As if the concept of AI-assisted "vibe coding" wasn't enough to make you spit out your strawberry matcha latte and undergo a medical procedure to permanently delete the years since ChatGPT launched in 2022 from your mind, Circana industry analyst Mat Piscatella suggests it's about to make Steam and other game retailers worse.
Nothing grows anymore in our cruel world. Not physical PlayStation discs, or originality, or anything that isn't AI friendslop latte. A perfect example: 404 Media reported that AI vibe coding now lets developers essentially clone another person's video game in, sometimes, only a few dozen hours. Piscatella reacted to the news on Bluesky, saying, "Good games will get cloned and buried. Players will default to games/franchises they know and trust. Breaking through will become even more difficult."
If you weren't sure, this is a scenario some experts would call "not good. Not good at all," as Piscatella writes.
AI ripoffs of successful games – especially indie superstars with social cachet, but maybe not a team of copyright lawyers – are already prevalent on most major storefronts, in the form of oily containers of fake Peak on the PlayStation Store, or faux REPO on the Nintendo eShop. I'm already overwhelmed when I browse Steam as it is now, so it chills me to imagine what using those digital storefronts will be like in the near future, after they get stuffed with more AI toilet paper.
"Massive counter point to anyone claiming that AI will help the video game market by lowering development time and cost," Piscatella says of AI vibe coding. "Add to this the already gargantuan challenge of discovery, the assumingly soon massive increase in the number of games being released daily, and matured demand... it's... bad!"
But there must be something somebody could do, right? Shouldn't Sony and Nintendo have better quality control for bajillion-dollar corporations, at least?
"Seems unstoppable at this point," Piscatella says. "The solution is to... yeah if I knew how to solve this I'd be out doing it and getting ready to buy my island."
Oh, well. Just another day in paradise.
Earlier this year, we spoke to dozens of game developers and heard the many, many reasons they don't want to use generative AI.
