Is Game Design still a valid LP?

[Eskilon]

Hi. I have a background in programming and I'm thinking on pursuing this from scratch(never built a game before).

The thing is, with the advancements of AI, can Game Design still be a good career path down the line(10-20 years from now)? Stuff like https://deepmind.google/blog/genie-3-a-new-frontier-for-world-models/ makes me wonder if this field is still a viable survival strategy.

@Leo Gura You input on this is really important

Edited Tuesday at 05:12 PM by Eskilon

[Leo Gura]

Yes! Of course.

AI cannot and will not make games.

Nobody appreciates how insanely complicated games are. Making a game is a million times harder than making a Hollywood film.

I was developing a game and AI wasn't able to do even 1% of the work.

No AI is replacing game design. Coding snippets it might do.

If AI can do game design it can replace every human job on Earth. So in that case no career you pick is safe. But that won't happen.

Be ware of AI group-think. Idiots who talk about AI have no comprehension of the complexity of intelligence and creativity. Nothing is replacing that in our lifetime.

I have such a deep understanding of the challenges of game design that it is laughable that an LLM can do it. People who haven't designed serious games have no idea what it entails. It is mountains upon mountains of highly nuanced creative work.

AI cannot even replace concept artists. I tried. I spent 100s of hours trying and it does not work. Not even 5%. Not even close. I had to budget $50k for concept artists because AI could not do it.

Edited Tuesday at 05:45 PM by Leo Gura

[Eskilon]

@Leo Gura Wow thanks for the response.

I am lucky to have your input because you came from this field and still have interest in it, so your words are comforting haha. But I am not a conformist!! 

I will pursue this, will be challenging, but what else is there to do right? 

 

Edited Tuesday at 06:03 PM by Eskilon

[Hojo]

Ai is random. I use it for music and its just creating random things that sound similar. You cant tell it what to do things will always change with it. So if you have a character and want it to make the character do something it will change the way the character looks. It dosent have any memory at all.

[Leo Gura]

8 minutes ago, Hojo said:

So if you have a character and want it to make the character do something it will change the way the character looks. It dosent have any memory at all.

That limitation they can improve pretty easily I think. So I wouldn't count on that for keeping your job.

[Hojo]

@Leo GuraI think it will be way harder. The memory will create limitation on the LLM. Its akin to creating karma for the LLM. Right now I think AI is like in a dreaming state. If you want it to have memory it will have to limit beleifs and I think weird things will happen.

The jump would be from dreaming to reality.

[ryoko]

@Leo Gura are you making a game? what style are you going for? 

[Ryan M]

18 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Yes! Of course.

AI cannot and will not make games.

Nobody appreciates how insanely complicated games are. Making a game is a million times harder than making a Hollywood film.

I was developing a game and AI wasn't able to do even 1% of the work.

No AI is replacing game design. Coding snippets it might do.

If AI can do game design it can replace every human job on Earth. So in that case no career you pick is safe. But that won't happen.

Be ware of AI group-think. Idiots who talk about AI have no comprehension of the complexity of intelligence and creativity. Nothing is replacing that in our lifetime.

I have such a deep understanding of the challenges of game design that it is laughable that an LLM can do it. People who haven't designed serious games have no idea what it entails. It is mountains upon mountains of highly nuanced creative work.

AI cannot even replace concept artists. I tried. I spent 100s of hours trying and it does not work. Not even 5%. Not even close. I had to budget $50k for concept artists because AI could not do it.

That must mean GTA 6 will be the most impressive feat of mankind lol. Can’t even imagine the work that must go into a game that takes 10+ years to make

Besides that I honestly thought AI would easily be able to make video games relatively soon. Kinda disappointing from a consumer perspective 

 

[Alex M]

20 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Yes! Of course.

AI cannot and will not make games.

Nobody appreciates how insanely complicated games are. Making a game is a million times harder than making a Hollywood film.

I was developing a game and AI wasn't able to do even 1% of the work.

No AI is replacing game design. Coding snippets it might do.

If AI can do game design it can replace every human job on Earth. So in that case no career you pick is safe. But that won't happen.

Be ware of AI group-think. Idiots who talk about AI have no comprehension of the complexity of intelligence and creativity. Nothing is replacing that in our lifetime.

I have such a deep understanding of the challenges of game design that it is laughable that an LLM can do it. People who haven't designed serious games have no idea what it entails. It is mountains upon mountains of highly nuanced creative work.

AI cannot even replace concept artists. I tried. I spent 100s of hours trying and it does not work. Not even 5%. Not even close. I had to budget $50k for concept artists because AI could not do it.

I find the same about web development. Sure AI can bosh out simple code snippets and small tiny bit's (that generally end up needing to be debugged). But anything larger is just way to complex for AI to develop. Then you have people that don't understand this, they create a simple little app or something and they think web/app coding is dead (Diary of CEO being one of these) 🤦‍♂️

[Leo Gura]

@Alex M Yes, this is all part of the AI conformist hype train.

Non-experts do not understand the complexities of creative work.

