I’m going to go out on a limb and predict the opposite.

I think “the youth” are going to grow up with a Cambrian explosion of styles, mashups, callbacks, revivals, etc.

Right now a vibecoded game just uses the generic style. But you could easily imagine the kid saying to Claude “rebuild this game but in the style of that old show [Samurai Jack | Ren and Stimpy | … ]. We are so early in the tech curve, market penetration is still very low, and the “creator-years” in the medium is tiny; it’ll be 10x in a year if not more.

AI is amazing at style transfer, and so there’s a huge payoff for exploring and learning references to existing artists.

(I also think copyright will die pretty soon for similar reasons, that’s a separate take though.)

You can change the stylization with LLMs. I think what we're seeing is simply any barriers to code/design/art/music/etc completely going away.

But those barriers going away now means that the starting point is much closer to where the finish line used to be. Like a few years ago this would have been an upper tier beat-em-up. I think we're still early enough in the window that I'd still call this upper tier, but the reality is that it's also now something that an uncle can vibe code for his nephew over a weekend.

In general I think this is going to be very good for everybody, but it's going to completely destroy the software as a problem-solving industry, and make the software as entertainment industry much more competitive.

That was already happening before AI, with in-house game engines dying off and all converging on the same quasi-realistic style and often the exact same assets.

Games used to have very unique, noticeable styles that you could instantly place from a screenshot. Now everything just looks like Unreal, Unity, or generic 2D.

Hopefully AI might actually make it easier to be more ambitious with unique art styles, should the developer choose to do so.

I'm kind of hoping that the youth will recognize that stuff that can be made with AI is just nothing special anymore, and find something that is (or still is) special. I don't know what that is, maybe something that AI can't do on a fundamental level (maybe something physical?).

(Of course, at this point it might be necessary to point out that "the youth" is a diverse bunch, and some will be like this and others like that.)

This style reminds me of those mobile game ads with helpless characters that need YOUR help not to freeze or something. Probably the exaggerated facial expressions.

Or the small Battle Wagon around the height of a child quintupling in size the next frame. Kiddos having fun is the main mission though :)

This nephew game is indistinguishable from 90s arcade game styling.