>How long until someone makes a tiktok-style game platform?
Well to your point, youtube already has these little mini games that exist in portrait mode. Seems like something is liminally out there pointing in that direction.
This is a really neat idea to explore, but I feel like it would be hard to succeed. Games require a very different level of engagement from the audience, with some effort to learn the mechanics or understand what to do next. Short-form video seems like the complete opposite... totally relaxed consumption.
This very idea has been tried - and venture funded - to the tune of many millions of dollars every 6 months for the past 4 years.
The last few founders I knew working on variations of the idea finally pivoted out over the summer. It’s definitely one of those ideas that sounds great until you try building it and you realize there’s nothing there. Definitely will get funded again before the year is up!
Has anyone made a generative version of TikTok yet? I suppose that's already what TikTok is, but with a slow feedback loop and tricky filters against AI generated content.
I suspect TikTok will be the generative version of TikTok as soon as they're confident enough in the video quality that people won't immediately notice and trigger a ferocious backlash.
(Recall that OpenAI said they were going to make essentially this, before the negative reaction made them back down. It will probably be tried again at some point.)
I am not sure where the money would be. You could already streamline something like itchio.io like that. Or reminds me of old shareware cds. Still even with how cheap AI makes things I am not sure you can generate enough revenue.
Most revenue now comes by making the game a habit and thus making people invest both time and money. I am not just seeing that happening with too short term throwaway content.
One of the startups that was hot last year was Gizmo doing exactly this, and surprised Meta has launched a new app called Pocket with that team just now.
Just got #2 in the world (for now) on "Steampunk Match". Very impressive what's possible in the browser. No way I would've thought this was AI generated. It was much higher quality than the vibe coded games out of Claude. The best outcome would be for this to enable some new weird games that wouldn't have gotten made otherwise, and also to bankrupt games that basically operate as casinos.
No, this is exactly what Claude vibe codes, this is definitely a one-shot Claude style game (assuming it looks up a decent pixel art pack).
LLMs are pretty decent these days at making standard game clones like this, you just have to add a system prompt about making it look like a real indie-style pixel art game instead of just letting it make it's standard "web game" style. I assume google has a good background system prompt/harness to do this automatically.
Just got #1. The next match will always be highlighted when time is running low. I never ran out of options. The game is fun, but it definitely seems as though there's still room for improvement.
I do kind of believe this is the "end game" at this point.
"Friend-slop" has already proven wildly successful, and significantly lower effort than AAA games.
Combine this with the fact your game will be stolen and put into Roblox, it really feels like we're approaching a era of just rapidly produced games that live for weeks rather than years.
Yeah agreed, I was talking to a friend few years ago when Google first wiped out blogging by taking over the blog content and showing snippets instead of real links.
Obviously the end-game is for the companies to automate all the text, games, and software so you just go to their feed and pay them a monthly instead of individuals making making this content.
There's multiple reasons people play games. Some people are competitive and play a game thousands of hours to get better at it. So there's always a market for longer lasting games.
If you want to try this but with free multiplayer servers check out https://snack.game (my site)
I also didn't bother with in-app game dev for now since I figured your local agents will be better. So for now you just develop locally with a CLI and your favorite subsidized model. I might change that soon.
I've always found Google Slides to be a great way to create cute, personal games. It requires no coding, and anyone can play them easily in their browser. Seeing what people are able to do with a simple presentation (PowerPoint, if you will) has been repeatedly eye-opening every time I've seen one.
I'm a bit worried that Google Slides-games will fall out of fashion now ;(
Am I the only one that feels repulsed by this kind of offerings?
Im not sure how to justify the feeling. Maybe it's that I expect more than entertainment out of creative works (which I consider games to be), but this... Corporate slop firehose seems fundamentally empty in a way that raises goosebumps, like a black mirror episode.
I was repulsed too at first, but honestly cheap build-your-own-video-game tools have been out there since the 90s at least. This is just the modern version. Fine.
I could see microgames creep into social media feeds maybe. That's what this allows for. Games that might be novel for a few minutes. Some folks will put in the effort to make a modern multi-hour game here but very few, like their player-base.
Also, prototyping! Maybe it's good for that (just don't share it publicly).