The Stage Orange materialist worldview believes that intelligence and creativity is nothing more than crunching numbers. Which is false.

Edited 20 hours ago by Leo Gura

[Space]

On 11/11/2025 at 5:29 PM, Leo Gura said:

Yes! Of course.

AI cannot and will not make games.

Nobody appreciates how insanely complicated games are. Making a game is a million times harder than making a Hollywood film.

I was developing a game and AI wasn't able to do even 1% of the work.

No AI is replacing game design. Coding snippets it might do.

If AI can do game design it can replace every human job on Earth. So in that case no career you pick is safe. But that won't happen.

Be ware of AI group-think. Idiots who talk about AI have no comprehension of the complexity of intelligence and creativity. Nothing is replacing that in our lifetime.

I have such a deep understanding of the challenges of game design that it is laughable that an LLM can do it. People who haven't designed serious games have no idea what it entails. It is mountains upon mountains of highly nuanced creative work.

AI cannot even replace concept artists. I tried. I spent 100s of hours trying and it does not work. Not even 5%. Not even close. I had to budget $50k for concept artists because AI could not do it.

Making a Hollywood film is also insanely complicated and hard but I understand the complexities of a game. Side note: Hollywood doesn't really exist anymore, the vast majority of studio films are made here in the UK. 

Aside from that, the trap that most AI groupies fall into is seeing great AI stuff and then applying that to real world creative projects, like games, films or illustration. But you actually need to go the other way around and start with the real world creative project and then try to use AI to solve those creative problems. What you find is that AI is completely incapable of completing most high level creative projects in any meaningful way.

Yes we have some cool AI short films, but try to direct it into making any larger, more complicated or more specific and its fails.
 

 

[Leo Gura]

27 minutes ago, Space said:

Making a Hollywood film is also insanely complicated and hard

A Hollywood film is shot in 100 days.

You can't make a playable prototype of a game in a year.

A proper game takes 3-5 years to make. Hollywood can't even imagine such numbers. They would shit their pants if they had to work on a single film full time for 5 years.

The last Legend of Zelda game had 200 people working on it for 5 years with a $200 million budget. The amount of engineering and design that goes into a Zelda game is insane. And that's a sequel which leverages an existing engine and proven game design.

People do not understand how hard these games are to make. It is a miracle they get made at all.

Edited 17 hours ago by Leo Gura

[- Adam -]

Compare apples to apples @Leo Gura.
From the first inspirations to a finished film is counted in years too, especially for ambitious movies.
 

 

[Leo Gura]

1 minute ago, - Adam - said:

From the first inspirations

First inspiration doesn't count. What counts is full time work.

There are some exceptional films like the Avatar sequels which took a decade to make. But most flims are made quick and dirty.

[AION]

46 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

 

The last Legend of Zelda game had 200 people working on it for 5 years with a $200 million budget. The amount of engineering and design that goes into a Zelda game is insane. And that's a sequel which leverages an existing engine and proven game design. 

Because that game looks like it is from 2008. For 200 mil I'm expecting at least 2018 graphics.

Edited 16 hours ago by AION

[Zen LaCroix]

3 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

A Hollywood film is shot in 100 days.

You can't make a playable prototype of a game in a year.

A proper game takes 3-5 years to make. Hollywood can't even imagine such numbers. They would shit their pants if they had to work on a single film full time for 5 years.

The last Legend of Zelda game had 200 people working on it for 5 years with a $200 million budget. The amount of engineering and design that goes into a Zelda game is insane. And that's a sequel which leverages an existing engine and proven game design.

People do not understand how hard these games are to make. It is a miracle they get made at all.

The Lord of the Rings movies were in post production for 5 years

[Cubbage]

7 hours ago, AION said:

Because that game looks like it is from 2008. For 200 mil I'm expecting at least 2018 graphics.

Art direction > graphics 

[Space]

11 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

A Hollywood film is shot in 100 days.

You can't make a playable prototype of a game in a year.

A proper game takes 3-5 years to make. Hollywood can't even imagine such numbers. They would shit their pants if they had to work on a single film full time for 5 years.

The last Legend of Zelda game had 200 people working on it for 5 years with a $200 million budget. The amount of engineering and design that goes into a Zelda game is insane. And that's a sequel which leverages an existing engine and proven game design.

People do not understand how hard these games are to make. It is a miracle they get made at all.

We're not disagreeing. I don't know anything about making games so i'm not pointing to that. I'm merely pointing to the fact that making awesome films and tv shows that people genuinely want to watch are also, in their own way, vastly more difficult than people think. 

Whilst a motion picture is shot in 100 days, it takes 2-3 years to make with pre-production and post production, thousands of people and a logistical nightmare you wouldn't believe. The amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to make a simple scene of two people talking in a car is insane. But it has to be done because it has to look a certain way and directing an AI-generator to do that is impossible.

A lot of people do work on a single film for 5 years -  its called a TV show, like GOT for example. Or the new HP series is booked in for 5-6 years. 

I'm not disregarding the complexities of making a game though.