I Found the Future of Online Gaming
I've found the future of online gaming, and I made it myself. I made this game with AI. If you want to make money online, if you want to turn your gaming skills and your passion into money, here's the opportunity: make your own games. I made this game literally with one single prompt. I made this entire game based on something like Nacht der Untoten from Call of Duty Zombies, and yet the customization and my creativity are all over it. This is a real game — free to play on jerrybanfield.net — and it is so much fun. I played it for an hour straight, and it's the most fun I've had gaming in a while. I'm so excited, because what this tells me is that I have so many more ideas for games to make. If you can make an entire game like this in a single one-shot prompt, what else is possible?
Monetization Built In from Day One
What's even more incredible is that I've got monetization built in from day one. I don't have to apply for Stripe or get a PayPal account, because I host this directly on the ICP blockchain, which nothing else in crypto can do. The AI is able to build the entire website and put it all on ICP. The hosting is incredibly cheap, and then you can take ICP payments and set it up however you want. You can make the game pay-to-play, where every single life costs a micropayment. You can offer free versions of the games. While I was playing, we cleared round 40, and I was already thinking through the models. I'm thinking I might make something microtransaction-based, where it's something like ten cents every time you play one of my games. You just deposit some ICP, you get Jerry Banfield power, and off you go. Or the games are totally free, but only the first version of the game is free, and you can play the upgraded version for around ten cents each. Microtransactions seem to be a really good model. You could also offer a version of the game with a new weapon, because with AI, I can just leave this version of the game alone, make a different version, and put all of it on my website. It's super cheap to host because it's on ICP.
User-Generated Games Are the Next User-Generated Content
What I want you to get excited about is this: to me, this is the future of gaming. It's just like how, before social media, the web was read-only. Every website you went to, all you were doing was reading. You were not submitting content to it. One of the biggest changes I've seen in the web over the years is going from one-way, read-only content to user-generated content. Well, now with AI, what we've got is user-generated games. The easiest way to do it is to make a little browser game like mine, but you could also set it up in theory to be a little mobile game. You could probably make your own version of about any game: some kind of text game, an Angry Birds kind of game, a card game. Mine is a first-person shooter zombies game, which is a bit heavier, but there's just so much you can do. All you need is to be able to use Claude, use your imagination, and then have Claude build it on Internet Computer Protocol. You need the whole thing to be secure on the blockchain, and you need it to be decentralized so your game can't get canceled or have the plug pulled on it for some reason. And you need instant payment. You need payments set up right in the infrastructure so you don't have to screw around with Stripe or PayPal or anything. You could always add those in later, but this way you can monetize immediately from day one.
Be Both the Creator and the Gamer
The ideal thing to me is to be both a content creator and a gamer. I've been frustrated with my gaming videos for a while, because I've been wondering how I give somebody a really good experience with them. Well, now I can just make my own games. I can show you something you've never seen before, because I made it, and I can make the exact kind of games that I want to share. What I see as a huge opportunity going forward is to be a gaming creator where you both create the games and play them, because when you create the games, you're marketing the games at the same time. It's just brilliant: I play the games, and then I'm marketing them. If you're wondering how you get views, take something like this. I could title it "I made my own Minecraft-style zombies game." You put another game people might enjoy in the title to call out the audience. What's special is that when they arrive, they see something they've never seen before, but it's going to be familiar because it's gaming. You don't want to be totally unfamiliar, because sometimes when something is totally unfamiliar, it's too weird and people won't engage. But this is what you can do: you can create a game on your own terms, totally, today, then show that game off and market the game just by playing it. That's incredible. I'm going to put all my own sound effects into this game, too. This is literally the very first version, and it's just so fun. It's fun because I came up with it. It's not somebody else's game.
Why This Beats Roblox: Speed
This is a huge opportunity to make money, because right now you're so early. Nobody realizes what a big deal this is. My friend was telling me about a month ago, "Dude, user-generated gaming is the future." He's into Roblox. But the problem with Roblox is that it's not that easy. It took him three weeks, even with AI, to get his Roblox game out, and it was okay. But that's too long. This game took me about an hour. Think about that: I've literally played this game longer than it took me to make it. And I have so many more ideas, just tons more ideas. This, to me, is the future of gaming, when you can just make your own games.
If you think people aren't going to want to play a simple game like this, here's the thing. If I'm Jerry Banfield, and you watch my YouTube channel, and then you play a game that has my voiceover in it, imagine that experience. Right now, somebody like MrBeast has had access to do this for a long time, because he has the money and the team to make his own games, but even he still sticks with Minecraft games. If you're not a huge MrBeast-level creator but you've got an audience, you can make a lot of money creating your own game. Some of these YouTubers who are gamers could take ten or twenty hours and probably print $100,000 by making their own game, doing their own voice lines, and using AI to create it. Then everybody's got to play the game, because your favorite YouTuber is the voice actor in the game, and they literally thought of it and created it. This is the future.
Get In Early: What TikTok Taught Me
Here's the thing: even if you have no audience, you've got to get in on opportunities like this early, before everybody else figures it out. I was on Facebook in 2005. I deleted my Facebook, though. I had millions of followers there, but in my opinion it's just a crap platform. Right now, almost nobody realizes what a big deal AI-generated games are, and almost nobody realizes how easy it is to host an AI-generated game on ICP. So there's a huge opportunity right now, where people have not seen AI-generated games before, where people are very willing to try new games, and where people are going to want to make new games. It's like when social media first started. I remember when TikTok first came out — it was actually called Musical.ly back then — and I was in a bad place. My friend told me about it, and I thought, this is stupid. Who's going to watch these vertical videos? It seemed dumb. That's because I was in a place of scarcity myself. I had just made a lot of money online, but I'd gotten down and felt like it all wasn't enough. I remember seeing TikTok before there were hardly any views on it, and if I would have just gone all in on making TikTok videos right then — I've already gotten over a billion views online — I would have probably gotten another billion more views on TikTok, because I was so early into it.
