AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary(popcar.bearblog.dev) |
AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary(popcar.bearblog.dev) |
It's surprisingly powerful.
In order do decompile you already need a game. If you usually buy games you'd still buy one. If you pirate games - you'd still pirate it.
So doesn't seem clear to me if there is a lot of lost revenue here?
And pirates don't really need AI do hack a game etc. All possible games have been on torrent trackers since forever.
Possibly ability to decompile and modify it would be a free marketing (from those who mod it and post videos) and only increase sales. Potentially what games should do is optimize builds for this so that mods can be easily created and shared - e.g. you buy a game and apply a bunch of mods created by ai or not.
The only reason I see is when it can hurt sales if some cool mod someone does can't be easily applied to original game and then you have no choice but to pirate it in order to play that mod.
Normally they would've released the "enhanced edition" for PCs next year right around the same period of time. With the current pricing on consoles, there's a good chance a ported PC version would even cannibalize sales of their console editions.
It is not a joke! The naming is so bad so it sounds like a joke. So people like the author assume it is a joke and move on without suing them. They are counting on that.
Last weekend I had it decompile the "Kitten Cannon" Flash game and then ran (what I believe was) an exhaustive check of the 36 trillion reachable launch+power+rng combinations to see what the longest run was (I got a little over 11k feet, successfully replayed in the Flash version).
It's so cool to see modifications/enhancements to nostalgic things appear for next to no effort as much as I want rather than be limited by the time I have for it.
Maybe the next time I spend some tokens on it I'll ask for it to convert the implementation to a "proper" runtime rip where the user can provide the source ROM and it extracts those assets live.
This is the future I always wanted, full control over the hardware and software I "bought" but I think we will end up lamenting our moment of empowerment in one way as the time we lost even more agency in the end.
Personal computing is increasingly under threat by government and big corporations, we all need to be vigilant and fight back.
Naturally, decompiling a binary would be simpler comparatively, but for models of sufficient capacity it seems the 'simpler/complex' axis has been shrinking.
When people with no prior experience, including teenagers, can produce a polished game by investing a few hundred hours of their free time to do the creative part, what do we need Ubisoft and co. for?
There is zero indication that that will ever happen. It takes a lot more to create a polished game like Assassin's Creed than telling a chat bot to "make it fun" while using stolen game assets. It's cute to watch mario run around in call of duty (https://www.dexerto.com/call-of-duty/call-of-duty-fan-create...) but most of the AI mashups people are putting out like that recently are basically unplayable garbage. It's fine, it's mostly for laughs and likes/views anyway, but the idea that people with zero experience in making games are going to be vibe coding games that are worth playing and on par with the best Ubisoft titles is ridiculous
Will you prompt the movies you want instead of watching a movie made by someone else? Will you prompt the novel you want to read? It’s nonsensical in other art form, it’s nonsensical in video games too unless you go for the lowest common denominator friendship or similar.
If you consider that "producing a polished game" then I can produce a polished game with a DVD burner and a Steam account.
It's exciting and kind of scary.
It is more likely that we will see a cambrian explosion of games that obviates the need for big company games in the first place. Big gaming companies are big because they need lots of developers, producers, artists, QA, and management and executive suites to manage those. You can even today get code, assets and QA for a tiny fraction of the price you have to pay humans, and that will apparently only get 'worse' for humans over time. It's going to be a very intriguing next few decades.
Why would this be the future you want?
For everything else .. well, it's hugely useful to be on one side of it. I was just today getting codex to explain why the Mac and Windows versions of a library I am using behave differently, which it does by decompiling them. We've yet to see how this pans out downstream, but it's quite likely there will be some sort of retaliatory closing of hardware to attempt to fight it.
https://flashpointarchive.org/view?id=54d974f5-51f8-42c8-a43...
It traditionally involves investing incredible amounts of time and effort and intelligence, but what I think AI does most encouragingly is allows people to access more complex, more modern, more high-performance technologies and interact with them in the same creative and explorational way.
Over the weekend, I was curious about the state of open source touch-based HID support as it compares to the state of proprietary market leaders. I tasked an agent with decompiling and analyzing firmware blobs from the systems I was interested in, and now I have an early alpha version of the most robust source-available multi touch implementation.
There are obviously some legal and perhaps even ethical considerations worth reviewing before considering publishing anything like this, but we have reached the point that proprietary software is essentially open source.
I want Animal Crossing to have an infinite world. I want it to be an MMO. I want the animals to have much better intelligence - for example, if I'm a bad neighbor, maybe they should team-up against me.
Zelda MMO will also be cool. It's just a matter of time. Like two weeks.
These are easy to do now. It's an amazing time to be alive.
But those that will persist through the awkwardness, might find gold. Zelda Four Swords was a banger after all
I'm working on a game right now that tries to find a nice balance between player made stuff and gorgeous assets they can't change.
Like just to start,how are you going to balance intelligence so that it's fun? The AI doesn't magically know.
An unbalanced, untested Zelda MMO will be out shortly. Watch.
