They definitely know why, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to tell who to 403 vs not. They obviously dont care to tell you because of ‘security’.
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.
We've hosted an AI game development platform for a while now and found there's a big difference between "making a game" and "making a fun game". I'd love to see if they are solving the real problem, but the link to try it out is a 403 for me.
I don't think AI will ever really solve "making a fun game" because:
1. Games are highly complex systems, so for example adding a fun mechanic from one game to another game can actually make that game less fun, and AI has no way to know, you just have to playtest it.
2. Games are evergreen (people still play and love the original Zelda/Mario/Tetris) and social (you want to share your love of game XYZ with others), so there's literally no reason for anyone to play a purely derivative game, when you can just play the original.
Eventually AI will be able to make perfect assets and all the other stuff AROUND making a fun game, but the game design will always be a human thing. At best, AI will come up with a bunch of game design experiments that a human will need to playtest and provide feedback on.
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
You may be right, at the same time a lot of "AI will never solve X" takes have aged pretty poorly, and I'm not confident what's fun about existing games cannot be codified and shown statistically somehow. Some genres seem more accessible to AI than others
It's hard to say for sure, I think we can at least confidently assert that games are going to be more challenging than other forms of creative expression like Books, Music, Art, etc because people's tolerance for derivative games is lower than their tolerance for derivative movies/music.
And I genuinely hope there will be some categories of games/music/books/art where human input is still needed and preferred. Currently I'm already a handful of bulletpoints down on the list of stuff I thought AI would never be able to do, and it's been kind of destabilizing
Certainly yours and mine, given we're both (presumably) adults with experience. I'm not sure if the next generation of kids is going to care much given the popularity of platforms like Roblox.
It's not that kids actually love the lazy derivative games on Roblox. What they love is the rush they get from feeding the gambling addiction the Roblox Child Casino was carefully designed to develop in them. Cheap games on Google Playground won't be nearly as attractive to kids unless Google also fills it with anti-features like push notifications to nag children into getting another fix when they start having fun outside of Roblox, or adding a ton of limited-time rewards to fill kids with anxiety and make them feel like shit when school, homework, or family gets in the way of earning more Robux.
What Google Playground really needs is their own currency designed to hide the true cost of every purchase that children can earn by making popular games. Then Google can profit from child labor the same way Roblox does. https://www.classaction.org/news/roblox-lawsuit-alleges-enti...
I don't think anyone, given better alternatives, would choose games like these. There's a reason low effort output of LLMs has been dubbed Slop... Slop isn't fun or interesting to consume.
> a lot of "AI will never solve X" takes have aged pretty poorly
"Make a fun game" or "create good art" is the cognitive equivalent of trying to solve the halting problem. These are some undecidable problems that cannot be solved by just throwing more GPUs at it.
Now, if you were to ask an AI to make an "addictive game", I'm sure it will eventually be able to.
AI will solve it the same way it solves everything else - by reproducing the patterns in its source data. Which means you will never see novel mechanics or combinations or mechanics.
For anyone getting a 403, it's US only right now and fails rather ungracefully. I just tried out a few games, framerates where strange/choppy, even in a match 3 game, and the games I tried were quite bad overall. I'm sure this type of thing will get good very soon though
- This is google experiment, meaning you're sadly likely invest more time in the product / community than google will from this point forward. (That's just my "fool me once" voice talking.)
- There really won't be much advantage to building in their playground vs building directly with any of the frontier models.
- Interest and distribution will be challenging because the bias is towards building your own game vs playing the games others make.
Every time I see a vibe-coded game, I think to "I should try that prompt" not "I want to play that game". I think personalized apps, experiences, and games are amazing but are a different beast and won't have the viral impact some creators are hoping for.
i generally agree, but i can imagine a world where a vibe coded game hits some certain "threshold" where it has a few properties:
- easily distributable, i.e there is a very clear way to play it fairly quickly
- it doesn't feel like slop even though it's vibe coded
- it's super fun
I predict that will be games, very very few, but there will be some that hit that inflection point likely through Twitch streamers picking it up. But I also predict that they will be a flash in the pan. Even fewer of the already few, the ones that will be here to stay will likely need to turn into an actual mini studio and take the development/customers seriously.
