AI-Generated Game Content Is a Niche Market
In April this year, Octopus—someone with no prior game-development experience—used AI to build a tabletop RPG called Infinite Space. It generated over 910,000 conversation turns and peaked at No. 2 in popularity on the Mu Jian platform. These days everyone's scrambling for talent: Tencent, NetEase, andXD Inc. have launched their own UGC platforms, and even Moonshot AI rolled out K399. It looks lively, but it's deeply uneven.
According to the article, TapTap Creator produced nearly 5,000 games in the first half of the year, yet top-tier creators accounted for only one-thirtieth of the total. Jin Haobin's four-game studio earned just 100,000 yuan, while most creators—for example, Ayu—spent three years and still made under 8,000 yuan. What's more galling is that AI-generated games tend to hover around an AP2 quality level, which isn't very fun to play. Players actually feel that slightly rougher, less polished titles look less AI-made, which is a pretty counterintuitive demand.
Monetization is another dead end. Ad revenue works only for casual mini-games; slapping ads into a narrative-driven RPG like Infinite Space ruins the experience. Meanwhile, rising model costs from DeepSeek's price adjustments have further squeezed margins. At its core, this is a business where platforms absorb creators and spin stories to secure funding. For everyday creators, patience tests you more than any technical skill.
A brief extension: an AI UGC game platform is essentially a two-sided-market problem. Creators won't join without users, and users won't stay without quality supply. Right now, only TapTap Creator has cracked monetization through the IAA (in-app advertising) model, but that's limited to the casual mini-game niche. Most platforms are still experimenting with token-based payments and one-time purchase models, yet players haven't developed a habit of paying for AI content. From an industry-chain perspective, these platforms sit in the upstream tooling layer and depend on falling foundational-model costs to widen profit margins. The current business models haven't yet achieved scale effects.
Original source: Creators Earning Over 100,000 Yuan a Month Don't Make the AI UGC Game Platform a Good Business