Begun, the distribution wars have.
In 2025 I wrote that gaming had reached an era of content abundance and that platforms and distribution would be the primary driver of value going forward.
x.com/JNavok/status/19426664…
This change is accelerating daily due to AI enabling infinite games. We are already at the singularity.
YouTube long ago enabled infinite video. 720,000 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube a day. If we froze the amount of content on YouTube today and you attempted to watch it all, it would take you tens of thousands of years.
Each year will add tens of thousands of years more worth of video, and this will continue to accelerate, like trying to approach the speed of light.
AI is enabling, but we were already hitting an inflection point. Since 2020 the annual releases on Steam went from a few thousand a year to 20,000 a year. There are 5 million games uploaded to Roblox a year. No one can play all these games. They are not meant to.
99.9% of these games will have few players. It was the case for views of most videos on YouTube, it is the case on nearly every platform which enable that level of UGC.
For those concerned that infinite content means everything is slop: it turns out infinite content does not matter. Good content still gets views, makes money. YouTube continues to be such a boon for content that Netflix is now competing with them to get YouTubers to bring their videos to its platform.
In the world of infinite content only those with one or more of the following will win:
1. Superior design (content)
2. Superior distribution (platform)
3. Superior IP (moat)
YouTube having distribution did not kill theatrical; movie studios had IP, and still made content people want to see.
Similarly, Roblox will not kill AAA.
But AAA has not been the growth engine for games in a long time. In the west, game growth has been lifted materially by Roblox.
It thus makes sense that everyone wants a piece of the pie now. AI is a disruptive force, and when disruption happens, new distribution methods can replace the old. So the guns are out for Roblox.
Roblox is a two sided marketplace. It needs both developers and players. Previously, Roblox's competitive advantage in addition to its sheer size of distribution (access to players) was its technology stack was light and easy to develop for, so that kids could do it.
I have said that prompt based games were coming for a long time.
x.com/JNavok/status/20174266…
Prompt is one facet of what AI enables. It also allows for incredibly fast prototyping, asset creation, coding for non-prompt based gaming. Both prompts and + development acceleration enable infinite content.
Unreal will benefit from the latter. But what Unity is doing is attempt to go head-to-head with Roblox on the technical front and leveraging Google to overcome its lack of distribution.
This is sensible. Unreal is unrivaled at the higher end, and the frontier models are already excellent at Unreal usage. Partnering with Google gives Unity the best shot. But Roblox's biggest competition is likely Claude/Codex combined with ThreeJS and Godot. By definition, that makes them Unity's competition as well.
Incidentally, this distribution war is why Roblox is enabling developers to put their games everywhere. Unity and Unreal have an advantage in being able to distribute on Steam, EGS, App Stores. In the distribution war, Roblox needs to expand a developer's ability to do the same.
I suspect Roblox will be hard to unseat. Its player marketplace is massive, and while Google Play has a huge amount of users, Roblox is on every surface, and Google Play is already open to all.
Put another way- as a developer, if I build for Roblox, I will get on Android devices, as well as iOS, PC, consoles, soon web. But if I build for Playground, the platform itself still has few users, and even if they enable all Playground games to be on Google Play (which I expect) I gain no particular advantage over any other developer building an Android game, while not have access to all of Roblox' surfaces.
Thus, expect everyone to attempt to distribute everywhere. The platform that maximizes every distribution surface wins the the war.