Yeah it was already really hard to find good games before AI due to a massive influx of indie devs, easier to use engines, review gaming, and asset flipping.
I worry how this will impact finding quality games.
I know people keep saying “we’ve had slop factories before AI” but this really feels different.
Best case scenario for this is...replace Roblox with games that don't have reward systems solely based on you playing as long as possible. We are losing a generation of children to these games.
Kids I know genuinely liked playing Roblox games. It was not just shiny imaginary points, it was that games were "for them" and they did not needed money to try another one.
Yeah the addictive part is being richer than the other children. It’s like trading card games, the actual game isn’t good but you get to be better than the people who don’t have rich parents.
Since this thread will contain the intersection of people interested in coding games and people interested in AI, can I ask whether the latest AI coding tools can help someone vibe code a simple low-poly 3D game? I only ever used Twine before.
Yep. Simplest is browser game with three.js, the only lib you need. But for low-poly 3D, you can basically tell the frontier LLMs to build yourself the rasteriser itself in whatever language you want. Literally just put your comment into Claude Code or Codex and see it do it.
> Playground launches today for users in the U.S. (18+) at playground.google, with tiered creation access rolling out based on your Google One membership.
Looks like they forgot to create a "Not available in your region" page, which makes me wonder whether they made this over a weekend.
Google seems to have some desire to enter the gaming world, with Stadia before this.
Perhaps it's their culture of letting engineers experiment with stuff during work hours that also led to Gmail, Maps, etc. and the mobile game ad market is certainly big.
I guess this mainly competes with mobile games, most of which are mediocre at best and aim to get a few "whale users" to spend inordinate amounts of money on coins, gems, or whatever in-game currency.
Maybe the theory is that those games are so easy to vibe-code that completely democratizing it will lead to enough of a flood of games?
And a few will stand out and become Candy Crush-sized successes?
Or perhaps it's the idea that if you can have millions of extremely niche games, each may have a few hardcore fans because it caters to their specific interests (the same way Kindle Direct Publishing enabled hyper-niche literary genres)
I don't know, it seems like it's just fun thing to play around with. I don't think serious things are meant to be built on this.
I often want to play simple games like Pacman, space invader, breakout, tetris or some other random iteration. Sometimes there are non-spammy simple versions of this game but often there aren't. This seems like a pretty cool fix. And if they disappear in the future, who cares?
That's precisely how something ends up becoming ubiquitous. You, and everyone else, start having fun on it and then suddenly it's a locked-in platform monetized by them.
YouTube started exactly how you described it, some silly thing not meant to be serious and today powers multiple 100M+ businesses using it for content to reach mass audiences.
> I don't think serious things are meant to be built on this.
I read at some point that projects at Google didn't get a greenlight unless there was a reasonable expectation they could be used directly or indirectly by a billion people.
Nothing wrong with me having an opinion on their strategy
My logic is not “don’t make money” but more so pick a lane
They can empower the community and let a PaaS emerge that’s locked in on their APIs for example
For example, did Shopify get into building Marketplaces for E-commerce? No
It isn’t like they would not be able to make money from the gaming industry by being just the layer zero, my beef here is that they’re going one layer up
I respect the opinions, and I was looking for more logical reasoning on how one arrives at that.
Whether to empower the company or not via open-source/open-weight etc is based on a company culture, value, and future direction/projection.
And it all depends on the scale.
Google didn't need no HR, no companies normally start with everything in place. AS the companies scale up, they add security team, HR, legal team, etc.
That means more $. Google is 20x the size of Shopify in terms of market cap. Google was loved for their search engines when it was at shopify level initially. REmember decades ago when everyone loved Google search?
This does not mean, Google will keep the same strategies for their direction neither will Shopify. I already hear a lot of complaints from my friends hosting on Shopify on the enshitification.
Anyways, I diregress a bit.
So my point is, at least try to reason about why `hmokiguess` arrived at "Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform". What is too much here in homikiguess's opinion (that is verys subjective, need verification),
Where did you get open-source/open-weight from my message? They offer models via APIs, they have GCP, they already have a Cloud PaaS that lets you build a Gaming PaaS on top (in fact, some existing ones are exactly that)
You're contradicting yourself, the reasoning for them to have too much was said by you in your own comment, they are 20x the size of Shopify.
