I don’t disagree with that, but my point is more along the lines of enabling low effort “theft” (or if you so dislike that term then perhaps “cloning” would better suit your tastes) demoralizes and thereby disincentivizes high effort creative works, on top of making high effort work harder to find by muddying the waters they’re both going to be put in.

Suppose I put in the work to craft a brand new style of game. Something that nobody has ever seen before. I now have to promote it in order to get sales, but by promoting it vibe coders now see it and can make a low effort clone. Because these particular vibe coders are trying to cash in on the hype I’m trying to build up they don’t necessarily care about quality, only about getting a return on the investment I put in on designing my original idea, so they’re able to produce something functional and ship it within the weeks of time I’m trying to use to build up a fanbase.

Depending on the success of my marketing, how much time I dedicated to marketing before release, the technical requirements to execute my game design, etc then I might still have a successful game and people are able to recognize the difference in quality between my games and the slop cash grabs but I also might now be fighting an uphill battle against the reputation the slop cash grabs have created around my original game design. What incentive do I then have the next time I come up with a new idea for a game?

Getting back to reality, I think many people can recognize a cash grab when they see it but I still think that LLMs enabling them made the already existing visibility problem for indie devs so very much worse.