HACKER Q&A
📣 eveningsun

Why isn't AI spawning profitable indie games?


Everyone’s hyped about Claude Code, Nano Banana models, and how AI can now “build a game in 30 minutes for $ 20.”

If that’s true—why don’t we see a flood of ultra-low-cost, high-quality tower defense games (like Kingdom Rush) built with AI, raking in serious revenue?

After all:

Art? → Image generators + style locking. Code? → LLMs can scaffold Unity/Godot logic. Balancing? → Maybe RL or even manual tuning on a tiny scope. Audio? → AI voice + music tools exist.

And yet… the App Store isn’t overrun with polished, profitable Kingdom Rush–style games made by solo devs using AI. Why?

P.S. Yes, this post was AI-generated—my first attempt at market research before launching Kingdom Rush: Nano Banana Edition.

  👤 CamperBob2 Accepted Answer ✓
Because as soon as the indie audience catches wind that a game uses AI for any code, artwork, or writing, there goes the "indie" cred. It's not cool anymore. Worst case, some ludds launch a vocal public crusade against you.

Rest assured, there is plenty of AI being used, but the game devs know better than to talk about it.

👤 Alex2037
because 90% of people raving about 1000% productivity boost from LLMs are students and junior-level programmers, whose productivity was nonexistent in the first place. for programmers with 5+ years of experience with the tools they're using, LLMs are a 10-20% boost, at most, and I'm saying that as a very AI-positive individual.
👤 falloutx
AI cant make complex games yet (complex here means more than one level consistently, its a very low bar, a game dev with 20min experience can achieve this). When you use a tool like Unreal or Unity or Godot, its not just code, its also thinking about lighting, music, art, surfaces, shaders, materials and so much more. And also a lot of things have to be done in a visual way (connecting nodes, placing models)

Creating a game, even when you have capable team of 2-3 members, its very very broad objective. You have to be master of so many things. During the vibe coding jam, there were so many games build by AI, but none of them were any good, AI was making three.js games mostly and it was placing objects so stupidly that the term ASS (artificial stupidity sourced) code is a term on discord indie scene. For eg, in a car came it was placing objects on the road.

You can see https://geminimakesrally.vercel.app/ and judge for yourself. Its terrible and its funny for now. It uses the latest Gemini 3 Pro model from December. Can you sell this game? Maybe on mobile if you want to add to the slop store more, I personally dont want to post slop games like this. Removed it from my itch too as soon as we completed the

And before you say its me being shit at vibecoding, yes fair, but I am fairly competitive in non game vibecoding: https://plonkedin.vercel.app/ (made in couple mins)