What is happening to mobile games
I'm tired.
I created a game and poured countless hours, energy, and honestly a good chunk of my health into it over the last two years. I've been working on the story behind it for decades, and on the actual game concept for about five years.
And now I look around and see people publishing AI slop in a matter of hours, flooding the stores with an endless stream of shitty games that nobody actually wants to play.
I'm not only complaining for myself either.
I keep thinking about all the solo developers and small teams who spent years, sometimes decades, building something they genuinely cared about. People learning programming, art, music, game design, writing, balancing, marketing, community management, and everything else that comes with trying to make a game.
Then they release it and immediately get buried under hundreds or thousands of projects that took a fraction of the effort to produce.
No amount of passion, polish, or work can compete with sheer volume when the stores are constantly being flooded.
And that's the part that scares me.
I'm not against AI existing. I've used AI as a tool myself. There's a massive difference between using it to help with development and asking it to generate an entire game as quickly as possible so you can throw it onto the Play Store and move on to the next one.
It feels like we're reaching a point where actually caring about what you're making is becoming a disadvantage.
You spend two years building one game while someone else generates twenty. Even if nineteen of theirs are garbage, they still get twenty chances at being discovered while your project gets one.
Maybe I'm just exhausted and frustrated after working on this for so long, but seeing what the mobile game market is turning into is depressing.
There are still incredible indie developers making genuinely interesting games. I just wonder how many of those games we're never going to see because they're buried underneath an ocean of disposable content before anyone even gets the chance to find them.