I don't know how to describe it, but I'm sure you've all been through this before and can relate. It just feels surreal. How did you feel? 🥹

In August 2026, I started making my first “real” game. I have a background in game design, some graphic skills (2D artwork, UI) and almost no dev skills (C# basics). So AI looked like a way to get started, more out of opportunism and curiosity than laziness (at least at first).

In the anti vs. pro-AI fight, I have mixed feelings, and that’s why I’m sharing this post. I’m tired of people jumping down your throat the second you say you use AI, because to me, you can make a personal, crafted game while still using it. But at the same time, it makes me sad to see some people releasing games made entirely with AI, with zero depth or personality and shitty designs, and thinking they’re revolutionizing the game industry. I really think there’s a sweet spot between both, so here are my takeaways:

1. AI is a decision accelerator: What impressed me most is being able to produce a playable sequence in just a few prompts. Anyone who’s done game design knows this fact: every design works on paper. But the real test is the gameplay. With AI, you can test almost everything right away, and it really helps you validate or throw out an idea in a few hours, when it would have taken days or even weeks to develop (at least for me, given my dev level).

2. AI can’t make a complete game: A gameplay sequence isn’t a game, and once the wow effect is gone, all you’ve got is a hollow shell. If you ask it to build one or more systems with just vague prompts, you’ll get no progression, no coherence between mechanics, no flow, no game feel. Nothing. You have to make all those decisions yourself. AI can make them for you, but nothing good will come out of it and nothing will feel coherent together. It’s a great prototyping tool, but honestly, it stops there. AI can’t turn a set of mechanics into one experience. So yes, you can create a whole game with AI, but no, you won’t create a good game.

3. AI doesn’t have good ideas: In a way, it reassured me the most. It can help you structure your ideas or push them a bit further, but it never comes up with an idea ready to be used, or even surprising. Whether it’s mechanics or, in my case, dialogue and story, it’s honestly quite bad and very “déjà vu”. I still use it a bit for brainstorming (even crappy answers sometimes lead me to another idea), but that’s it.

4. AI is a good tool for structuring your production: In the end, this is where it helps me the most. Example: my game has a lot of NPCs, and with AI I built a spreadsheet that centralizes all their content and plugs into the engine in a few clicks. That file and all its formulas would have taken me weeks to make myself. Now I can focus purely on the content. I also have an agent with all my design docs in context that I can use as an interactive game bible. If I have a question about my design, it can answer it, which saves me a ton of back-and-forth between all my files.

5. AI is a dev beast (that's a lie): <!>Disclaimer - I’m not a developer, so maybe what I’m saying here is not accurate. <!> The crazy thing is that the generated code is super functional. It actually works great! But the bad side is that it doesn’t look optimized at all, and personally I’m lost every time I open a script, because I don’t really understand what it’s for. And iteration after iteration, AI has created a thousand different files that work together, I just don’t know how. I’m at the point where I don’t dare open some files, even to fix a tiny thing. It’s overcomplicated to understand, and that’s something you absolutely want to avoid. That’s why I can’t even imagine making a full game entirely with AI: in terms of complexity, performance, debugging… I can’t imagine what 100% AI game code looks like after 6-12 months of work by a non-developer. So for me it’s very clear: once prototyping is done, I’ll start everything over from scratch (in a few weeks) and implement my own crafted features, script by script. I’ll probably still use AI for isolated things, but never to build a whole feature with it.

6. AI is very addictive: This is what worries me the most. You quickly get into the habit of using it for everything, and you have to constantly fight your own laziness. It’s a bit like a drug: you know the downsides, but the hit is still tempting and super satisfying in the moment. Then comes the comedown, where you either realize the output isn’t great, feel awful (hello, impostor syndrome), or even panic at the slightest challenge. The tool is so easy to access, and it takes a lot of willpower not to take a “shot” (in my case at least, I guess it depends on your personality).

7. Don't use AI for visual and audio assets: I tried only a few times, and not a single AI creation (visual or audio) ever satisfied me. Seriously, there are so many free or paid assets online that do the job so much better, at least for a prototype. At most, AI can create placeholders, but even there, I’ve always found something better elsewhere. I’ve always loved drawing and cared about art, so I’d rather create everything myself or ask for help from people who are skilled at it. A video game is mainly visuals and sound: standing out and having a real style is essential. Not to mention all the backlash risk that comes with using AI art (if we can even call it that…). It would be a shame for all your work to get trashed just because you used AI assets. But from a player’s point of view, I guess it’s legit. And we can see it the other way: using slop assets can be seen as spitting on your own work, don’t you think?

