Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

braindump.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 312 posts

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#21

Post by aleph_minus_one »

bckr wrote: post #13
EncomLab wrote: post #11

Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.

I think that, while making a game is not hard, making an excellent game is hard. And I think making an excellent game is a lot like reaching product-market fit. It takes fast iteration with user feedback to find the fun, then a ton of polish to make it extraordinary. It has to be so good that, out of those 73,000 games and counting, I’ll spend some of my money and time on it. The way GenAI can help here, I think, is…

> And I think making an excellent game is a lot like reaching product-market fit.

Making an excellent game takes quite different skills than creating a commercially successful game; just compare "pop culture" (optimized to be commercially successful) vs "high-brow culture".

Even if you are not the "extremely high-brow taste" kind of person, there exist quite some video game genres in which excellent games are produced, but the audience of these games is a quite small (but sophisticated) niche audience, so that just by volume, games of these genres likely won't make a lot of money.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#23

Post by pjc50 »

EncomLab wrote: post #11

Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.

Itch.io claim to host over 200k free games.

AI makes standing out harder; we're not ready for the sludge era of having seven billion people and ten billion games.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#24

Post by omneity »

EwanG wrote: post #5
FredrikNoren wrote: post #2

Hi HN. We want to make it possible for anyone to build games without first learning to code or make art, by giving them access to an “AI game studio”. It’s early days, but here’s what we’ve learned so far building this product. Would love to hear what everyone thinks, and see if we can find some alpha testers for this!

Having done a couple indie games myself over the years, I think you're addressing many of the pain points of building such a game. However the REAL problem as an indie gamer is getting a marketing/get-the-word-out campaign such that said game produces enough income to cover the cost of making it. Will you be adding a "marketing" add-on to this to help developers actually get their games noticed and played?

Marketing is hardly something that can be done via an "add-on" or some mechanical approach.

It's more of a mindset, getting yourself and what you're working on known is something you need to do throughout the entire process, before, during and after the release of a game.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#25

Post by dev1ycan »

jncfhnb wrote: post #14
EncomLab wrote: post #11

Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.

The majority of those games are now visual novels / pornography.

which shows how bad puritan culture is, most people don't care about your puritanism in their room, they want to play a game, see a hot char, and be able to do stuff with them in the game. it's the harsh truth that people seem to get mad at.

Especially now with ever increasing rates of ADHD and other stuff, having an old school genre like an RPG have that type of stuff as a "reward" for beating a level or whatever reinvigorates a genre that felt outdated due to a lack of a proper reward structure.

Fact of the matter is, if you as a game dev want to make money, better lose your inhibitions real fast, because the consumers, want more choices in their game, even if it's just romance for the most part.

Look at stardew valley, I would never have played it if I hadn't found out you could literally date and marry a girl in the game, it just added a layer of reward to the gameplay.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#26

Post by dkarras »

EncomLab wrote: post #11

Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.

It is not just about marketing though. There is this belief, especially among fledgling indies that if they make a game that they think is good, and if they are able to market it well, it will be a success, even a hit.

A hit in gamedev is not easier than creating a hit in the music industry really. Even the veteran composers are not able to replicate (or even achieve) creating a hit. Possibility of success depends on many factors which change constantly, and success hinges on your ability to "read the room" which is the sound palette and the persona (for the artist that "performs" the music) millions of people are likely to find interesting at any point in time.

If you are a beginner composer creating a hit, it is an extreme fluke. Same is with gamedev. Your passion project most probably is not the thing most people want at this point in time. No amount of marketing will solve that problem. Your efforts at marketing are doomed to have negative ROI. Maybe you are a year too late? A decade too late? Maybe a couple years too early? Maybe what you think is fun is not really fun in the general sense and will never be?

I'd honestly struggle to find any good games (right for their time and audience) that failed because of a lack of suitable marketing. In the same vein, I'd struggle to find a hit game that succeeded because of marketing. No amount of marketing effort can beat thousands of people finding what you do interesting and sharing their opinion in person, on social media, youtube etc. If you have pockets as deep as Coca Cola, you may influence the culture through your marketing efforts, influence what "should" be popular - but if you are not that, you need to be an expert at reading culture of your target audience and cater to that. When you do that, "marketing" will be a walk in the park. Or else, even if you spend enormous efforts in marketing, it will only generate negative ROI.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#28

Post by password54321 »

EncomLab wrote: post #11

Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.

Word spreads fast on good games due to Reddit and Twitch. Look at the success of Balatro and how much marketing that had.

The number of games you listed just highlights how little Steam filters.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#29

Post by dwallin »

bckr wrote: post #13
EncomLab wrote: post #11

Hard facts: Steam has over 73k games - and is growing at over 10k games per year and increasing. The median game on Steam earns less than $800 - down from $4k in 2020. Making a game is not hard - marketing a game is.

I think that, while making a game is not hard, making an excellent game is hard. And I think making an excellent game is a lot like reaching product-market fit. It takes fast iteration with user feedback to find the fun, then a ton of polish to make it extraordinary. It has to be so good that, out of those 73,000 games and counting, I’ll spend some of my money and time on it. The way GenAI can help here, I think, is…

Making an excellent game isn't even enough these days, that's just table stakes. With so many games out there it's a market of lemons. You need to have a way of rising above the noise. For AAA, it's having budgets to make games on a bigger scale than everyone else. For mobile games, it's generally about leveraging a large war chest to fuel an advertising-driven margin game. For prestige/indie games you need something that people will want to talk/write about, or build a dedicated fanbase over time. For tiny games like flappy bird / wordle you need massive built-in virality and lots of luck.

Re: Building an AI game studio: what we've learned so far

#30

Post by bogwog »

They mention using a service called Meshy for generating models, and I noticed that they have a free plan where the generated assets have a "license" of CC-BY-4.0[1]. Any lawyers in here that can comment on that? They're claiming copyright ownership over models generated from customer prompts, and I doubt they trained their model exclusively on stuff they own/licensed.

1: https://www.meshy.ai/pricing

Post reply on HN