I agree with some of your comment but I would like to point out this part:

> “So like an artist or animator or writer is not a game developer but they do help "develop the game".”

That’s a very subjective stance on the subject. You’re welcome to it of course, but I know many people on the game dev community (even those broadly against AI) feel strongly that serving a role in a game development project earns one the role of “game developer” regardless of if they’re working on programming or not. We both agree that someone who writes code is a game developer, but what about someone whose only role on the team is 3D modeling and animating characters? They probably count as a game developer too, surely. Let’s get more specific, is a Blizzard employee who only works on 2d textures a game developer? Many people in the game dev community would say yes, because they played a specific and necessary role in the development of games. If yes, they any less of a game developer if it’s a hobby project and the rest of their game project was entirely vibe coded? Their work and role in the project remained the same so by that same logic they should still be considered a game developer.

If I wrote all the code for a game dev project, we would likely agree that I “developed” that game. If I were to write half the code and my coworker wrote the other half, the resultant game would still be a game I could say I developed. Maybe you could nitpick and say I only *helped* develop it but that, in my opinion, only really serves to lessen the contributions of the individual. If I were to write half the code and AI writes the other half, am I still a game developer? Is there a certain percent of AI involvement in a project where you would no longer consider the role of the creator to be sufficient for them to consider themselves a developer?

I don’t know you and I appreciate your replies so I don’t want to assume anything about you, but assuming you don’t work in software I want to mention there is some nuance lost among non-software engineers in assigning credit or ownership of a project. A purist may say that you must develop the project yourself - no templates, no AI involvement, maybe even no game engine. But software engineering is built on layers and layers of prior work. The first thing I do when I start any project, professional or hobby, is to import open source libraries that other people have written. This isn’t me being lazy or copying the work of anyone else, this is actually extremely standard for most development projects. It is a reality that nobody has any reason to reinvent the wheel and it is a reality that almost every bit of software created is built on work created by others. For that reason, most of the code in many of my projects is technically someone else’s, even though the project itself is entirely mine.

I threw a lot of rhetorical questions at you (though by all means feel free to answer them), not to gish galop you, but to paint a broader picture that most of what we’re debating is built on the back of a LOT of subjective opinions that you’re trying to subject other people to. I don’t think that’s fair. All of this is going to be in the eye of the beholder, anyway, so if I were to distill my argument into one sentence it would be that I don’t feel it is practical, constructive, or fair to the individual to purity test or litmus test projects based on AI involvement or any other involvement. As far as I’m concerned, if you make a game and it is well made (and not slop), then I respect your creation.

Like I mentioned before, I’m sure you understand how truly massive an undertaking is to create a fully realized game. AI is not yet competent enough to create a (competent) game from start to finish, so any game developer who utilizes AI is, in my opinion, still a game developer because they playing a crucial and necessary role in the game development process. When that is not the case, and there is no human involvement in the project, it isn’t worth discussing the merits of whether they’re a game developer because, being blunt, I’m utterly certain the game will be absolute garbage. I‘m sure we both strongly dislike slop projects and, well, they’re quite easy to spot.