Why I rarely see game dev startup here?

Question

Do investors despise game development companies, and do you have to go solo? If so, I would have expected to see at least one on Show HN. Or maybe I missed it&mdash;definitely not as popular as other apps.Also, why haven&rsquo;t LLM wrappers penetrated this sector? Is it because OpenAI and other &ldquo;parasites&rdquo; haven&rsquo;t had the opportunity to access source code to build their wholesale theft, so they don&rsquo;t have the code to instruct you to build games? Or maybe there are a lot, and I just missed them.

Marshferm · Accepted Answer

Games are idiosyncratic, creative, and funded mostly by knowledgeable insiders funding devs with track records. The failure rate is mitigated this way. Plus the revenue doesn&rsquo;t favor the VC system. First investors aren&rsquo;t given such extreme advantages, and seed money for proofs isn&rsquo;t necessary. A demo costs much less than an app. I&rsquo;m in game dev and VC is the last place I&rsquo;d seek capital. AI is the last place I&rsquo;d look for creative help (though AI is involved in the intricacies of baking and texture refinement).

gus_massa · Answer

Minigames are posted quite often https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... I'm not sure if you are looking for game companies.

romanhn · Answer

One interesting company in this space I've seen is CreativeMode - generating Minecraft mods based on a text description. Pretty brilliant use of LLM coding actually. Found out about it when my kid asked me to pay for it. Doesn't look like they ran a Show HN / Launch HN (not one I can find) despite being a YC company.

lerp-io · Answer

i think the stuff posted here is mostly designed for devs as the end consumers

shahbaby · Answer

For most other ideas you can build a quick MVP to validate or perhaps even just a landing page. Games take much longer to get off the ground.I think the reason we don't see many LLM wrappers is because Games are technically complex, multi-disciplinary and ever changing.

paulwilsonn · Answer

That&rsquo;s a really good observation- I&rsquo;ve noticed the same. I think it&rsquo;s because game dev and startup culture overlap less than we expect.Game dev usually leans more art and creativity than problem-solving or scalable business models.Different mindset, funding path, and timelines. Though lately, game dev tools and AI pipelines are starting to bridge that gap.