Comment by beefsack

I'm not worried at all. LLMs are already so good that they can reproduce many apps and games merely by using those apps and games for a little while. By the time customers are willing to accept streaming only games (which I contend is still MANY years away from mainstream), LLMs will be able to near perfectly replicate these games. Or better yet, make far better versions of them. I'm not even sure we have a games industry in a few years.

That’s actually a really interesting take I hadn’t thought of. I’m involved in a decomp project (that to my knowledge is all human created) and knew there would be a legal reconning for AI powered projects, but I didn’t anticipate the business model changing to prevent near future releases from being preserved through fair use RE. What a bleak outlook.

This is not necessarily the case, as you still need to deliver an experience that customers enjoy and will pay money for. This means consoles that let them play games in their hands with the highest picture quality and lowest latency. No disruptions from poor wireless or significant interference in environments like apartment complexes.

Fully homomorphic encrypted processing may also become a norm and if that is combined with some games going back to being console only, there could be significant enough protection for games that contain trade secrets. That said, the days may be numbered for trade secrets at all given that better models may make today's clever trade secrets look juvenile.

At the same time, a lot of these games were already getting decompiled and inspected at runtime. That has historically been one part of the incentive to release games on console only or console first, particularly first party titles.

In any market where it's relevant to their business interests, they can still rely on the copyright laws and can set traps for any companies using decompiled code as part of their own paid and sold product. That whole process will become cheaper and easier to do as well, plus new approaches to slowing down or hindering the results of decompilation will become normal for games in mathematically provable ways. We've already seen approaches over the years like Denuvo.

Always online games themselves have benefited from some of their code being in the cloud and that will obviously be under fire more than ever with people writing their own servers, but even that might have novel approaches that can survive advanced tampering.