June 15, 2026
Game Over for the old guard?
Being an old school web-based sports sim dev in the era of vibe coded games
Indie sports game maker says AI could finally bring rivals — and commenters are not calm
TLDR: A browser basketball game maker says artificial intelligence may finally make it easier for rivals to challenge the niche he spent years building. Commenters are split between calling the hype unproven, pointing out business costs still matter, and joking their way through the panic.
A longtime basketball game creator just dropped a very relatable internet panic: after spending more than a decade slowly building a free browser-based sports management game into a full-time living, he now fears artificial intelligence could let newcomers skip the painful years he had to survive. His big point is simple: in the past, copying or beating him was too much work for too little money. Now? That protective moat may be getting a lot smaller.
But the real action is in the crowd response, where the vibe swings wildly from skeptical to sentimental to deliciously blunt. One of the loudest reactions is basically, okay, but where are these magical AI-made hit games everyone keeps hyping? Commenter schnitzelstoat throws cold water on the buzz by asking if there are any actually popular “vibe-coded” games at all, which instantly turns the conversation from doomposting into a demand for receipts. Another commenter, alexpotato, backs the original writer’s business logic with a story from Pinboard: sometimes the winner isn’t the flashiest product, just the one that costs less to keep alive. In other words: this isn’t just about who can make a game, but who can afford to keep one running.
And then, because the internet refuses to stay serious for too long, dvh arrives with peak dad-core comedy: a childhood memory of being banned from playing an old Olympics game because the joystick made “crunchy noises.” Meanwhile, akoboldfrying delivers the unexpectedly wholesome take, praising the post for not screaming "AI good" or "AI bad" and instead sounding like an actual human being processing change in real time. So yes, the drama is real — but the comments are split between AI doubters, business realists, and nostalgic chaos goblins.
Key Points
- •The author started building the web-based version of Basketball GM in 2012, when web development tools and documentation were much less mature.
- •Basketball GM grew enough by 2021 to become the author’s full-time job, and he says it is now more popular and more profitable than it was then.
- •The author says direct competition in his niche was limited partly because creating a comparable free, feature-rich web-based sports sim required years of work and uncertain economics.
- •He argues that new competitors would face the added challenge of taking users from an established product, unlike when he entered a niche with no true competitor.
- •The article says advances in AI coding tools have changed the author’s view of how secure that niche may be, even though he personally uses AI in a limited way.