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Short, opinionated takes on industry shifts. What happened, why it caught our attention, and what it means for people building games.

2026

• The 52/52 split (2026-03-28)
  52% of game companies use AI, and 52% of developers say it's harming the industry. Both sides are right because they're not having the same argument.

• Browser rendering just had its best month ever (2026-03-27)
  While everyone argued about AI at GDC, browser rendering shipped five years of progress in four weeks. Clustered lighting, GPU Gaussian splatting, and WebGPU standardization all landed in March.

• AI-native engines are shipping, and they look nothing like Unity (2026-03-24)
  Three new game engines shipped in March that are built for AI agents, not humans. No visual editors. YAML scenes. MCP protocols. This isn't Unity with an AI tab bolted on.

• Solo developers are shipping real games, not just prototypes (2026-03-23)
  Two weeks after vibe coding became the new game jam, solo developers moved from prototyping to selling. 29K lines of C#, 8 parallel Claude agents, and real games on Steam.

• When AI overrides the artist (2026-03-16)
  DLSS 5's controversy isn't about upscaling. It's about what happens when the rendering pipeline between your art and the player's screen has an AI rewriting your creative decisions.

• Vibe coding is the new game jam (2026-03-13)
  Collins Dictionary named vibe coding Word of the Year 2025. For game developers, it means the barrier between weird idea and playable prototype has collapsed.

• What 2,200 games at Steam Next Fest tell you about discovery (2026-03-11)
  Next Fest rewards games that already have an audience. If you're starting from zero, you need a different path.

• Open source has an AI pollution problem (2026-03-06)
  Godot maintainers are drowning in AI-generated pull requests. The tools meant to make developers more productive are making open-source projects less productive.

• Everyone wants to be the AI game engine now (2026-03-04)
  Unity, Roblox, Moonlake, Phaser, and a dozen startups all announced AI-first game creation tools in the same month. Two years ago, VCs said this market didn't exist.