Wow. I wonder how Steam and Nintendo and other game marketplaces are going to deal with the incoming wave of extremely low quality games. It's easy to find garbage game on both of those platforms, but I wouldn't say we're at a point yet where most of the games are terrible and it's impossible to tell the difference before you buy. Maybe refunds will become a more vital tool for consumers?

I'm worried that companies will stop releasing demos again out of fear of AI-driven clones stealing their work and beating them to the market.

I'm worried that devs go harder on gen-AI to try to get games out faster

This might self-regulate itself unless those AI copies reach a certain quality. I mean if you are a gamer and its buggy crappy demo after demo, and you can tell that they all copied this one game, wouldn't you want to test that one rather than all the sloppy shit?

But that does require you to have a way of knowing what the original is.

It's mostly a problem for indie games where novel gameplay is often the main selling point. Imagine if a hundred Katamari Damacy or Patapon clones came out months before the originals, and whether they'd have made the same impact when they finally released in that scenario.

Clones are already a huge problem in the independent games space (see the myriad of "dig for buried treasure in a backyard" games last year). AI gives cloners the ability to churn them out so rapidly they can steal the original's thunder entirely.

Steam charges $100/game listing, which is refunded after $1000 in sales. That helps keep the crapalanche at bay.