🗞 What's New: The gold rush for AI game development

We got jealous watching all the vibe-coding success stories from the sidelines, so we entered the arena 😤

• The rush to build AI games is at a fever pitch, and Team Indie Hackers has thrown a new hat into the ring.
• Digg is being dug from the grave, with help from Reddit's co-founder. Is it the next big distribution channel?
• An AI app generating $30k/month, from a founder who sells licenses instead of monthly subscriptions.

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After Pieter Levels started sharing the insane growth of his vibe-coded flight simulator last week — it's up to $38K/month now! — hundreds of indie hackers hopped into the arena to use AI tools to build their own games.

Including us!

From battle royale shooters to spooky forest escapes, these apps are generating hundreds of thousands of views — even for founders with small audiences.

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Kevin Rose, the original founder of Digg, just reacquired his once-popular social news aggregation site for an undisclosed amount — with plans to rebuild it as a challenger to Reddit.

The twist? He's collaborating with Alexis Ohanian — Reddit's co-founder who once viewed Digg as "the enemy" when launching Reddit back in 2005.

The “new Digg” will launch on March 8 (this Saturday) and is worth keeping an eye on because every new community platform represents a new distribution channel for expanding your reach.

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Note to self:

Stop patting yourself on the back for how good you are at having Type 2 Fun and carve out a little more space for Type 3.

—@channingallen

While most SaaS founders chase recurring revenue, Daniel Nguyen is proving there's another path to profitability.

His Mac app, BoltAI, generates up to $30K monthly using a perpetual license model that customers prefer over subscriptions.

From building his first version with ChatGPT (despite knowing zero Swift) to finding the perfect price point ($100), Daniel shares the exact marketing channels that worked, why he abandoned freemium, and how he's leveraging free tools as lead magnets to sustain growth as a one-person business.

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Special thanks to Yushavel Calderon for the graphic design, and to Michal Kankowski and James Fleischmann for contributing posts.

—Channing