> To keep the experience safe and welcoming, every published game undergoes safety screenings aligned with our Community Guidelines, along with user reporting.
Kind of cringe. I mean I suppose its one thing to stop people making CSAM but safety screens make it sound like you can't have any sort of mature game? Gore, violence, drugs, suggestive themes or nudity etc all disallowed or something? Everyone has to make a T for Teen game?
I'm usually very pro AI and the idea that people could vibe code their own games which combine exactly the things they enjoy appeals to me so was quite excited for this.
I played a few editors picks. "Westbound Frontier" is a kind of RTS. On mobile all the windows open on top of eachother and the text is very hard to read. The amount of resource required to build the first building after town hall was way too high by and you had to wait ages to do anything. There was an infuriating AI sound track singing "ooo-wee-ooo". 0/10 from me, broken and not fun.
Next I tried volcano run, a 3D infinite runner. Not my kind of game but a nice aesthetic and it actually worked. After about 30 seconds though the graphics changed to a really low contrast mode (night?) and I couldn't see the rocks I was supposed to dodge. 2/10.
Honestly genuinely a bit shocked Google launched this. It's obviously not ready, the "Editor" who picked these games should have known that. I am not sure if this is some kind of set of skills for Gemini or a fine tune or just a prompt but it certainly feels very low effort and embarrassing.
> Honestly genuinely a bit shocked Google launched this.
Every "AI + Google" product is pretty much like this, impressive to people who basically have no other skills than "talking about stuff others click on video links for" but falls apart to any sort of quality checks, and most of time isn't even internally consistent and coherent.
There's already Youtube games (youtube.com/playables), where all games are hyper casual ad-driven low-effort games published by companies like Voodoo or SayGames. I believe Playground would compete with those more than with regular PC games. There's no way slop from regular people could be worse than what's already out there for mobile.
I'm shocked how bad they seem to be. The other day I was shopping around a prompt to all the AI models to compare and Gemini was by far the most disappointing and laziest
You can build standard games now, and there is a waitlist for Unity Spark. But there are demos of Unity Spark games now, if you want to see what will be possible.
I was able to spin up a couple of games really quickly--a 2D cosy space exploration game, and a snarky sci fi trivia game. I'd say the the writting for the humorous trivia questions and the cosy interactions was reasonable--this isn't a tool that can only do reskins of old school arcade games. In addition to music and graphics it can do text to speech.
It's still an experiment, simultaneous impressive, and frustrating, with rather unexpectedly low prompt compliance. But, beta.
It really doesn't seem to like shifting from multiplayer to solo play. It seems like you ought to have a strong opinion upfront. (again, early days)
It's natural to think of this quick and easy tool for playing game, but I suspect part of the eventual value will be learning tools and "self gamification" I could imagine doing a variant of my trivial game for memorization or language learning.
Does Google not have lawyers any more? Playground Games is the name of the Microsoft-owned games studio behind Forza Horizon; X-Box studio is as part of their current restructuring merging them with Turn 10 (the mainline Forza studio) and, weirdly, handing the resulting studio Fable to work on, but Microsoft definitely still has an interest in the trademark of ‘playground’ in the context of video games.
I think the point of this product is not the quality of the games, it's the accessibility and distribution and the fact that it's free to use.
Big tech already controls the distribution of traditional platforms so they are building AI platforms to make sure they keep control of the distribution of new forms of content, including that for AI games now that they're easier to make than a YouTube video.
But inevitably these products (and the competitors they will inevitably spawn) put us closer to a future of arguably dystopian, AI-driven hyper-entertainment world, even if no one inside the companies meant to do that. I can only hope in that future many people still appreciate human-made games, and even on these AI platforms genuine human ideas (assisted by AI) can still bubble to the top.
As for game quality, these look close to Opus 5.5 one-shots to me, maybe even a little worse.
i believe services like this "generate an ai game in one prompt" will always fail. if i could make a game that people actually wanted to play with ai, why would i do it on here and not just sell it on steam for a few bucks?
the slop games fall to the bottom to services like these while good games would rise to the top and go to well established platforms.
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[ 10.3 ms ] story [ 72.0 ms ] threadI was out after the slurping sound in the first 1-second.
