Look at steam releases. May 2025: 1727. May 2026: 1875
A year over year increase matching the same trend that has existed since 2017. The same pattern holds for every month this year except March (where there was an increase year over year of about 600 games).
If you’ve ever been to a game dev forum, you’ll see that there are at least 10x as many people who want to make a game as there are people who have made a game (it’s probably much higher than 10x).
If games were easy to vibe code, or if AI speed up game dev 10x, I would expect it to almost immediately show up as a flood of games on Steam.
Turns out making a game, even with full help of the LLM power is still a massive effort most people won’t go through.
Even simpler but non-trivial programs require a lot of back and forth. So in the end it will be the same kind of motivated people that will be able to produce something good. We’re nowhere near “Claude, build me GTA6”
Hm. Nowadays a lot of games look alike. They use some 3D-Engine and most of the work is in the 3D-modelling and writing some interesting scripts.
For modelling and scripting I think we're not far away. A lot of games just reused old historical stories or fiction and a lot of stories feel like cheap soap operas. As soon as an AI can separate the good from the bad scrips it'll be mostly done.
You overvalue the HN crowd (or undervalue the AI hype-machine) considering you're downvoted and GP is upvoted (Another gamedev here smiling at GP's comment).
someday we will have models that can resolve physics to such degree to predict the future with surgical accuracy and when someone says "maybe models will become advanced enough to create a whole other universe from scratch" you will be there saying "highly doubt it"
At some point in the apparently-impending "software is free" era, s/w stops being a product that has to be "popular" and starts being mostly bespoke. One possible future is that your machine does you want because you have a local agent molding it into the right form all the time.
Bit of a stretch, but possible. I've had agents write 100x more code for me _to be productive at things_ than they do for new projects I want to sell/share.
no, most won’t burn themselves by publicly linking them as vibe coded
there is that ny times article about the peptide guy and lovable showcase by revenue though. I guess next up are even more disqualifiers about the term “successful”, but my outstanding question is who cares? What does convincing you buy, an Anthropic pro subscription at best?
S&box is a good example of how the scene might look in the LLM era. They made games easy to make and publish, and while Garry's Mod always had a hacky, rough vibe to the available game modes (Source engine magic + CSS textures), you'd always feel that the games were made by people.
Fast forward to 2026 and the next generation platform is here, and while there are unique, passion projects available, most of the discover screen is filled with vibe coded xp farming games with AI slop thumbnails. The issue is so big Facepunch had to actively derank and punish games that would do this, because the "marketing" content was so detached from the game (despite everything being AI generated pretty much).
When I was a boy my father forbade me playing Summer Olympics on our Atari 800XL, he didn't like the crunchy noises coming out of joystick and he didn't want to pay for the repairs.
I always enjoy hearing the thoughts of someone who took a slightly different path (indie game development being a favourite), and isn't committed to advancing some thesis -- pressing me to love this or hate that. It feels like it gives my brain a chance to step back from dopamine- or rage-induced habits and just... connect with other people.
I don't know what will happen either. I hope that you and I and other hardworking, basically good people will continue to have a somewhat meaningful, somewhat pleasant existence in the post-AI world, and I think that might be possible, but I just don't know.
Are there any popular/successful vibe-coded games? I suppose perhaps they wouldn't disclose that it was vibe-coded but I'm not aware of a single one.
Look at steam releases. May 2025: 1727. May 2026: 1875
A year over year increase matching the same trend that has existed since 2017. The same pattern holds for every month this year except March (where there was an increase year over year of about 600 games).
If you’ve ever been to a game dev forum, you’ll see that there are at least 10x as many people who want to make a game as there are people who have made a game (it’s probably much higher than 10x).
If games were easy to vibe code, or if AI speed up game dev 10x, I would expect it to almost immediately show up as a flood of games on Steam.
enclose.horse is somewhat popular and successful, posted here on hacker news a while ago.
