Nowadays there is a lot of garbage generated by AI. You may be wondering, “Who wants this?” Well, apparently millions of people do, according to the people behind Astrocade, a free website and online platform built around AI-generated games and experiences that now has 10 million monthly users. In an interview with Gamesbeat, Astrocade CEO Amir Sadeghian told the outlet that the platform has grown rapidly, going from around five million monthly users to 10 million in just the last four months. Astrocade allows anyone to create games and interactive experiences using AI tools, and then any other user can play those games, similar to Roblox. “The only reason we exist as a platform is AI creation tools, which allow everyone to create,” Sadeghian said. “And I think the advantage of Astrocade is that we have a lot of data to be able to train our models and improve them. Basically, being able to train models that are designed to generate fun things for the audience because we have the end-to-end signal all the way to the fun. We have the distribution, we have the creation, we have recommendations, and I think that’s the biggest advantage for Astrocade.” The company is preparing to launch an iOS app and is marketing heavily in the United States, although according to the CEO, Astrocade is already very popular in the US even though the platform has not yet made a big effort to grow its audience in that part of the world. ©Astrocade / Kotaku When taking a look at some of the most popular games, you’ll quickly notice a lot of Minecraft clones, games with copyrighted characters, and knockoffs of popular Roblox games like Steal a Brainrot. These were all built using Astrocade’s AI tools and feature AI illustrations. That hasn’t stopped people from enjoying them, as some of Astrocade’s most popular games have hundreds of thousands or even millions of plays. And like TikTok and other vertical video apps, Astrocade games are completely vertical experiences and you can scroll through them through an endless feed driven by an algorithm. Oh, sorry, these aren’t actually games. According to Sadeghian, Astrocade offers “playables” that people can scroll through like they do on social media and other online sources. The plan is for Astrocade to offer educational content, AI companions and interactive stories as well. However, the future of Astrocade content will depend on what creators actually “do” with their AI tools. And since the platform pays people more money to create popular content, I imagine there will be a lot of knockoffs of famous games and not a lot of interactive experiences that teach you about Ancient Egypt. “Technology has become so good on our creation side that it is very difficult to also know if they are made with AI,” the CEO said. “AI now is like writing code better than a lot of engineers. So that part is actually better. And even some of these 3D assets are getting to a point where it’s very difficult to tell them apart.”