Play a little game, then when you're done it generates a new one based on what you've enjoyed. Repeat ad infinitum.
Haven't followed them too closely, but wouldn't be surprised if they'd added LLM tools to the platform.
Well to your point, youtube already has these little mini games that exist in portrait mode. Seems like something is liminally out there pointing in that direction.
The last few founders I knew working on variations of the idea finally pivoted out over the summer. It’s definitely one of those ideas that sounds great until you try building it and you realize there’s nothing there. Definitely will get funded again before the year is up!
(Recall that OpenAI said they were going to make essentially this, before the negative reaction made them back down. It will probably be tried again at some point.)
Most revenue now comes by making the game a habit and thus making people invest both time and money. I am not just seeing that happening with too short term throwaway content.
This looks like it might be very useful indeed!
"Friend-slop" has already proven wildly successful, and significantly lower effort than AAA games.
Combine this with the fact your game will be stolen and put into Roblox, it really feels like we're approaching a era of just rapidly produced games that live for weeks rather than years.
Obviously the end-game is for the companies to automate all the text, games, and software so you just go to their feed and pay them a monthly instead of individuals making making this content.
You be tripping if you actually think AAA soulless that has filled with agenda is better
> significantly lower effort than AAA games
I think you meant lower budget.
I also didn't bother with in-app game dev for now since I figured your local agents will be better. So for now you just develop locally with a CLI and your favorite subsidized model. I might change that soon.
I'm a bit worried that Google Slides-games will fall out of fashion now ;(
Im not sure how to justify the feeling. Maybe it's that I expect more than entertainment out of creative works (which I consider games to be), but this... Corporate slop firehose seems fundamentally empty in a way that raises goosebumps, like a black mirror episode.
If you are disgusted by this, the resources spent on AI adult content would make you mad. But why judge what other people choose to do.
There's an episode of President Curtis where USA is running out of energy and the final solution is to (spoilers) tax AI porn.
I could see microgames creep into social media feeds maybe. That's what this allows for. Games that might be novel for a few minutes. Some folks will put in the effort to make a modern multi-hour game here but very few, like their player-base.
Also, prototyping! Maybe it's good for that (just don't share it publicly).
We are in the ara of commoditization and we just have to learn handling it.
And its not just AI 'slop' making it so, its also A LOT of peole having acess to so much more.
The indiegame scene got crazy. As soon there is one new game concept, hundreds of small adjustments to this idea are popping up.
The sorting game thing? Has now a lot of clones/variations.
AI adds more of this for sure, but its not the underlying issue.
I worry how this will impact finding quality games.
I know people keep saying “we’ve had slop factories before AI” but this really feels different.
Is it really just that they give kids nice shiny imaginary points for playing longer?
>Not available in your region Playground is expanding to more regions soon. In the meantime, you can explore other experiments today.
Looks like they forgot to create a "Not available in your region" page, which makes me wonder whether they made this over a weekend.
Perhaps it's their culture of letting engineers experiment with stuff during work hours that also led to Gmail, Maps, etc. and the mobile game ad market is certainly big.
I guess this mainly competes with mobile games, most of which are mediocre at best and aim to get a few "whale users" to spend inordinate amounts of money on coins, gems, or whatever in-game currency.
Maybe the theory is that those games are so easy to vibe-code that completely democratizing it will lead to enough of a flood of games?
And a few will stand out and become Candy Crush-sized successes?
Or perhaps it's the idea that if you can have millions of extremely niche games, each may have a few hardcore fans because it caters to their specific interests (the same way Kindle Direct Publishing enabled hyper-niche literary genres)
Let developers use your models and tools and build stuff with it. Why own everything.
Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform.
I often want to play simple games like Pacman, space invader, breakout, tetris or some other random iteration. Sometimes there are non-spammy simple versions of this game but often there aren't. This seems like a pretty cool fix. And if they disappear in the future, who cares?
YouTube started exactly how you described it, some silly thing not meant to be serious and today powers multiple 100M+ businesses using it for content to reach mass audiences.
I read at some point that projects at Google didn't get a greenlight unless there was a reasonable expectation they could be used directly or indirectly by a billion people.
