[lishali88]

We are happy our custom image models are liked by our users and I think helping game devs make good game assets/art is a valuable problem to solve, but not one we are focused on. The first 3-4 years of Rosebud we focused on image generation based app, so I have thought a lot about the opportunity of focusing on a image/asset gen as the main feature of the product. I would argue that it generally has a thinner moat with more capped upside and can more easily be toppled by foundational model companies like OpenAI (with the exception of Midjourney, which is amazing because they have the moat of a community that guides their stronger aesthetics). Furthermore there are a number of other services that focus just on asset gen, and we allow uploads (from assets generated elsewhere) in addition to our own custom models for asset generation for that reason.

The opportunity I am excited most about, and what Rosebud is focused on, is to increase the number of creators of games by many orders of magnitude. That is why we are leaning into an llm native approach for game dev. I also know that the current best models for code gen will be improved dramatically in the next few years and that will have have an even greater impact on the consumer behaviour of who gets to make games and who gets to build software in general. Building a platform around game creation, not just asset gen, will be able to absorb this impending tidal wave of change that I don’t think even incumbent developer tools like Unity or Unreal can address as fast as a startup such as ourselves. The entire game creation work flow is going to get much more intuitive, faster and ultimately be able to generate the quality of games to compete with AAA. Now it is not there, but soon it will be. The game genres we support may look more opinionated and constrained now (ai characters, RPGs, some 3D) but that’s the first step in being able to let our agent based code gen platform perform well in prod. We are making choices that allow us to absorb llm advances later and that generalize well once those improvements happen.

Also, on the IP point, once we let people monetize on the platform, we will be much more strict about what gets to be monetized (i.e only things where it’s ok from an IP point of view).

[jncfhnb]

But Unreal is not tooling. It’s a game engine. It has physics and rendering and audio and networking. Unreal is not a competitor.

You cannot possibly expect an LLM to be spitting out a AAA competitive engine on top of a great game built with it. If you really want to achieve that level of sophistication then you should probably be building on top of unreal tbh. It’s a huuuuge undertaking. And the AI driven asset store side of things feels like it’s very separate to me

[loic-rosebud]

We're not looking at spitting out a AAA game engine. Our goal is more to lower the barrier to entry, for both assets and code. So, yes that means that to start with, the games created may not be AAA quality (ok that's a bit of an understatement). But the same has been said about Roblox. With time, the games will improve. And enabling everyone to create games will surely unleash more creativity. And who can say what could be achieved in a few years?

[jprete]

If your goal is to increase game creators by order of magnitudes, and the method involves putting people in a position to make games alone, what exactly is going to keep the game market from being totally destroyed by an endless stream of very-low-value games?

[lishali88]

See my comment above for another thread and the subsequent comments: "My take is that whenever we can break down barriers to allow more creators to enter, it's ultimately better for the entire industry. As a platform we can work on curating and filtering for high quality game content from our users, but that's a problem of curation rather than artificially limiting creation for fear of people making low quality content. Most content quality like many things are power law distributed anyways."