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1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality

GDC Festival of Gaming · talk · Watch on YouTube

Indie game developmentGame designTech industry & business models

What it is

In this 2019 GDC talk, Alex Schwartz and Ziba Scott explain how they flooded the app stores with over 1,500 auto-generated slot machine games to find the lowest bar for success. They tour the dark side of the mobile app market.

Why Hacker News recommends it

HN commenters recommend it as a hilarious account of mass-produced app store shovelware and cite it in threads on spam and low-quality content.

  • 3 people recommended it
  • 3 different months
  • 1 strong recommendations
  • first 2020, last 2026

What HN commenters said

  1. “That talk was hilarious”

    Hilarious story of an AI-generated slot machine game empire earning from ads.

    cyber_kinetist, 2022-07 · Strong recommendation · in “Unity merges with IronSource”

  2. “Reminds me of this brilliant GDC Talk - 1,500 Slot Machines Walk into a Bar: Adventures in Quantity Over Quality”

    GDC talk on mass-producing low-quality slot machine apps.

    jordanwallwork, 2020-09 · Recommendation · in “Google requiring Android apps on Play store to use its billing system next year”

  3. “They procedurally generated 1,500+ different iterations on top of the same Unity-based slots shovelware using noun/adjective pairs.”

    Funny GDC talk on procedurally generated slots shovelware and its success.

    chaorace, 2021-01 · Recommendation · in “A bit on scaling chess.com's database”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: mobile apps, slot machines, procedural generation, gdc, app store spam

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