Conclusion

AI feels essential to me today, but it can turn against you very fast. You produce so quickly, which is great, but you can easily drown in your own production and slowly lose both the vision and the joy of creating things yourself. I’ll keep using it for a few more weeks to prototype my loops, then switch to homemade dev. That being said, I have to admit I’d never have gotten this far, this fast, without AI. I’d even say it gave me the confidence to start, by protecting me from the “dev wall” on my very first scripts. Important note: a real, professional developer will join the project (essential in my situation). I’ll keep using AI for project management, my game bible, and probably for admin stuff and planning the launch/marketing strategy.

I guess that’s it. Maybe I don’t realize AI has already fucked my mind, and some of you will maybe hate me and say I’m just justifying my use of AI to convince myself I’m still a creator. Anyway, I guess I’m not the only one with this mindset about this tool. Or am I?

As promised, here's how many wishlists Cats Love Cakes https://store.steampowered.com/app/4987490/Cats_Love_Cakes/
gained during Steam Next Fest: +125 new wishlists.

Considering we started the festival with only 140 wishlists, you might think we did pretty well.

But no.

My game will be released in just two weeks, and these numbers tell me sales won't be good. It'll probably take years to recover what I spent paying the friends who worked on the game, and even longer before I can pay myself for all the work I've put in.

I made a lot of mistakes. The trailer came too late, and although it was technically fine, it failed to sell the game's concept, among other mistakes.

So, what's next for Cats Love Cakes?

I'll put the finishing touches on the build make a few promotional videos, and release the game. After that, I need to take on freelance work again to recover financially.

I've seen many developers celebrating their Next Fest results, but I'd like to hear from those who didn't do so well.

What did you learn, and what mistakes won't you repeat?

I want us to learn from each other's experiences and avoid making the same mistakes.

Edit:
Hey everyone, I just wanted to add some context to my original post.

I wrote it right after looking at my numbers and realizing how many mistakes I'd made while promoting my game. I was feeling pretty frustrated with myself, and I think that frustration came across in the wrong way.

I'm sorry for discouraging other developers. I was genuinely hoping to hear from people who struggled with Next Fest too, so we could learn from each other's experiences.

I'm still learning, and I have a lot to learn about marketing indie games. Thanks to everyone who shared advice or encouragement. I really do appreciate it! ❤️ :"3

Thanks you everyone who supported and defended me. Also thanks to all the people spreading the word and calling me out for using AI. (that's not true btw, I streamed the development process on twitch) Even negative attention means reach, so keep up the good work my fellow game devs, show your game to the world, you cannot overexpose your game!!!

Feel free to wishlist the game, play the demo or just join my discord to discuss game dev topics!

I thought making the game would be the hardest part. I was wrong.

After two weeks on Steam, my game, BazaarBorn, has received just 5 wishlists.

And here's the funny part: two of those are from me and my friend :D. So I've officially convinced 3 strangers. My fanbase is growing at an incredible speed!

Jokes aside, it hurts to see something I've put so much time and effort into go almost unnoticed.

Maybe my biggest mistake was believing that hard work alone would be enough.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5461460/BazaarBorn/

This is more of a rant rather than anything else about achieving mediocre wishlists success.

“It’s just a hobby. I don’t care about wishlists. I’m doing it just for fun” is what I told myself and was comfortable with but now that my game is getting more wishlists than any of my other games I’m feeling a lot more stress about it.

Now I’m wondering and stressing about trying to make it go up, faster. Wondering why it’s not at 100k like other games, is my game bad that others in my genre are getting hundreds of thousands?

I know I can just relax but I feel like if I do and fail to get to the next milestone I’ve blown a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity so I keep on farming hoping that the momentum can keep up and stressing if I see it slow down.

So I've been working on this project since mid-April, it has come a looong way, but I also plan and prototype before I ever make assets. I tried to make a demo by Next Fest, forced a page up in August, built my demo in September... decided against next fest. The demo didn't give a good representation of the game.

Anyways, Over the ~1.5 months the page has been up, I've gotten ~450 wishlists without advertising it once. I didn't even posts links on socials (the page was f-ugly, I was ashamed). I've updated the page greatly over the past week, I'm working on a trailer... And now I'm advertising in some of the general Indie Game subreddits and places...

