Expressions

When I first started on Keygen in 2016, I was right in the middle of the SaaS "boom." I felt a lot of pressure to move quickly and make sure I could capitalize on what felt like a trend. I saw founders building businesses and hitting revenue goals quickly, and I wanted to experience that before the market became "oversaturated."

I didn't want to miss my share of the pie.

I didn't want to "miss my shot."

Nearly ten years later, that "oversaturation" never actually happened — at least not to the extent that people stopped buying. In reality, SaaS has never been bigger — and more people started buying.

Sure, there is more of it — but the quality almost always surfaces to the top, eventually. There was never a time when I thought "wow, this competitor is really crowding the market."

And so the idea of "missing my shot" wasn't really based in reality — rather, it was really just launch anxiety. There were even points when I asked myself if it was worth continuing when my chances of capitalizing on what felt like a "gold rush" were so low.

(They weren't low. It wasn't a gold rush.)

I see a form of this same anxiety in people now, not with SaaS, but with AI. They don't want to miss their shot. But this time, AI affects nearly all types of software, not just SaaS — games, apps, etc.

I recently had a conversation with a friend that dreams of making a game, and in fact, they've been working on a game for years.

With the advent of AI, they fear that the gaming market will become oversaturated soon, and they won't be able to have their own community and user base — their own slice of the pie.

They fear they'll be lost in the noise of AI-generated games.

They became so anxious that they actually stopped working on the game, fearing that all of their effort would be for naught.

Do you see the similarities yet?

In reality, this oversaturation may happen, but quality will almost always find a way to surface itself through the noise — and chances are this oversaturation won't occur at all, not in the way we think.

For games in particular, users don't want AI-generated slop. Sure, it might be trendy for awhile, but users don't want to generate their own games. At least, not forever. Eventually, users will want some human's unique expression of what they think a game should be.

The gaming industry has never been in such dire need of quality — of unique expressions on what a game should be.

With that — I believe, given enough time, this will always be true:

Humans want other humans' expressions of things.

We don't want to do everything ourselves — because what we can conjure up isn't always what's most fun, or most performant, or most effective, or most useful, or most impactful.

We want others' expressions — their art, their ideas, their problem solving. AI can be a tool, but it can't conjure the expression.

Tools change, but humans don't. Not really.