You ain't making sense. Companies need $, and what's wrong with what they do with what they own and can do in this particular case?
Yes. Google does not actually care about search anymore, and the threat that the technology could disappear altogether is real.
My logic is not “don’t make money” but more so pick a lane
They can empower the community and let a PaaS emerge that’s locked in on their APIs for example
For example, did Shopify get into building Marketplaces for E-commerce? No
It isn’t like they would not be able to make money from the gaming industry by being just the layer zero, my beef here is that they’re going one layer up
Whether to empower the company or not via open-source/open-weight etc is based on a company culture, value, and future direction/projection.
And it all depends on the scale.
Google didn't need no HR, no companies normally start with everything in place. AS the companies scale up, they add security team, HR, legal team, etc.
That means more $. Google is 20x the size of Shopify in terms of market cap. Google was loved for their search engines when it was at shopify level initially. REmember decades ago when everyone loved Google search?
This does not mean, Google will keep the same strategies for their direction neither will Shopify. I already hear a lot of complaints from my friends hosting on Shopify on the enshitification.
Anyways, I diregress a bit.
So my point is, at least try to reason about why `hmokiguess` arrived at "Google has too much already and in my opinion they have no business owning a gaming platform". What is too much here in homikiguess's opinion (that is verys subjective, need verification),
You're contradicting yourself, the reasoning for them to have too much was said by you in your own comment, they are 20x the size of Shopify.
No need. Just access to the index.
> To keep the experience safe and welcoming, every published game undergoes safety screenings aligned with our Community Guidelines, along with user reporting.
Kind of cringe. I mean I suppose its one thing to stop people making CSAM but safety screens make it sound like you can't have any sort of mature game? Gore, violence, drugs, suggestive themes or nudity etc all disallowed or something? Everyone has to make a T for Teen game?
I played a few editors picks. "Westbound Frontier" is a kind of RTS. On mobile all the windows open on top of eachother and the text is very hard to read. The amount of resource required to build the first building after town hall was way too high by and you had to wait ages to do anything. There was an infuriating AI sound track singing "ooo-wee-ooo". 0/10 from me, broken and not fun.
Next I tried volcano run, a 3D infinite runner. Not my kind of game but a nice aesthetic and it actually worked. After about 30 seconds though the graphics changed to a really low contrast mode (night?) and I couldn't see the rocks I was supposed to dodge. 2/10.
Honestly genuinely a bit shocked Google launched this. It's obviously not ready, the "Editor" who picked these games should have known that. I am not sure if this is some kind of set of skills for Gemini or a fine tune or just a prompt but it certainly feels very low effort and embarrassing.
Every "AI + Google" product is pretty much like this, impressive to people who basically have no other skills than "talking about stuff others click on video links for" but falls apart to any sort of quality checks, and most of time isn't even internally consistent and coherent.
Let the slopocalypse commence.
I was able to spin up a couple of games really quickly--a 2D cosy space exploration game, and a snarky sci fi trivia game. I'd say the the writting for the humorous trivia questions and the cosy interactions was reasonable--this isn't a tool that can only do reskins of old school arcade games. In addition to music and graphics it can do text to speech.
It's still an experiment, simultaneous impressive, and frustrating, with rather unexpectedly low prompt compliance. But, beta.
It really doesn't seem to like shifting from multiplayer to solo play. It seems like you ought to have a strong opinion upfront. (again, early days)
It's natural to think of this quick and easy tool for playing game, but I suspect part of the eventual value will be learning tools and "self gamification" I could imagine doing a variant of my trivial game for memorization or language learning.
Big tech already controls the distribution of traditional platforms so they are building AI platforms to make sure they keep control of the distribution of new forms of content, including that for AI games now that they're easier to make than a YouTube video.
But inevitably these products (and the competitors they will inevitably spawn) put us closer to a future of arguably dystopian, AI-driven hyper-entertainment world, even if no one inside the companies meant to do that. I can only hope in that future many people still appreciate human-made games, and even on these AI platforms genuine human ideas (assisted by AI) can still bubble to the top.
As for game quality, these look close to Opus 5.5 one-shots to me, maybe even a little worse.
the slop games fall to the bottom to services like these while good games would rise to the top and go to well established platforms.