How it feels to be an old school web-based sports sim dev when tons of vibecoded web-based sports sims are being released

Back when I started working on the web-based version of Basketball GM in 2012, web development was very different. npm was brand new and hardly anyone used it. Bundling/deploying JS was very primitive, a lot of people still were just concatenating files together. And things like TypeScript, React, async/await... these did not even exist yet!

It was really difficult! The tools and documentation were horrible compared to today. But I thought it'd be really cool if I could make BBGM run in a web browser, so I persevered. And over time the web dev ecosystem blossomed into what it is today: certainly far from perfect, but worlds better than it was in 2012.

In 2021 BBGM was big enough to become my full time job. That has gone really well! Today it is both more popular and more profitable than it was in 2021.

At times over the past several years I've wondered how long will that really last.

Will people get bored of BBGM? Video games normally don't remain popular for many years, but sports are special. As long as basketball is popular, people will want to play basketball video games. Of course everyone knows that, just look at the annual Madden and 2k releases that are always super popular. Sports management sims are a smaller niche than those mainstream games, but still a profitable niche for me and several other game developers. Which also made me wonder...

Will someone release a game so much better than BBGM that I lose all my users? The 2k to my Live? Why hasn't that happened?

There are other basketball sim games, but for many years there was no true competitor to my niche, which is something like a free, web-based game that has a lot of features.

Why not? I think because it wasn't a good business decision to compete with me.

I didn't make BBGM to get rich, I made it as a hobby. Only after several years of work did it start to make a little money, and then even more years until it supported me as a full time job. Very few people are going to put so much effort into a video game. Maybe a better programmer than me could do it faster? But better programmers than me have even more lucrative opportunities than my little niche. Maybe a team of programmers could do it faster? Well paying a team of programmers is very expensive. I certainly don't make enough money to do that. So why would someone want to spend more money than BBGM makes just for a chance to compete against BBGM? That last part matters too... since BBGM exists, any new entrant to the market has to win users from me, whereas when I did it, the market didn't exist. I had no competition in my niche. So even an obsessive hobbyist like myself might not have as much motivation to create the next BBGM, they might rather make a somewhat different game.

That's how I explained my fortunate situation to myself for years. I have this dream job that many people would love to have, but the economics of the situation suggested that I was pretty safe. Nobody was going to seriously compete with me because they would have very little chance of actually outcompeting me and creating a profitable business.

And then AI happened.

I remember the first bit of AI programming I saw, shortly after ChatGPT was released. Someone made a system where you could ask the AI to generate some HTML/CSS/JS to do a simple task. And it kind of sort of worked with some very basic tasks. Pretty crazy!

By now, things have escalated quite a bit.

A lot of people now say human programming is obsolete. Some of these people are fools blinded by hype. But some of them are talented, skilled programmers who I have deeply respected for years. This is not the crypto boom, this is something real.

Personally, I do very little AI programming. I don't do any of the "agent" stuff. I just sometimes ask it specific questions in chat, similar to how I would ask questions on Stack Overflow in the before times. I probably am leaving some productivity on the table by not fully embracing AI, but, well, I like programming! I don't want the AI to do all my programming for me. Maybe some day I will be forced to embrace the new technology that has made my skills obsolete, as has happened to so many people in so many industries in the past. But I'm not eager for that to happen.

A lot of people are, though. There's a lot of programmers who love working with the AI. And there's even more people who are not quite programmers, but now with AI they can be.

This has resulted in a lot of change in the tech industry. And it's also resulted in some change in the sports simulation video game industry. Almost every day some new vibecoded sports sim game is released. Some people disregard them because they're usually fairly low effort and not very good. But even the low effort ones have at least some impressive functionality. And not all of them are low effort.

Of particular relevance to me, a lot of the vibecoded games are web-based games like Basketball GM. Probably for the same reason that primitive AI coding tool I mentioned above did web programming. It's popular, there's tons of documentation and examples out there, and it's easy to run. You just open a web browser. No weird proprietary tools needed.

Things have certainly changed since 2012. Back then I was taking on a huge challenge to make a web-based sports sim game. But now that's the easy path. That explanation I wrote above about how maybe nobody has really competed with BBGM because it didn't make econmomic sense? The economics have changed. Now everyone is trying to compete with me!

And yet nothing has really changed for me right now. BBGM is still about as popular as it was the past few year. It's actually making a little more money this year, due to the ad market improving. But I no longer feel comfortable sitting here in my niche. It's like the enemy is approaching my city walls, and nothing has really changed yet, the siege has not begun, the battle has not started. But it's coming.

How long until someone makes something that's just as good as BBGM? How long until someone makes something that's significantly better? Yogi Berra's quote about predictions is very wise, so I don't know the answer to these questions, but if forced to guess I'd say maybe a year or two? Something like that? Who knows.

As I mentioned above, I know I'm not the first person in history to feel this way about technological change impacting their livelihood. But AI is different. Every technological change in the past ultimately opened up new opportunities for humans, because humans have always been the smartest thing around. What happens when that's no longer true?

It's a weird feeling. It feels like my days as a successful indie game dev are numbered. But even weirder is that I can't really worry too much about that, because if the AI does continue improving and does make me obsolete, it's going to make quite a few other things obsolete as well. Maybe everything?

So I guess for now I'm just going to continue, business as usual, until the siege truly begins...