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Ask HN: Why I rarely see game dev startup here?

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Re: Ask HN: Why I rarely see game dev startup here?

#11
"why haven’t LLM wrappers penetrated this sector"

The vast majority of games are sold over Steam. It's so overwhelmingly dominant that it eclipses almost every other platform put together, with some exceptions for consoles and mobile. Even when it's targeted at these, Steam is such a powerful marketing/discovery channel for games.

When Steam says no AI, nobody does AI. It's not just no AI generated content, some argue it means no brainstorming dialogue via AI and so on. The game dev community selects for this. This means that alternative platforms like Itch tend to also lean towards anti-AI even if they could differentiate by allowing AI. Consoles tend to also build for PC and adopting AI would cost them too much.

Pro-AI people tend to move to other platforms like Play Store and App Store, and lately we're seeing more quality control ramp up on these.

Re: Ask HN: Why I rarely see game dev startup here?

#12
Game developers are extremely rare because they can actually program. Most people writing software for a living cannot actually write software. It’s the difference between struggling at copy/pasting other people’s words into your own plagiarized essay versus writing an original novel or textbook.

Re: Ask HN: Why I rarely see game dev startup here?

#13

That’s a really good observation- I’ve noticed the same. I think it’s because game dev and startup culture overlap less than we expect. Game dev usually leans more art and creativity than problem-solving or scalable business models. Different mindset, funding path, and timelines. Though lately, game dev tools and AI pipelines are starting to bridge that gap.

How applicable are AI pipelines to game dev? A few months ago, I worked on an iPad game (Unity) and found that AI tools were pretty bad and unhelpful. The other dev didn't use AI at all
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