Let’s be clear. Unreal is used to make games. Roblox is used to make Roblox games. Those are completely different. It sounds like what you want is to be a big platform that collects rent from people who make games. But people who make their own games aren’t going to want to be in your sandbox like Roblox if that’s what you’re hoping for. What you’re proposing making is cool. It’s dev tools. I would like some dedicated tooling to generative AI art assets. That is a business on its own. Not a very big moat but it’s a useful service.
But all of this tooling to generate art and stuff is not relevant to the service of being a game platform. The cool thing about Roblox and Fortnite is that you’re just sprinkling some creative sugar over Roblox and Fortnite which people already liked.
Let’s assume you knock it out of the park on everything your page shows. it feels like you’re an asset store that, rather than charging reasonable prices for those possibly custom made assets, wants a % of game revenue as a royalty? It might feel viable because you’re targeting people who as a matter of skill and expertise absolutely cannot execute without this, but I’m not seeing this happen much successfully.
So… yeah. Tl;dr Figure out if you’re Roblox, unreal, or an assets store.
There's no confusion at all about whether we are trying to a UGC platform to make games (i.e AI Roblox). We are definitely not an asset store. Even though you can create assets in Rosebud, it's a feature of the entire workflow, which is focused on converting user descriptions to games.
I think some confusion may be arising from just going to rosebud.ai and seeing the demo video. Instead go to https://play.rosebud.ai/home to make games and play the games other people already made to test it out! Love to hear your comments about the development experience there!
You are right that there is a developer tool angle here, but I think what's interesting to experiment with respect to the business model is whether developers want to be charged first by using the tool (like unity) versus only when they are successful (like unreal). Roblox is able to collect rent because they help the developers build an audience. What we have to show is that our platform can also help developers build an audience to justify collecting rent.
Yeah I’m hearing that but it seems very much like you are selling art, an LLM character service, and some dev/packaging. I don’t think you’re going to reap much benefits from aggregating all these together. Feels like a shovelware machine. One of your homepage trending projects also used Star Trek IP.
Like your value prop is description to game. Ok. But doesn’t that mean that if the description to game is too complicated that you’re going to be failing your value prop? Which is very likely to happen because you’re trying to instantiate something of great complexity? It really really feels to me like you’re selling some tooling.
The art looks much better than the games. Selling devs art tooling might be more sensible even if the total imaginable market is much smaller.
We are happy our custom image models are liked by our users and I think helping game devs make good game assets/art is a valuable problem to solve, but not one we are focused on. The first 3-4 years of Rosebud we focused on image generation based app, so I have thought a lot about the opportunity of focusing on a image/asset gen as the main feature of the product. I would argue that it generally has a thinner moat with more capped upside and can more easily be toppled by foundational model companies like OpenAI (with the exception of Midjourney, which is amazing because they have the moat of a community that guides their stronger aesthetics). Furthermore there are a number of other services that focus just on asset gen, and we allow uploads (from assets generated elsewhere) in addition to our own custom models for asset generation for that reason.
The opportunity I am excited most about, and what Rosebud is focused on, is to increase the number of creators of games by many orders of magnitude. That is why we are leaning into an llm native approach for game dev. I also know that the current best models for code gen will be improved dramatically in the next few years and that will have have an even greater impact on the consumer behaviour of who gets to make games and who gets to build software in general. Building a platform around game creation, not just asset gen, will be able to absorb this impending tidal wave of change that I don’t think even incumbent developer tools like Unity or Unreal can address as fast as a startup such as ourselves. The entire game creation work flow is going to get much more intuitive, faster and ultimately be able to generate the quality of games to compete with AAA. Now it is not there, but soon it will be. The game genres we support may look more opinionated and constrained now (ai characters, RPGs, some 3D) but that’s the first step in being able to let our agent based code gen platform perform well in prod. We are making choices that allow us to absorb llm advances later and that generalize well once those improvements happen.
Also, on the IP point, once we let people monetize on the platform, we will be much more strict about what gets to be monetized (i.e only things where it’s ok from an IP point of view).
But Unreal is not tooling. It’s a game engine. It has physics and rendering and audio and networking. Unreal is not a competitor.
You cannot possibly expect an LLM to be spitting out a AAA competitive engine on top of a great game built with it. If you really want to achieve that level of sophistication then you should probably be building on top of unreal tbh. It’s a huuuuge undertaking. And the AI driven asset store side of things feels like it’s very separate to me
We're not looking at spitting out a AAA game engine. Our goal is more to lower the barrier to entry, for both assets and code. So, yes that means that to start with, the games created may not be AAA quality (ok that's a bit of an understatement). But the same has been said about Roblox. With time, the games will improve. And enabling everyone to create games will surely unleash more creativity.
And who can say what could be achieved in a few years?
The same has been said about Roblox but you’re also not producing Roblox quality games. And Roblox loses a billion dollars a year.
I mean I’m not trying to be a dick and I get that you’re just starting here but I don’t get the sense that the team understands what’s required to ship a game.
You should not show the content on “trending”. You should show something you have made with your tools that you are happy to call a fun game that is shippable and buildable with your tools as promised.
For example, 1D Pac-Man as featured here. Can you build a clone of that game?
You should definitely try our platform and build that 1D PacMan. I've seen users creating clones of snake, asteroids or space invaders. So PacMan should be achievable.
If your goal is to increase game creators by order of magnitudes, and the method involves putting people in a position to make games alone, what exactly is going to keep the game market from being totally destroyed by an endless stream of very-low-value games?
See my comment above for another thread and the subsequent comments: "My take is that whenever we can break down barriers to allow more creators to enter, it's ultimately better for the entire industry. As a platform we can work on curating and filtering for high quality game content from our users, but that's a problem of curation rather than artificially limiting creation for fear of people making low quality content. Most content quality like many things are power law distributed anyways."
Let’s be clear. Unreal is used to make games. Roblox is used to make Roblox games. Those are completely different. It sounds like what you want is to be a big platform that collects rent from people who make games. But people who make their own games aren’t going to want to be in your sandbox like Roblox if that’s what you’re hoping for. What you’re proposing making is cool. It’s dev tools. I would like some dedicated tooling to generative AI art assets. That is a business on its own. Not a very big moat but it’s a useful service.
But all of this tooling to generate art and stuff is not relevant to the service of being a game platform. The cool thing about Roblox and Fortnite is that you’re just sprinkling some creative sugar over Roblox and Fortnite which people already liked.
Let’s assume you knock it out of the park on everything your page shows. it feels like you’re an asset store that, rather than charging reasonable prices for those possibly custom made assets, wants a % of game revenue as a royalty? It might feel viable because you’re targeting people who as a matter of skill and expertise absolutely cannot execute without this, but I’m not seeing this happen much successfully.
So… yeah. Tl;dr Figure out if you’re Roblox, unreal, or an assets store.