This is why AI won't be producing (real) video games any time soon

03 Nov, 2025

The newest thing in the AI hype is AI-people prophesising that "AI will be able to ship complete video games in X months/years"¹.

If you are like me and dream about trying game dev, this probably sounds scary. Already there around a thousand games published monthly on Steam alone, and AI slop is already finding it's way to places like the PlayStation store (with human assistance, so far). With AI producing games on a conveyor belt it will more like ten thousand.

The idea of prompting full games is advertised as a good thing: no more gatekeeping with complicated programming languages and environments. I like learning new things, but yeah, generally making things more accessible is a good thing, I guess.²

But there is one fundamental flaw to this whole vibe developing entire games by AI idea. Let's look at what LLMs are the best at: creating text. It is literally-literally what they are created for at the first place.

So this is where they should really shine already. But are they? I am sure online bookstores are full of AI slop already, but I never heard anyone seriously considering reading AI content as a real form of entertainment. Not even the AI-prophets are waving around copies of Lord of the Rings 4: Rohan Drift.

AI should excel at writing copies based on an existing corpus, but it cannot even do that at a enjoyable level, let alone coming up with something new (of which it is just by design incapable of). If it could really do that, the tech bros wouldn't shut up about it. Sure AI can imitate the style of writers, sound like someone for a couple of sentences. But it only works like a mildly amusing party trick. You read it, you say "heh", and move on with your life. It gets old quick, for more than a couple of paragraphs AI written texts are a real pain to read.

The same is true for AI generated pictures. It is widely available, it is free, and I am sure companies would have no second thoughts about cutting costs on artists and use electronic slave labour instead. But you will see surprisingly few example of AI content on billboards (at least in Europe, 2025), and most of the time even AI-ish stuff is obviously edited by humans, they just ditched the stock photos for free generated pictures. Why? Because AI looks cheap. People associate it with garbage scammy products.

Back to games: so LLMs cannot write at a level where even people into LLMs consider it anything they can monetize or brag about. AI cannot create still images good enough for money hungry big corporations. How realistic it is that they will be producing something so complex and interdisciplinary like video games any time soon? Something people will be willing spend 60-100-500 hours with, and not just try it, say "heh, that was interesting" and forget about it.

I can imagine those weird mobile games seen in ads will be (or already are) AI generated, but they were meant to trick 5 years-olds to buy premium currencies with their parents' credit card in the first place. This is exactly the realm of AI content currently: garbage, scams and right wing extremism.

Summa summarum: I find it amusing that AI people constantly come up with more fantastic promises while they fail to deliver on the old ones. "We created these text generating engines. Currently they sound like a costumer service employee on MDMA. But in one year they will be generating AAA games on demands." It is like saying I can do a hundred push ups, and when people ask me to demonstrate, I do 2 then I promise to do a thousand in 6 months.