about for another four weeks.
It goes without saying that this is a contentious subject. I have been name-called, argued against, gaslamped, and flat-out blocked on LinkedIn for my opinions on AI in games. I speak for an entire cohort of people in games and entertainment when I do this, especially in a world where tools like this exist. I wish I were less busy this summer, because I would trade some subset of internal organs to get into the beta for this product and start making stuff.
The number of creators who are not excited about these tools absolutely blows my mind.
So, for all of those folks out there, and I am sure some of them will accidentally read this, I have terrible news for you.
AI’s biggest and fastest successes will come from the entertainment space. It will be the infected surface by which AI establishes itself in the hearts and minds of your children, your spouses, your families, your friends, and your coworkers.
There is an inevitability here that parallels the first time that Gutenberg guy put the first piece of paper in the prototype of what eventually became the printing press.
These tools are here to stay, they are going to get better, and they already do absolutely amazing things.
The arrival of the first paid AI series has already happened. Every week, I am seeing more and more people making short serials with their families and friends featured as starring casts. These are no longer the Will-Smith-Eats-Spaghetti six-fingered slop that you all sneered at; these are great-looking productions that have legs and adhere to some of the best story writing principles that Joseph Campbell put into his iconic work.
It goes without saying that software sells hardware. I bought a CD-ROM to play Myst. People bought an Xbox to play Halo, and people bought a Sony PlayStation to play God of War and other platform hits.
Everyone is ridiculing the massive push towards cross-platform releases. There is still exactly one PlayStation 5 exclusive today. The fate of next-generation consoles is greatly at risk by the “let’s just play everything everywhere” sickness that has eliminated the need to buy the latest and greatest console. I still do not understand this at all. You made a several-hundred-dollar dongle to sell software, and then you decided to sell the software without needing the dongle? It hurts my brain. I get that you want to sell the software everywhere, but did anyone even open a spreadsheet and calculate the cannibalization of dongle revenue by doing this? That might be an insane way to look at a console, but “must have” titles had a reason to exist. Now everyone will just wait for it to show up on Steam so they can play it on their PC, on their couch, and in their bed.
What does this have to do with AI games, you ask? Everything.
Right now, the industry has decided to eat itself in this massive unintelligent spasm of unemployment manifested through economic self-loathing.
The different tribes of game development, enumerated previously as mobile-first, AAA, Roblox, AI-first, and “wishlist-me-on-Steam” have all decided to just be friends and have stopped seeing each other.
There is now a mad race for each of them to succeed in a way that makes their exes jealous.
Mobile-first is going to be the first to fall in this race. It is a juggernaut of revenue that competes with your line number at the DMV. Free-to-play mobile games with ads and microtransactions have lost their mindshare and have turned into the value aisle of magnetic mini-board games you can buy at the gas station. What you do on your phone now is just tap to fill time because you are bored, or you need to fill five minutes with “not thinking.”
AAA is just done. Everyone is settling for fewer and fewer franchises and fewer and fewer releases of those franchises. We are now at the spot where there are five top ten companies. There are not even ten of them left anymore.
Roblox is going to be doing its own thing and will continue to evolve. Based on the content and the platform, I am going to tell you in the future why it will be eaten by AI-first.
Whaddabout “wishlist-me-on-Steam?”
Oh my heart… I cannot pour the words on the page of the hundreds of thousands of people who have flocked to Gabe’s ego-maker… This massive pit of content that consumes the greatest and best of everyone’s games and turns their shining jewels of beauty into slowly digested 0s and 1s like some kind of Seattle-based Sarlacc pit. Your games, except for ten every month, will go there to die, for the low low price of 100 dollars of your rent budget. I am so sorry. I weep for all of you. Actually, not all of you. I weep for all but 10 of you. 10 people will break out, make some money, post how easy it was, and start a fund out of guilt for their success to fund two, maybe three more games. I don’t weep for those people. They have stopped returning my phone calls, and presumably yours, too.
So what the hell does any of this have to do with AI?
It is like the day the carriers decided that they hated running a games business. They burned it to the ground and left a fertile crop of soil behind for Apple and Google to come and plant a fresh crop of clickable links in a store for downloads and revenue.
These people are running a losing race because they are doubling down instead of trying to approach the platform orthogonally. If you need an example of that, and you are not paying attention to little things like “The most important tech headline of the decade”, then let me explain it to you slowly using very small words.
Apple just rebooted itself. Tim Cook stepped down, and the people who make physical things just got the keys to the car.
I heard a great 20-minute explanation about why Apple is going all-in on the hardware layer for AI, and it is precisely why AI games will win.
I am not going to put a two-page story about why Minecraft’s first-night experience is so fucking good and why brains like new games and new genres. Suffice it to say that there are chemical reasons that new patterns and new play styles are intellectually nourishing.
You will have a pile of those coming out of the indie Steam space, but the only way you will find them is if those people decided to kiss the ring of Marketing, and fork over some time and cash and thought process to making their product visible to more than you and your mom. Also, most indie game developers hate marketing because marketing is why there was a big new John Madden game this year, and they had to skip Thanksgiving to make sure it got done for Christmas, and guess what? The developers got let go anyway.
There are more tragic reasons why indie game developers hate marketing, and that is another two-page rant I am not going to get into.
On the basis of everyone abdicating their ability to win at scale, there is going to be a huge leadership vacuum for new things. It is going to be split down the middle like King Solomon’s baby between AI and Roblox. Roblox is desperately trying to grow up and make itself appealing to “I grew up with Roblox” people who are now thinking about things like “families” and “jobs.”
Aaaand they have activated their own trap card… They are leaning in on 3D fidelity and graphics because why wouldn’t they? And that arms race has already been run and is going to be part of their undoing.
The low-fidelity end of their product is what gave it the wide swath of kiddie eyeballs and is sufficiently good for games. They are going to incentivize all of their “developers” to upgrade and move to a more complicated high-fidelity platform. And all of those people, with a David Baszucki “all of your revenue” gun pointed squarely at their forehead, will jump as high and as often as he likes, even if it means they will have to work harder for less money because it is… checks notes… strategic.
So what does that leave?
Those smug little AI-first a-holes filling in the “Plant A Garden” old platform gaps with their slop, along with every other “release a new game every ten days” platform they have spread their content to. It will fill every nook and every cranny that it can. No one will compete because 10 days of agentic output from six Mac minis sitting on Mom’s old piano in the basement is a force of nature that a team of six developers anywhere in the world cannot compete with.
Admittedly, I only have the one Mac mini right now, but that is the racehorse I would bet on. And the biggest fucking company in the world just made that bet first.
As a result of everyone in the race stopping to tie their shoe lace, or take a dump, or probably both at the same time, the AI people are going to swagger over the finish line in a race that people have tried to run and gotten tired and fallen down.
They are going to release wave after wave of AI content in a world that refused to call a Starbucks Cup in Game of Thrones “slop”, because when the content is good enough, everything is forgiven. Their games no longer have six fingers, two of which were middle fingers, by the way, and based on the ease of creation and the minuscule volume of machinery needed, they are going to succeed just by showing up.
So I am going to go all-in on AI games creation and all-in on AI games enjoyment.
And you know what?
I am absolutely right!
