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Comment by CMay

12 hours ago

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.

Indie platformers will continue to run entirely on the console. But AAA games have a history of prioritizing visuals over everything else, because that sells trailers. Fully streamed games executing on a remote GPU allow better graphics and prevent decompilation and piracy, all great things from the publisher's POV. So far the economics haven't been appealing and the experience isn't uniform for customers, but I could see AI-assisted decompilation pushing the AAA publishers over the threshold

It would coincide with too many people not being able to buy gaming hardware though.

But also AI can just recreate games from gameplay videos.