Most of them will be fun projects that die the day they get released simply because building a decent looking vibe coded game is commoditized. Maybe some fun twitter engagements, but nothing more.
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].
[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.
We have a "vibe coded" game on Steam[0] we're seeing the start of this trend on. There was a noticeable point when people stopped referring to it as "slop" (we put it out originally for very early feedback) and started referring to it as "vibe coded" (it's a way more mature game now). We have players who've played for 300+ hours, and 25% of players played the original demo for longer than 5 hours.
I actually think "easily distributable" is the least necessary of the three bullet points here (though arguably Steam does make things easily distributable, just not as easily as, say, web games or mobile games). IMO this is a maybe a really good "pick two" triangle.
I've been vibe coding a game and it's so far from a one shot at this stage. A week and a half solid of prompting with multiple agents. Haven't looked at a line of code, but been iterating, playing and refining constantly. In my mind there's no chance anyone else could get the same result without pointing an agent at my game and reverse engineering it.
Maybe we need yet another word for this kind of development. It's going to be way more common.
Side note: I feel like I could only get this far with Opus 5.5 level models and tooling (cloud agents). No chance I could get to this point without rolling my sleeves up and helping with the technical side with earlier models, and no chance I could get this far pretty much only using my phone.
I'm basically paying Anthropic for both the experience of building a game with a team of decent engineers (it's been exhilarating), and the game itself. It's been incredibly fun. I would never pay this money for something to one shot it for me. This current level has been such a sweet spot of pretty much every ask being nailed and it still feeling like it's my own creation. Something one shotting it for me would kill most of the fun and feeling of "I did this" ownership.
The scope of what a single prompt can do continues to grow. I’m in the same boat as you but not as optimistic that it’ll be something I enjoy as a craft for much longer.
"Maybe we need yet another word for this kind of development."
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.
I want this to be a distinction too, vibe coding with benchmarks and evals and making good architectural decisions for the LLM coder based on them takes a lot of mental energy and engineering insight. I've been making a voice agent and Claude's initial attempts were all based on best practices from two years ago. I had to do a lot of paper reading and research consolidation to get any kind of consistent, useable quality results.
Same, I've been working on some little projects and 3d environments, its quite enjoyable overall. This one is a procedurally driven voxel game - still a work in progress, but its turning out better than expected.
you are smoking crack and you don't understand hollywood. i don't think you understand indie games either... what happened is other forms of entertainment ate away at the attention share, and gaming is one of them.
Beyond the aggressive reply, I mean you are partially right? In addition to the battle for attention the financial model of windowing was destroyed or collapsed into streaming, changing the types/quality/choices of movies that get made, the nuances of what happens in movies and tv shows (fewer character actors) and many other dynamics including change in financial risk and borrowing costs, which in aggregate had an impact that many could argue was on par with the attention battle. Current trends may be able to shift downward the risk/cost trend as well as unlock new formats which may result in the rise of new producers/inputs.
I don't think your analysis is on point regarding the gaming market.
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.
> won't have the viral impact some creators are hoping for
Maybe that's not the point? Mario-maker is an incredible game. You can play shared levels, but the fun is all in building. Sometimes building is the game.
A few of my friends and I have been building a game for a few weeks. It has been really fun because anyone can make a level and it’s somewhat random what level you get sent to- each level could have wildly different controls/goals, but getting oriented is part of the fun. We also have a ton of inside jokes and memories cooked in - I don’t think it would be very fun for someone external, it’s fun because a group of friends are building something together and that process is very fun. This seems to be just more of a game printing machine
This is why no code / low code is exciting. It will allow people who excel in what you call the "most important" parts to be able to create games.
Now, I don't think Google Playground is the best demonstration of this point, given it's intended to be quick turnaround. None of what's shown in the demo video is particularly thoughtful. But it still is a good indication of things to come.
Most people are not remotely capable of designing even a mediocre game.
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.
I'll dig more into it. I did a quick search on Yandere Simulator, and it suggests that the terrible code and assets that aren't optimized is then impacting performance of the game, that it's laggy. This person might benefit from higher quality code, no? Someone who has a talent for making games, but just can't get there technically.
