What AI Means for the Indies | Did We Get This Wrong?

Live stream. Pull up. Tonight we get into what AI actually means for independent creators, and whether a lot of us got this wrong from the start.

The pitch was that large language modeling closes the gap. Whatever deficiency you thought you had, the tech evens the score, and the smaller guy finally gets a shot. What did not get considered is that the exact same technology can be pointed right back at you.

Freya Holmer posted a 50 second clip of a Tetris prototype where the whole board rotates. A vibecoded clone video went up roughly four and a half hours later. Charlie Greenman built Rotris in about a day. Blockfall landed within days, and she counted up to four cloned versions, one of which turned up on mobile app stores. Her own version still is not out.

Lucas Pope, who made Papers Please and Return of the Obra Dinn, no longer says what he is working on because he does not want it slurped up by AI.

Steelkrill Studio’s The Backrooms 1998 was allegedly decompiled and reissued by another outfit. He found out when a commenter accused him of re-releasing his own game. The copy got pulled and the publisher banned, and the games reappeared under different publisher names.

Then there is the flood. Look at the volume going up on Steam and how much of it is generated. When a market floods, people do not go hunting for the unique thing. They revert back to what they already know. That hands the marketing advantage straight back to the mainstream, and that moat is the part nobody wants to talk about.

Meanwhile Epic and Tim Sweeney have been open about acceleration, and Xbox just stood up Xbox Labs around AI assisted porting and modding. The big dogs are getting ahead of the conversation. The indies have no familiar name, no marketing, and no perceived legitimacy to fall back on.

So where does that leave the smaller creator, and what does marketing even look like when showing your progress is what gets you cloned? That is the conversation. Not doomer, realist. Come make your case in chat.

Plus whatever else comes up and whatever y’all bring.