Comment by SchemaLoad
12 hours ago
Curation is probably going to be king over the next years. A game simply existing is no guarantee that any effort has been put in or that even the developer played it.
You'll need to find a publisher, journalists, etc to market your game. You'll ask your friends what they are playing instead of scrolling the store page. Trusted platforms will promote games that are actually worth looking at. This problem already exists on modern platforms like Steam but AI is supercharging it.
This has always been the case. Just because someone made an album or a game or a movie it doesn't guarantee that it's worth your time even if there was effort. Low effort music can be good too, namely by musicians that are really talented. A really talented game designer may be able to make a very engaging game with little effort beyond the initial design.
If you want to test this, find yourself a record store and pick up a few LPs less than a few bucks from bands you've never heard. You might get something really great or it might be terrible.
I agree, in the current ecosystem games are abundant but it's still not easy to find the diamonds in the rough.
Trust signals are going to be quite influential going forward, and that will get exploited too. I think we're going to see the return of high effort, high trust games journalism. Not necessarily as the commercial victor, but as a community we will rally around people and outlets we trust.
The problem is finding the needle in the haystack. When you can cheaply develop AI slop by the millions, good luck finding that one game where a human put blood, sweat and tears to realize their vision/dream. Even if you somehow have access to at-scale distribution, economics will ultimately always triumph everything else and more slop will be pushed because it makes economic sense.
It will take at least a full decade for people to realize the slop isn't helping, has made us all collectively mediocre and will seek out people with real specializations. By then I sure hope those who are specializing haven't lost the motivation to do great things and moved on to other fields.