I feel like the person you're responding to is correct, AI/LLMs opens up game design to more people. Yes, good game design is hard and/or talent. Still, we see the same in other areas. Before smartphones and youtube, making "TV Shows" was hard, now tons of people are doing it because it became easy. Yes, the percent of crap is high, but it's also where Veritasium, Kurzgesagt, 3Blue1Brown, and 1000s and 1000s of other channels came from.
AI in games seems the same to me. It opens game dev to more people. Yes, like everything else that means more crap, but it also means tons more people who wouldn't have done it otherwise but now will and end up doing it well will put up their games and like those youtube channels, find a audience.
That said, Google Playground doesn't seem like the way forward.
Beware: "you are on the list" - "or upgrade to access instantly"
I upgraded, same message. I downgraded, they kept the money because now I have a month of a plan that I didn't need to check something I still don't have access to.
How do we incorporate advertising/monetization that compensates us the creators into this?
Google Playground is a destination, currently, with no monetization. So any gamedev effort and ideas we contribute into it are collected by Google.
EDIT:
It is offered as "for funsies with your pals in America, bros!" and it looks a lot like it's almost a feature in the Google Play portfolio which makes me think this wasn't thought through fully.
So Google doing something strategic here which is not clear to me.
- are they training their AI?
- are they collecting user feedback for an eventual commercial launch?
I don't see the appeal of scrolling through a list of games I could potentially make myself VS scrolling through a list of games I could immediately play.
The biggest challenge is designing the mechanics that make games fun. AI is not quite there yet but with enough data could potentially get there.
I put together a site a few months back to play around with 3d assets from Sketchfab and animated characters from Mixamo as an experiment: https://gobananas.co/
I could not test it because I am also facing 403 error - UK.
Anyway...
If you are interested, there is also an open-source way to do exactly this and it works with your existing subscriptions and local models too - your data is kept private on your devices.
You can make the game, stream it directly from your AI hub or play it locally on your devices. You can cast it on the TV while converting your phone into a controller (with haptics support) or you can connect physical game controllers for local co-op.
Off-topic, but that showcase image in this repo is truly pathetic. "What should I get Mum?", "find me something to do on Sunday morning" - is this seriously what people need AI for now?
What is the minimum age required to use `Google Playground`? Why?
> CONTENT ACCESS LIMITED
To access Playground, you’ll just need to verify your age. Confirming you’re old enough helps us keep the platform safe and secure for everyone.
104 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 33.5 ms ] threadWell ok then
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.
Happens when I click Press Start. Did Google kill this before they shipped it?
oh playground... you were so young :'(
1. Games are highly complex systems, so for example adding a fun mechanic from one game to another game can actually make that game less fun, and AI has no way to know, you just have to playtest it.
2. Games are evergreen (people still play and love the original Zelda/Mario/Tetris) and social (you want to share your love of game XYZ with others), so there's literally no reason for anyone to play a purely derivative game, when you can just play the original.
Eventually AI will be able to make perfect assets and all the other stuff AROUND making a fun game, but the game design will always be a human thing. At best, AI will come up with a bunch of game design experiments that a human will need to playtest and provide feedback on.
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
And I genuinely hope there will be some categories of games/music/books/art where human input is still needed and preferred. Currently I'm already a handful of bulletpoints down on the list of stuff I thought AI would never be able to do, and it's been kind of destabilizing
What Google Playground really needs is their own currency designed to hide the true cost of every purchase that children can earn by making popular games. Then Google can profit from child labor the same way Roblox does. https://www.classaction.org/news/roblox-lawsuit-alleges-enti...
if we can't even write it down, how is an llm going to be able to ace it?
I imagine AI will be making semi-complex indie-style games before we see an AI movie worth watching
"Make a fun game" or "create good art" is the cognitive equivalent of trying to solve the halting problem. These are some undecidable problems that cannot be solved by just throwing more GPUs at it.
Now, if you were to ask an AI to make an "addictive game", I'm sure it will eventually be able to.
- easily distributable, i.e there is a very clear way to play it fairly quickly
- it doesn't feel like slop even though it's vibe coded
- it's super fun
I predict that will be games, very very few, but there will be some that hit that inflection point likely through Twitch streamers picking it up. But I also predict that they will be a flash in the pan. Even fewer of the already few, the ones that will be here to stay will likely need to turn into an actual mini studio and take the development/customers seriously.
