- Published on
42% of the games from last year's Vibe Jam are already offline
- Authors
- Name
- Michael Scheiwiller
I keep a curated list of games built mostly with AI. This month I checked every link: 28 of 61 were broken. Six of those games had moved somewhere else. The other 22 were gone for good.
So I looked at a bigger sample. Pieter Levels' Vibe Jam publishes an open API with every entry from both editions and whether it still loads:
| Games | Offline today | |
|---|---|---|
| Vibe Jam 2025 | 1,083 | 42% |
| Vibe Jam 2026 (ended May 2026) | 945 | 13% |
Four in ten games from a jam with more than 1,000 entries have disappeared within about a year and a half.
Where a game is hosted predicts whether it survives
| Host | 2025 games | Offline | 2026 games | Offline |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Custom domain | 804 | 50% | 581 | 14% |
| vercel.app | 98 | 14% | 177 | 7% |
| netlify.app | 48 | 15% | 53 | 4% |
| github.io | 61 | 20% | 35 | 9% |
| pages.dev | 8 | 0% | 37 | 3% |
| onrender.com | 27 | 30% | 14 | 29% |
| railway.app | 2 | — | 14 | 86% |
Two patterns:
- Custom domains lapse. Half of the 2025 games on their own
.comor.ioare offline. Free static subdomains (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare Pages, GitHub Pages) lost 0–20%. A domain is a yearly bill, and a jam game isn't worth renewing for most people. - Servers die, static files don't. Games that need a running backend on Railway, Render or Fly are dying fastest. 12 of the 14 Railway-hosted 2026 games are already offline after five months. Free trials end and free tiers sleep, while a static bundle on a CDN costs nothing to keep alive.
What vibe-coded games are built with
- Three.js is the default engine of vibe coding: 60% of 2025 entries and 65% of 2026. Phaser holds at 5–6%, and Godot went from 5 games to 21.
- In my curated list, where creators say which AI they used, Claude appears in 25 of 35 games (Claude Code in 7). Cursor is in 13, and Codex and Grok in 4 each.
If you ship a vibe-coded game
- Deploy the static build to a free subdomain host and point your custom domain at it. If the domain lapses, the subdomain still works.
- Keep multiplayer optional, so the single-player game survives when the server doesn't.
- Put the source on GitHub, so you or anyone else can redeploy it later.
Method and caveats
- Offline status is the
is_upflag from vibejam.com/api as of 2026-09-24. I didn't re-check the 2,028 URLs individually. - Small samples: Railway (2025), pages.dev (2025) and Fly.io have too few games to generalize.
- My own list was checked by hand (HTTP status, rendered page, and whether the URL still hosts the same game).
The rebuilt list, with 61 games that all work today, grouped by genre with the AI tools and engine behind each: Awesome AI-Built Games