alt Hacker NewsThey really want a "no dogshit" filter, I imagine. So a filter for actual effort and care.
Slop is inversely proportional to time invested.
But yeah, already a year ago you would see on Steam, twenty almost identical games released on the same day.
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As a counterpoint, I spent several years working on a game that's absolute shit. (And I can name similar examples but I won't!) Meanwhile I've made much better games with AI. (Or rather, AI made them...)
Quality is decoupled from time invested. That was already true before AI. But time is still probably the best proxy we have.
Maybe bringing back Greenlight would be good. Nobody would Greenlight 10 identical puzzle games uploaded on the same day. But they would accept high quality games, regardless of how they were made.
Exactly this.
Ten years ago, you could already code one tower defense or "farming simulator" or bejeweled-alike game, and then reskin it 6 different ways for cheap and release the "new versions". The only new thing is the quantity of slop, but slop games certainly existed before AI.
So long as user reviews are adequately filtered to be real players, some slight tweaks to the Steam search algorithm should do a good job at handling it.
No one will notice or care if Claude wrote boilerplate code for your game. Everyone will notice if you vibecoded the mechanics whole cloth. The people who don't want to play sloppy games, already are avoiding sloppy games just fine.