It's time. Game developers need to read Clayton Christensen's Disruptive Innovation, because he explained how this was going to go decades ago. Let's start with how Disruptive Innovation happened in the industry since inception, with the previously strong moats of distribution, technology, assets and cost all now gone. Consoles were the biggest moats. Dev kits were expensive, not everyone could access them (you needed a relationship), you needed to be able to afford to pass their cert + print discs + convince retailers who bought your product and resold to customers. Starting in the mid-2000s digital platforms on PC began to grow, but digital didn't truly shift until Steam's moved away from a closed market to an open market in the early 2010s, paired at the same time with mobile app stores also being default open, and finally consoles also enable digital stores that allowed more open distribution than before on their digital stores. As open platforms enabled distribution to everyone the next moat to fall was technical. Unity and Unreal played a hand here- before you needed to have your own engine or buy components requiring a dedicated team. Now, you could easily license the most complex part of software development Further gates fell in the late 2010s as asset marketplaces toppled inexpensive access channels to the inner moat, which was the creation of assets, animations, textures, etc. The moat still remained somewhat strong, though, because if you used marketplace content you were getting the same look as others, meaning you were undifferentiated, or couldn't copy the latest popular trend. Then there was one final, smaller moat: the speed by which you could program a game, and its cost. AI killed the last two moats in one shot for many indie titles. It can replicate unique assets, and it can quickly, for effectively zero cost, enable someone to make a copy of your game, assuming the game was simple enough. All barriers to entry (console access, distribution access, engine access, asset access, time/cost to make) are gone. The result is many games are now commoditized. Clayton said that when capabilities become commoditized the advantages of established producers erode and their margins come under pressure. He also said that markets evolve through functionality → reliability → convenience → price. As performance becomes good enough, customers place greater value on other attributes in the chain. The appearance of AI-generated copies of games, especially indie games, is a predictable consequence of technical moats being eliminated. Those whose moat was only the last one will sell fewer games because all moats are gone. The market is flooded with copies of your game that swamp the algorithm with lookalike thumbnails and gameplay. Your competitors just have to price at or below you to earn a customer because they have zero marginal cost. You have no defense, it's the equivalent of having a business making screws. We don't make screws in America anymore because Chinese factories can make them for a fraction of the price, and they're generic with no particular defense or reason to buy one brand over another. We don't want to think of games like screws, but now they are. An additional lesson from Clayton for game developers is that the market doesn't necessarily reward the effort required to produce something. It rewards the value customers perceive relative to the alternatives available to them. Competitive advantages in games increasingly have to come from things harder to replicate: community, distribution, brand/known IP, network effects, game complexity and innovation that outpaces the commoditization of your moat. GTA6, for example, has many of those advantages (notably the game is so big that AI cannot easily reproduce it). For many game developers, the basis of competition will shift away from any form of creative work that anyone can instantly copy. You will need to find a new moat. That doesn't mean you shouldn't make games. Now is the best time to do so with AI making it so cheap and affordable. But think about how you can develop a moat for your game that isn't based on assets or design that cannot quickly/easily be copied. This could be, for example, forming a copyright around unique IP that you can use to do takedowns. Generic fish and visuals do not work. Unique fish and visuals do. Even the influencer who first generated Tung Tung Tung Sachar, the AI-made Brainrot, gets his pound of flesh from Roblox games trying to use the character.