You're leaving out the social and mobile games that made astronomical amount of money in early 2010s like Farmville and Candy Crush.

In fact, the 2010–2026 era proved that non-AAA games, smaller mobile studios, and independent developers could achieve higher profit margins than traditional big studio projects.

Moreover, indie game market has never been as strong. AI will accelerate and democratize this trend further, as upfront development costs is reduced.

https://icemunk.github.io/voxelstrike-site/

I am fine with vibe coding by now. It captures the spirit quite well, if the vibe of the direction is good, you have a rush with one shotting amazing features - if the vibe is gone, it became a slob hell with the model going in circles. But this is not random for me, but depends how much I follow the architectural decisions (and not "great, go on"). So I would rather introduce "slob coding", for mindless prompting without control of what is happening.

This is by far the hard part. The complete rulesets for most games[0] would be smaller than a prompt necessary to turn that board game into a computer game[1].

Anyone can draw some counters and a board, make up some rules. Making those rules interesting, let alone fun, is so much of a problem that many published board games get house-ruled in various ways[2].

The AI-made games I've noticed (clichés, the AI can't help it) have been at the median level of the old Flash sites, but with less variation: fewer total disasters, but also nothing amazing.

While this isn't great, it's also not nothing: I wouldn't be surprised if one of the current ones goes through an iterative refinement like Bloons TD did.

[0] not all: I was obsessed with Star Fleet Battles as a young teenager, these days I describe it as "A computer game written about ten years before home computers had enough memory to store all the rules", which is why each turn takes 2 hours, one of which is counting out boxes and using that to fill out a spreadsheet as you work out how much power your ship has and how fast it's going and which equipment you can use, and distributing weapon damage on some target is worked out with the help of an A4-sized printout that functionally implements a dice-driven state machine.

[1] Unless the prompt was "here is a photo of the rules, turn it into a video game", but I count that as cheating, "a picture is worth a thousand words" etc.

[2] My main house rule for Star Fleet Battles, these days[3], is to simplify the 4+ kinds of power source into one. I can appreciate the world building of "an impulse engine can't divert antimatter to a photon torpedo", but it's not actually fun to keep track of this.

[3] I've played it like 4 times in the last 15 years.

I’m having a lot of fun creating an “improved” clone of a very old school game I loved.

It takes lots of back and forth but there is definitely (for me at least) to play this derivative game since it adds a lot of levels and stuff that weren’t available in the original.

Without AI I wouldn’t be able to do anything; but with it it can make some changes, I test them and we iterate on it.

So for me AI solves “making a fun game”. It doesn’t “one shot GTA7” if that is your goal but that also sounds boring

This dismissive contemptuous attitude is typical of all big tech, all your value is just reduced to data generator to be mined, without any other regard.

The more games you play, the more you understand and appreciate what makes a game good, and how hard it is to come up with a game that is original, enjoyable to look at and fun to play. Lots and lots of games created by professionals don't even excel at any of them. Meanwhile indie game developers are never limited by their programming skills.

I'm not looking forward to all the slop that comes out of this.