My reply to someone considering starting a video game company:
The distribution of possible rewards for starting a video game company are generally not very good today. The market is well served, and gaining a foothold requires strong execution on both business and product issues, along with a substantial amount of luck. Plan to burn through seven figures with a not-great chance of making it back.
If you do go for it, some bits of advice:
Identify your customers clearly before you start. Not just a broad community, but specific people, and imagine them as you make decisions.
Initially, build the smallest, most concise game you can imagine anyone paying for. It will still take much longer than you expect.
Once something exists, hill-climb the value. Hopefully you will have some elements that clearly bring joy to people, which you can magnify. There will inevitably be tons of things that people find confusing, frustrating, or just boring that you will need to fix.
My Adobe subscription has a $270 cancellation fee to exit my contract I started in college in 2013.
I’ve paid Adobe over $8000 and don’t own anything, and if I want to leave they’ll charge me a heinous fee that is hidden in the fine print, using dark pattern business.
2026 · Wan 2.5, LTX, HunyuanVideo run on a consumer GPU. Blender 5 is free. Foundation models do the cleanup. Director-agents do the orchestration.
The question stops being "how many people does this take" and starts being "whose taste is in the take."
Premium animation will keep being made by armies. Indie animation just got a 200× labor multiplier.
Two markets, two cost curves. Plan accordingly.
The cost curve of cinematic animation didn't bend.
It bifurcated.
One side is getting heavier. The other side is being built from a laptop. The split happened in the last 18 months and almost nobody is pricing it correctly.
2015 · Rubato (ESMA student film)
5 student directors. ~6 months. 7 minutes. Festival-grade CG that holds up against contemporary feature work.
It's been screened on tens of millions of feeds. Most viewers can't tell it's a student project.
That was 2015 — pre-diffusion, pre-foundation-models, pre-everything. With just the 2015 toolset, five undergrads matched the polish that 110 Pixar staff produced in 1995.
What happens to that line when 2026 tools enter?
"Scenethesis: A Language and Vision Agentic Framework for 3D Scene Generation"
TL;DR: combines LLM planning with vision-guided refinement to generate physically plausible and coherent 3D scenes from text
One 3D scene. Five worlds. Only the text prompt changed.
I rigged up Blender -> LTX-2: export depth from a 3D scene, feed it to an open-weight video model with different prompts. Forest, ocean, desert, snow, neon Tokyo. All from the same geometry.
#WIP#buildinpublic