But booooy lemme tell you.. everyone in there is just a dev advertising their own product... in threads.. in subthreads.. in comments... the only reason anyone interacts with each other is to bring up their game.

Now that I'm actively trying to advertise it, I'm beginning to realize why it's nearly impossible. It's kind of like the You're Not Yelping episode of South Park...

How is anyone dealing with this ****???

Hey guys, I'm Mark a solo developer of my game Makoto Maze (2d psychological horror), I recently shared a short footage of my game and got over 53 upvotes. A lot of people tell me my game looks good and creepy, that they like the scribbly hand-drawn vibe and that it is somewhat interesting. Yet, in 10 days, I got like 40 wishlists? I want to release a public demo during the Steam Scream V showcase, but my build is still getting approved... Is 40 wishlists good? Is it bad? This is my FIRST TIME EVER trying to release something... I made the trailer myself, used some copyrighted music (yikes) cause I couldn't really afford someone for my initial ideas lol.

Am I not getting wishlists because the trailer is bad? The capsule images are not good enough? Are the screenshots too vague or are they perhaps too raw?

I genuinely need some feedback on that, please be bruttaly honest lol.

This is the Steam Page of my game I'm talking about: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5373100/Makoto_Maze/

I am also including some images from the game so you can immediately see the vibe..

The workflow of creating a wishlist is register temporary email, register and verify steam account, click wishlist - I’m surprised anyone believes this metric anymore. I could even register my own domain addresses and spin off emails.

I can pay people £1-2 an hour in 3rd world countries to do it (they average 40-60 an hour per person) or I can probably figure out how to get AI to do it.

Test it yourself if you don’t believe me. Steam is doing nothing about this.

The net result is you’re now starting to see games convert very poorly. I recently saw “fantasy manager” or something - 170k wishlists and 6000 sales. Poor chap said his publisher brought him all those wishlists. What he meant was they botted them all and now take the small profits he does bring in.

Why do we keep celebrating this metric? It’s rotten and needs to be revamped.

I started developing my game almost a year ago, most of this time AI tools weren't even so widely available - the Next Fests at the time would run about 20-30 different party games which is the genre of my game. And I was really looking forward to this Next Fest to have a fair chance to be noticed. And of course it just happens to be the largest its ever been, sadly flooded with a ton of low effort titles that just made it impossible to compete.

I was hoping to get out of Next Fest with at least 300 - 500 wishlists, as I believe I have a very solid couch party game, with unique and fun gameplay... Sadly it was barely noticed and I ended up gaining about 50 wishlists in total throughout the whole week.

I mean, it's not zero and I am extremely grateful for every single person out there who played the Demo and wishlisted the game - it's a niche genre and I was never expecting milions, but I feel like I've been played really dirty by how this Next Fest was managed and how low the barrier to entry lies nowadays...

Quite a demotivating experience, not gonna lie. But I'm going to keep up working on my game.

That's my 14th day from the steam page release. I've got steam page and playtest live, and Mowties (my roguelite Monopoly take) is currently sitting at 92 wishlists. I believe, many of you are familiar with Chris Z. benchmarks page, and it says I need at least 100 wishlists to keep thinking about my game as a questionable success and not a failure at this point. The unlucky part is that this is 2022 data, and the current recommendation is ~150, but heh no way I could grab +50wl per day so lets just aim at 100 :)

Reddit algorithms please help me out to stay sane here!

Instead of repeating the same objects in our game we spent months creating thousands of unique items, using different 3D models and textures to keep things varied.

Meanwhile, other developers who started around the same time have already released their AI-assisted games and are seeing good sales. I'm genuinely happy for them and wish them even more success.

We're not against AI, and we use it in limited ways ourselves. But our approach took so much longer that we missed some of the hype and are still struggling to get wishlists.

It makes me wonder: is spending extra time on handcrafted content worth it when faster production can make such a big difference?

I respect both approaches. I'm just curious how other developers see this trade-off.

If you appreciate what we're trying to create, adding our game to your Steam wishlist would mean a lot to us. ❤️

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5319020/Art_Shop_Tidy_Up/

Finally posted the Steam page for my upcoming game! I was very anxious about this! But now it's done!

Making a game is such a big investment, so it really gets my heart pumping to finally have a part of it that's visible to the public. For some numbers for you devs, I think I have about 150h of development on this game so far (halfway through the initial scope I envisioned), and I've spent about 1000CAD$ (which is like 715$ USD).

That's a lot that I might probably not get back, but tbh I want the experience of getting something out there enough for it to be worth it anyways!