Turns out making a game, even with full help of the LLM power is still a massive effort most people won’t go through.
Even simpler but non-trivial programs require a lot of back and forth. So in the end it will be the same kind of motivated people that will be able to produce something good. We’re nowhere near “Claude, build me GTA6”
We might get a powerful enough model to run "Claude, build me GTA6" before GTA6.
Highly doubt it.
Hm. Nowadays a lot of games look alike. They use some 3D-Engine and most of the work is in the 3D-modelling and writing some interesting scripts.
For modelling and scripting I think we're not far away. A lot of games just reused old historical stories or fiction and a lot of stories feel like cheap soap operas. As soon as an AI can separate the good from the bad scrips it'll be mostly done.
Clearly you don't work in game development, this comment put a smile on my face. Although I expected a bit more from hacker news crowd
You overvalue the HN crowd (or undervalue the AI hype-machine) considering you're downvoted and GP is upvoted (Another gamedev here smiling at GP's comment).
someday we will have models that can resolve physics to such degree to predict the future with surgical accuracy and when someone says "maybe models will become advanced enough to create a whole other universe from scratch" you will be there saying "highly doubt it"
This reminds me of a boss I had 20 years ago that said devs were going to be replaced soon.
Maybe he was 20 years early or maybe it's not happening now too.
Someday.
> Are there any popular/successful vibe-coded games?
Fair question... I'd even go as far as broadening the scope :
Are there any popular/successful vibe-coded anything?
And by popular/successful I don't mean bought Github stars from other GenAI/LLMs related project as it's been a demonstrated practice https://awesomeagents.ai/news/github-fake-stars-investigatio... for that specific domain now.
At some point in the apparently-impending "software is free" era, s/w stops being a product that has to be "popular" and starts being mostly bespoke. One possible future is that your machine does you want because you have a local agent molding it into the right form all the time.
Bit of a stretch, but possible. I've had agents write 100x more code for me _to be productive at things_ than they do for new projects I want to sell/share.
yes, there are
no, most won’t burn themselves by publicly linking them as vibe coded
there is that ny times article about the peptide guy and lovable showcase by revenue though. I guess next up are even more disqualifiers about the term “successful”, but my outstanding question is who cares? What does convincing you buy, an Anthropic pro subscription at best?
don't ask how the sausage is made
Games were filled to the brink with asset flops and low effort titles long before LLMs. I've personally contributed 13 or so.
S&box is a good example of how the scene might look in the LLM era. They made games easy to make and publish, and while Garry's Mod always had a hacky, rough vibe to the available game modes (Source engine magic + CSS textures), you'd always feel that the games were made by people.
Fast forward to 2026 and the next generation platform is here, and while there are unique, passion projects available, most of the discover screen is filled with vibe coded xp farming games with AI slop thumbnails. The issue is so big Facepunch had to actively derank and punish games that would do this, because the "marketing" content was so detached from the game (despite everything being AI generated pretty much).
Like in any other field of Software Engineering, it's not the actual programming part that is hard.
If there truly were, I'm sure we wouldn't hear the end of it. However, the state of the art is all hype and no substance, i.e., slop.
We would have heard about one already by now but it appears that we are still waiting.
Or maybe it is not worth the time and tokens spent to vibe code yet another Minecraft / Roblox clone that makes no money.
When I was a boy my father forbade me playing Summer Olympics on our Atari 800XL, he didn't like the crunchy noises coming out of joystick and he didn't want to pay for the repairs.
I always enjoy hearing the thoughts of someone who took a slightly different path (indie game development being a favourite), and isn't committed to advancing some thesis -- pressing me to love this or hate that. It feels like it gives my brain a chance to step back from dopamine- or rage-induced habits and just... connect with other people.
I don't know what will happen either. I hope that you and I and other hardworking, basically good people will continue to have a somewhat meaningful, somewhat pleasant existence in the post-AI world, and I think that might be possible, but I just don't know.