Most of them will be fun projects that die the day they get released simply because building a decent looking vibe coded game is commoditized. Maybe some fun twitter engagements, but nothing more.
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].
[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.
[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/4489800/Alchemy_Survivors...
I actually think "easily distributable" is the least necessary of the three bullet points here (though arguably Steam does make things easily distributable, just not as easily as, say, web games or mobile games). IMO this is a maybe a really good "pick two" triangle.
Maybe we need yet another word for this kind of development. It's going to be way more common.
Side note: I feel like I could only get this far with Opus 5.5 level models and tooling (cloud agents). No chance I could get to this point without rolling my sleeves up and helping with the technical side with earlier models, and no chance I could get this far pretty much only using my phone.
I'm basically paying Anthropic for both the experience of building a game with a team of decent engineers (it's been exhilarating), and the game itself. It's been incredibly fun. I would never pay this money for something to one shot it for me. This current level has been such a sweet spot of pretty much every ask being nailed and it still feeling like it's my own creation. Something one shotting it for me would kill most of the fun and feeling of "I did this" ownership.
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.
https://icemunk.github.io/voxelstrike-site/
```
Gaming will undergo the movie industry cycle of 2010-2025.
First, Only AAA (GTA-6) or micro-indie games will make money. mid-budget games will get eaten out. <---2010 Hollywood
Until, people get AAA exhaustion and game creation keeps getting cheaper and cheaper.
Then a single auteur makes a mid-budget game with a recognizable aesthetic, that makes AAA money.
A studio (A-24) realizes that auteur curation is profitable, and builds recognize-able identity.
The studio (A-24) starts churning out reliable hitters, that people buy because of the studio more than the game itself.
AAA stagnates, hires the most recent auteur to make their next AAA game with full control.
If it goes bust, then AAA tries again.
If it goes boom, they pick the next auteur for their next AAA game. <---Hollywood is here in 2026
```
I think it is a “yes, and…”
Though what do I know.
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.
Maybe that's not the point? Mario-maker is an incredible game. You can play shared levels, but the fun is all in building. Sometimes building is the game.
Exactly! The fantasy is the game with an audience of N=1, or N < Dunbar.
The platforms are conflating this obvious use case with "make a viral game that not even I care about". Which has an audience of N=0.
Now, I don't think Google Playground is the best demonstration of this point, given it's intended to be quick turnaround. None of what's shown in the demo video is particularly thoughtful. But it still is a good indication of things to come.
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.
Look into Yandere Simulator, Undertale. There are videos explaining the horrible code practices but those are stellar experience
I'd guess this might be one of the videos you were referring to, for others who are curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXotP-9LcDY
AI in games seems the same to me. It opens game dev to more people. Yes, like everything else that means more crap, but it also means tons more people who wouldn't have done it otherwise but now will and end up doing it well will put up their games and like those youtube channels, find a audience.
That said, Google Playground doesn't seem like the way forward.
I upgraded, same message. I downgraded, they kept the money because now I have a month of a plan that I didn't need to check something I still don't have access to.
Google Playground is a destination, currently, with no monetization. So any gamedev effort and ideas we contribute into it are collected by Google.
EDIT:
It is offered as "for funsies with your pals in America, bros!" and it looks a lot like it's almost a feature in the Google Play portfolio which makes me think this wasn't thought through fully.
So Google doing something strategic here which is not clear to me.
- are they training their AI?
- are they collecting user feedback for an eventual commercial launch?
- are they building hype?
Why did Google spend the money on this?
For "creator": Donation link, with some "pay 2 win" items.
I put together a site a few months back to play around with 3d assets from Sketchfab and animated characters from Mixamo as an experiment: https://gobananas.co/
Anyway...
If you are interested, there is also an open-source way to do exactly this and it works with your existing subscriptions and local models too - your data is kept private on your devices.
You can make the game, stream it directly from your AI hub or play it locally on your devices. You can cast it on the TV while converting your phone into a controller (with haptics support) or you can connect physical game controllers for local co-op.
https://github.com/pdparchitect/noodle
The README does not talk about this feature but you can find videos in my twitter account.
> CONTENT ACCESS LIMITED To access Playground, you’ll just need to verify your age. Confirming you’re old enough helps us keep the platform safe and secure for everyone.
Please hire some QA instead of embarrassing yourself this bad