What You Actually Need to Start
So right now, if you're into gaming, get into AI gaming. I know it sounds intimidating. You might be asking, how did you actually do this? All you need is a Claude subscription, which runs around a hundred dollars a month. If you're thinking that's way too expensive, well, sometimes you need to invest in things. In my experience, a hundred-dollar-a-month Claude subscription is enough to crank out probably five or ten games like this, at least currently with the Fable usage on it. You could also use ChatGPT Codex. I use ChatGPT too, but I've been using Claude right now, and if the Fable model goes away, I may switch to ChatGPT Codex. All you need to do is use Claude and tell it what kind of game you want. First, you tell it the game you want to make — the idea. I imagined how the game should be, and then I had it clean the prompt up before it got built, so it wasn't so sloppy.
Even while I was explaining all this, the game kept pulling me back in. Suddenly the zombies were taking two shots to kill, and I realized we needed to buy some more firepower — having two-shot zombies makes things a lot harder. So I grabbed the Real Power upgrade to get my damage up, and my goodness, it was expensive. It only put me up about 25 damage. Still a one-shot kill, though.
From Prompt to Playable Game
It was interesting to see how far we could push the game, because the upgrades were getting crazy expensive at that point. But here's the process: you need to be able to clean your prompt up so the AI can essentially put it in terms that are easier and more direct to code. Then, from there, you code it. And honestly, if you can play video games, you can get comfortable in a command line interface. You don't have to actually know hardly any commands. All you literally have to know how to do is change directory. It's super easy, and you can even use Claude for that part. All you need to do is tell Claude that you want to start making video games with AI and that you want to host them on ICP, Internet Computer Protocol. Now, you will need to buy a little bit of ICP off an exchange and then take it off the exchange in order to pay for the hosting costs. But once you've got that, it's super easy — and I can help you do all of that. You can also host your game on something else, but there are some problems: being able to monetize right away will be a problem, how much your hosting will cost could be a problem, whether your game might potentially get censored depending on if the platform likes it, and how secure it would be.
The Opportunity I've Waited 30 Years For
This is a limited-time opportunity, and it's huge right now. This is one of the biggest opportunities I see online right now: combining content creation with game creation. It's just amazing. I've essentially been waiting 30 years for an opportunity like this — to take any game I can think of and turn it into something I can just instantly play. And it's this effective. It's nuts. So I hope I've got you excited about this opportunity. I'm so excited to see how much money I'm going to make from this, because between all the different aspects of it — teaching people how to do this and doing it myself — I think I'm going to make tens of thousands a month from this. It's that big of an opportunity. And look at how people react to it. When my kids saw this game — my kids are into Roblox — they said, "Oh my God, Dad, can we play that game? Really, Dad, I want to play that game!" That's the reaction I got from my own kids. Meanwhile, in the game, I hit 1,600 points and the Bitcoin boss came out. Nice.
Why the Window Won't Stay Open
This is such a big opportunity right now, but I believe it's a limited-time thing. Once everybody gets into creating their own AI games, what you'll end up having is fragmentation, where there are so many different games people are playing. It's kind of like social media. When I first started on Facebook, especially when I first started teaching Facebook marketing, when they first came out with pages in 2012 and I got a page right away, it was super easy to get my page up to 2 million likes. And it was super easy to make a course and sell hundreds of thousands of dollars of it, because nobody knew how to do it yet. But now, take TikTok. In my opinion, TikTok sucks today, because everybody's got a TikTok. I deleted mine — I had millions of views on my TikTok before I deleted it, and I decided it was trash and wasting my time. When I first started on TikTok, it was so easy to get 100,000 views on a video. It was crazy — the trashiest video you could make would get 100,000 views. But now you just grind out endless videos and get 100 or 200 views, and those are low-retention views, usually only a couple of seconds, usually useless. TikTok in 2019 — that was the time to be on it. When everybody's already on a platform and has figured it out, you're too late.
AI Gaming Content Creation Empires
I think right now there are thousands of people around the world who are going to build up AI gaming content creation empires, where you create video game content and you make your own AI games. You make the games and you play them, and then you monetize, and you make whatever kind of games you want to, and everything's custom. I think there's an opportunity now to have huge, huge monetization. But it's going to disappear pretty quickly, because once everybody knows about this, people are going to have their favorite AI gaming creators. I may be one of people's favorite AI gaming creators, and every game I play, people may come play it too, and then I'll have that audience. Right now, there's a huge audience up for grabs in gaming — people who are just bored playing the same old games over and over and want something more meaningful. So to me, now's the time. Now's the time to learn how to do this. Now's the time to start getting AI-generated games out there. Now's the time, before everybody figures it out.
Where the Money Is Going
I hope this has been helpful for you. This is probably the future of my gaming channel: everything you'll find on my Games playlist is going to be games I've created. Why? Just think about this from a content creator's point of view. Why would you promote somebody else's game when you can make your own game and promote it? Yes, you might be able to get more views on some other game, but you can make so much more money on your own game. I think content creators in gaming are going to pivot hard to making their own games, because there's just too much money to be made. Some of these creators could make millions and millions of dollars just creating their own games instead of playing other people's. Think MrBeast. How much money would MrBeast make making his own game? With AI, it's going to be easier than ever — he'd just have a couple of people on his team do it, and it would be super easy. How much money would he make with his own game instead of playing other games? Even if there were fewer views, there would be way, way more money.
So this, to me, is where the money's at, and this is where the money's going. I hope I get to talk with you — and if you want to play my games, go to jerrybanfield.net and give this one a try yourself.