Generative AI is rapidly changing game development, but the real worry may not be that AI makes good games, but that it makes it easier than ever to “copy good games.” Game market analyst Chris Zukowski recently warned that with the rise of AI “Vibe Coding”, platforms such as Steam may be flooded with a large number of low-cost copies in the future, and truly creative works may be submerged.
AI makes it easier to make games, and it also makes it easier to “copy games”!
The so-called “Vibe Coding” means that developers use AI tools to quickly generate programs, art, and even entire game prototypes using natural language instructions, significantly lowering the development threshold. Zukowski believes that the biggest risk of this technology is not that AI will replace developers, but that as long as a popular work appears on the market, a large number of AI-assisted imitations will soon follow, eventually burying the original work in a large number of similar games.
He bluntly said that in the future, players may not be unable to find good games, but may not be able to see good games at all. Because truly excellent works can easily be surrounded by dozens or even hundreds of highly similar AI works, resulting in increasingly lower chances of exposure.
Steam is probably just the first battlefield
In recent years, Steam has gradually required developers to disclose whether they use generative AI, but AI tools continue to improve, allowing more and more people to create and put games on the shelves in a short time. For analysts, the real challenge is not whether AI can make games, but whether digital stores have the ability to make truly worth-playing works visible to players in a large amount of content.
AI may make game development more democratic, but if it turns out to be “whoever copies it the fastest will make money,” the real impact may be on the teams that have spent several years making a good game.