This market seeks to predict the ability to use AI to generate meaningful parts of an impressive game.
We are not concerned with precision down to the level of generating a good Settings menu, but trying to take a qualitative look at how relevant overall the AI is.
Individual examples that would cause this market to resolve YES:
- All (or the overwhelming majority) of assets are AI generated -> YES
- All game mechanics are AI generated -> YES
- All the story / dialogue elements are AI generated in a visual novel -> YES
At the end of 2026 if this market closes and no game has met the critera, this market will resolve NO.
FAQ:
What counts as a game?
I am fleshing out two main requirements:
1. It must be listed as a game for sale on Steam, Epic, game consoles, or equivalent online game storefronts.
2. There must be tangible game rules, with explicit victory and loss states.
(Open ended chat sandboxes are not the interesting question, as we basically already have those.)What if the assets are AI-generated but human-edited?
For the purposes of this market this will NOT count.
Continuing the trend of these markets:
Certainly worried that a game like this could easily make those revenue numbers while still taking deep profit losses. So, I think market hype by dumb money will prove me wrong, considering what we saw with NFT games, but $1 million is still a high bar even for raw revenue and I'm moderately satisfied that the market requirements, if held rigorously, will give NO an honest chance.
@SneakySly would you be so kind as to sharpen where you would draw the line between App and Toy? I know this is a perennial & boring distinction, just would appreciate more color on your definition for the sake of this market.
(AI dungeon is listed as an Adventure Game according to apple / the developer)
@MaxBittker AI Dungeon is definitely not a game for this market.
Although a truly good AI DM is an interesting market in itself, these markets aren't looking for that. It is more about getting at the technology of something like Stable Diffusion for game dev.
I will be pretty permissive here, but we need tangible game structure, rules, end states, and the main method of interaction should not be through typing text into a chat client.
@SneakySly Thanks! Unfortunately it seems very likely that "overwhelming majority of assets" will be tricky to discern unambiguously when it's time to potentially resolve this.
Oh well! I trust your judgement and it's a fun market : )
I may comment with some more examples that are <$1MM revenue for your judgement as they crop up this year, as that's a depressurized way to establish the boundary
@SneakySly
WDYT:
Arrowmancer: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id1530311867
"Are all the characters really drawn by an AI?"
Yes! The portraits you see are not remixed parts drawn by human artists, but faces born from the imagination of an inhuman creator.
We trained a machine learning algorithm to draw independently of guidance from humans.
@MaxBittker Definitely a game.
Seems to use AI drawn character portraits, but every other aspect of the game is not AI generated. Is that accurate?
@SneakySly What feature makes it not a game? how would I identify whether something similar to novelai was a game?
@L One option is "it's a game if it's on Steam, Epic or another online storefront, or if it's on a console, and it is claimed to be a game." Of course, this would cut out AI Dungeon and the like.
@AaronKaufman That is reasonable. AI Dungeon is more of a toy in my view, not actually a game anyway.