You Have More Games Than Players

A few nights ago I typed three words into ChatGPT.

"Roast my games."

It went through what I have built this year, took a breath, and delivered the line I have not stopped thinking about since.

You have more games than players.

I laughed until I could not breathe. Then I put the laptop down and sat there, because it was not just funny. It was accurate.

The Evidence Against Me

Here is what I have shipped, and I am going to be honest about the traffic.

Drop Duel. Coffee Break Snake. Felt Kings. Micro Sweep. All live, all playable right now, all built while I was working on something else entirely. And right now I am building Operation Line, a turn based online strategy warfare game, which is the most ambitious of the lot.

Number of people who play them regularly: me.

Not "small but growing." Not "early traction." Me. I am the community. I am also the QA team, the support desk and the leaderboard.

How This Became Possible

I should explain the part that makes this different from a normal hobby.

I am not sitting down for six months to hand build a game. I run AI agents on the side while I do my actual work. I describe what I want, they build, I play it, I tell them what feels wrong, they fix it. A game that would have been a serious project a few years ago now grows in the background of a Tuesday.

The gap between "I wish this existed" and "this exists" has almost closed. For someone whose brain has spent forty seven years generating things it wishes existed, that is not a small change. That is a different life.

So the games multiplied. Of course they did.

The Question the Roast Forced

Once I stopped laughing, the real question showed up.

Why am I building games nobody plays?

I know what the right answer is supposed to be. I have written it myself. I published a post called The Distribution Problem Is the Only Problem, and I meant every word of it. Building without distribution is how you end up with a beautiful thing sitting in the dark. I have run software businesses long enough to know that shipping is the easy half.

So by my own logic, five games with one player is a failure five times over.

Except it does not feel like failure. It feels like the opposite, and I wanted to understand why instead of arguing myself out of it.

Two Different Reasons to Build

Here is where I landed.

Some things I build because I want them to be used. Those have users, revenue, support tickets, a roadmap and my full attention on distribution. If nobody uses them, I have failed at the thing I set out to do, and I should go and fix that.

Some things I build because I wanted them to exist. That is the whole goal. It was complete the moment it worked.

The games are the second kind. They were never entered in the race I keep measuring everything else in. Judging them by users is like judging a meal I cooked for myself by how many people ordered it.

The misery comes from mixing the two up. From building something for the joy of it and then quietly resenting it for not making money. Or from building a business and pretending you do not care whether anyone shows up. I have done both, and both feel bad.

Why Games, Specifically

I have been making things since I was a kid. That part is not new. What is new is that games finally became reachable.

Games were always the software I most wanted to make and the software I was least able to make. Too much work for one person, too many disciplines, too far from what I do for a living. So the ideas piled up for decades and stayed ideas.

Now they do not have to. That is it. That is the entire reason there are five of them. The dam broke.

There is also something specific about a game that a tool does not give you. A tool is finished when it stops annoying you. A game is finished when it is fun, and fun is a thing you can only find by playing. So I play my own games, alone, and adjust them until they feel right. That loop is the most fun I have had building anything in years.

I Am Not Arguing Against Distribution

I want to be careful here, because this is exactly the kind of idea that turns into a comfortable excuse.

I am not saying metrics do not matter. For the products I actually run, they are the only thing that matters, and when I catch myself building instead of asking someone to try the thing, that is avoidance and I call it what it is.

What I am saying is narrower. Not everything you make has to be a candidate for that. You are allowed to have a shelf. You are allowed to make something that will never be anything, purely because you wanted to hold it.

If every single thing you build has to justify itself with users, you will eventually stop building the things that made you love building.

The Roast Was Right

ChatGPT was not wrong. I do have more games than players. That will probably still be true next year, and I am fine with that.

The roast just landed differently than it was supposed to. It was aimed at my ego and it hit something quieter instead. Five games exist that did not exist in January. I wanted them, so I made them. Nobody asked for them and nobody needed them and they are still here, working, waiting for a player who is mostly me.

That turned out to be enough.

What have you made that nobody wanted, that you would make again?