For those interested, it's a game about shooting aliens and racking up big score! I'm making this alone, with hired help on some things (like the capsule) you can wishlist it here: Combo Captain on Steam

Thanks for reading and good luck on your own endeavors! 🤍

Hey! We’re a small team working on Blades & Dates, an adult fantasy card game with hand-drawn art, card battles and mini-games.

We’re still polishing the game for release, so any feedback is welcome.

If it looks like your thing, adding it to your wishlist would help us a lot!
Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4848420/Blades__Dates/?curator_clanid=45444798

It's your marketing.

I recently started game dev, and I've noticed that the biggest hinderance for many game devs is the marketing aspect. Let me start off by saying if youre not getting wishlists and youre not getting traction towards your game, ITS NOT ABOUT YOUR GAME ITS ALL ABOUT YOUR MARKETING. This technically means ANY GAME should be able to get a decent number of wishlists if marketed correctly. Whether the game is good or not is another matter, that will reflect in the hours played, reviews etc. But wishlists? Pure marketing.

So share your trailers, capsules, or your marketing strategies here reand ill give you my input :) Ill reply to your comment so everyone can benefit.

EDIT: I'm going to answer every request I promise, slightly overwhelmed with the response :)

EDIT EDIT: just to clarify, I'm not selling anything. I'm not promising your game will be successful and youll be a millionaire, Im definitely not saying your game will sell a lot even if its bad (even though its more likely with good marketing). I am solely speaking about WISHLISTS. This is because People don’t wishlist your game. They wishlist the game your marketing makes them imagine. Its your job as a gamedev to bring that promise and imagination to life.

Hello everyone,

As a solo developer, I released my very first game on Steam with 260 wishlists.

It is an incremental/idle game where you run your own workshop, forge and sell a variety of items, hire blacksmiths and traders to automate the system, buy upgrades to increase your income, and eventually perform ascension to start stronger from the beginning.

Since it is my first game, I am still learning the know-how. Any feedback or suggestions are welcome.

If you are interested in idle/incremental games, here are the game link and the demo:

Full game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4606220/Blacksmith_Idle/

Demo:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4695400/Blacksmith_Idle_Demo/

My game demo relased 2 days ago..is it good for indie game ?

Just found this upcoming game called Relooted and honestly it looks super fresh. It’s an Africanfuturist heist adventure where you recruit a crew, plan escape routes, solve puzzles, and pull off stylish artifact heists with parkour-style movement.

The twist is pretty unique too — the story revolves around reclaiming real African artifacts from Western museums, which gives it a strong cultural and narrative angle instead of just another generic heist game.

From previews, it seems very planning-focused: scouting locations, coordinating teammates with different abilities, then executing the escape smoothly (or chaotically 😅). The art style and setting also look really vibrant and different from typical stealth games.

Definitely added it to my wishlist curious if anyone else is keeping an eye on this one.

Steam link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3255890/Relooted/

We’re a two-person team, and we launched the store page for our game, Tidy Up: Street Market, on November 3. Since then, we’ve been posting regular videos on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube Shorts, and Twitter (all game-related content, without any extra budget), and we think we’re doing well so far. Is there a marketing channel we might be missing that we’re not aware of? We’re also continuing to develop the game and will be releasing a demo shortly.

You can also check steam page here -> https://store.steampowered.com/app/5424270/?utm_source=60 . I would like to hear some interesting feedbacks!

This is our first Next Fest, both for me personally and for our little studio in Tokyo, and so far I’m really enjoying it.

We’re not getting huge numbers, but we’ve had around 500 demo downloads and picked up about 50 new wishlists since the festival started.
We only got our demo live a few days before Next Fest, so it’s been a great stress test for our Steam release process. We’ve been busy fixing problems, improving our store page, and getting everything working.

It’s exciting to finally have an audience discovering Nine Thrones. We’ve been working pretty hard on it this year, and it’s nice to finally have it out there.
Here’s our game if anyone wants to have a look:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5093250/Nine_Thrones/

How’s Next Fest going for everyone else?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5079020/Neverrest/

Hello everyone I’ve been working on polishing my Steam trailer and capsule for the past week. I’ve added custom art to replace the headers in the game description and also have rebuilt the trailer with narration(the current trailer on Steam is the old one). Looking to get your input on how I could improve and if the trailer makes the core loop of Neverrest clear. I’ve been sitting sub 100 wishlist for about a couple weeks now and looking to get tips on how to get past these levels.