Nail on the head, this is new. When someone can steal your release date then why bother making a game? Make a game, release a demo, demo is stolen and published the same week, 6 months before the dev was ready to release.
Demos are (up until this week) the #1 for studios to do marketing.
Marketing will change now, to more socials being required (YT etc), and even then only small bits here and there as decomp will happen from video as well.
The marketplaces that adapt to this and enable devs will help, hopefully.
You don’t need to use anything. You just need to enjoy what you are doing. This is often related to dopamine. Being in flow state for hours on end while programming is bliss and fun for me.
If you don’t enjoy programming keep trying, have the language or api docs open and do not use generative AI. Generative AI just gets you outcomes. An artist paints because they like painting, not because they like a pile of painted pictures.
I’m not a programmer, life choices took me in another direction, but I’m starting to understand the addictive part of building things and immediately seeing them come to life.
With AI coding it suddenly feels like there are so many possibilities. My biggest problem now is almost the opposite: trying not to chase every idea and keeping myself focused on building one thing. There’s definitely a dopamine hit in seeing visible progress regularly :)
I had an Odin code base with raylib doing cpu bound stuff. On Catchy OS it tanked my frame rate from 120 to 90 fps (intentionally, seeing what I can get away with). Same build, on Windows 11, 40fps.
Demos are (up until this week) the #1 for studios to do marketing.
Marketing will change now, to more socials being required (YT etc), and even then only small bits here and there as decomp will happen from video as well.
The marketplaces that adapt to this and enable devs will help, hopefully.