I ended up coding coding up a fully interactive version stream on twitch. Unfortunately the Twitch extension I made to make it interactive is still pending review by Twitch, but I can manually add anything keen enough to the allow list. https://www.twitch.tv/medic_911/ (edit, I've switched the stream to use the existing twitch interactive ext, GreenHeat, so you can play the game now, it's just not optimised for this game like my ext is)
I also converted one of the existing decodes of Simtower out there into a native macOS app, which is pretty cool.
I find it (AI) really exciting, but also scary how this will shape the future. People still need to make money somehow to be able to spend it.
Single player PC games are a small fraction of the market these days, and once people have a job, they are generally happy to pay for the things they like.
I think the "clean room" Photoshop example is much more interesting because Photoshop is far more expensive and Adobe has a semi-antagonistic relationship with creatives.
What I hope is that we don't just end up with a bunch of vibe coded clones, that may or may not contain AI introduced bugs or even malware, that get uploaded without being run/tested and then become instantly abandoned. Instead, I hope that AI's ability to help decompile software helps people develop open source projects that are maintained and further developed to go beyond what the commercial software was capable of.
Demos are (up until this week) the #1 for studios to do marketing.
Marketing will change now, to more socials being required (YT etc), and even then only small bits here and there as decomp will happen from video as well.
The marketplaces that adapt to this and enable devs will help, hopefully.
I was shocked YC accepted my fully FOSS company, but YC and a lot of investors realize proprietary software is no longer a moat, and some VCs -exclusively- fund FOSS companies now seeing them as the future.
I cannot express the amount of joy and hope it gives me in this dark world that every proprietary binary anyone has ever found useful or entertaining is about to be reverse engineered and have all the tracking bullshit users do not want removed. Only useful or entertaining features will remain.
This is about to completely break a proprietary and surveillance obsessed software industry that deserves to be broken.
I am thankful to have a front row seat in Silicon Valley, and look forward to watching every single company be forced to Open Source or die.
Everything we do at Caution is FOSS right down to our website and frontend.
People pay us because we maintain an obsessively strict security model of code review, code signing, full source bootstrapping, and trusting no single human or machine. For any of our customers to hold those standards they would need to hire a minimum of 3 experienced systems/security engineers, and paying a subscription to us is a way cheaper option.
If you want people to pay you, even for open source, you need to provide support and value no AI can match.
That is a level of extreme agency over software that was once only available to security engineers with decades of experience like me, that is now available to almost everyone.
I knew it was over when we used automatic place and route to synthesize entire CPUs in Cadence in my ECE classes in 1999 before I graduated with my degree. It already achieved 80% of the circuit density and speed as humans. Then read Genetic Programming III by John Koza 5 years later, which explained that each computer 10 years older than the previous generation, running about 100 times faster due to Moore's Law, could be made to write previous gen software automatically.
Unfortunately, GPUs don't help much with the kinds of optimization problems that I was interested in, where we really need many thousands or even millions of independent threads exploring enormous search spaces using multicore CPUs with local memories. Gradient descent is one way to do that, but IMHO it's one of the hardest ways, requiring the most bare hands effort and brute force. That's why neural nets that actually worked took 25 years to manifest.
So imagine knowing how to basically grow computer hardware and software organically with self-training/improvement in the late 90s and early 2000s, only to be stifled by the end of Moore's Law arriving in 2007 when smartphones chased the profit in cost/power reduction of CPUs and devoted most all remaining R&D to faster SIMD GPUs which didn't help MIMD (multiple instruction multiple data) workloads.
After working so hard for so many years and decades, only to tread water making rent, some part of me welcomes watching the world burn. Now everyone else will get to enjoy the precarious feeling of having the skills to do real work, only to be forced not to at some BS job that almost pays the bills.
Unless you all prove me wrong and put your potential to real use, and bring time/money/resources to the working poor, outside of the current wealth inequality pyramid scheme we pretend to call capitalism.
Maybe I sound bitter, but I'm feeling oddly inspired and optimistic for the first time in a quarter century.
RSG usually waits for a year before releasing to PC, but this will force their hand.
Now we will see a renaissance of creativity, beauty and fun games. Pre-AI games like this would have just stayed in the brain of this one guy forever. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeMWHApB5Fh/
As a thought experiment, how many companies do you know that make enough positive revenue to recoup development and marketing costs from a completely open source download that doesn't rely on something other than the open source software itself for profitability, like a proprietary component or some kind of hosting or network or human support service to drive value? I can think of none.
Between feeds, the slopification of discourse and the transition to streaming pixels, we're now looking at TV 2.0
I do wonder what this means for open-source versions of games, as in: could companies threaten with legal actions more easily now?
Thank you AI for ruining more of our tech freedoms.
I'll be playing the ones I control.
Only one of those gets cheaper and faster with time. (And that's just me guessing it will get cheaper. I could be wrong.)
In any case, the other two scale up with the complexity of the game being streamed. The AAA studios can simply overwhelm with complexity and content. Especially since AI will be generating an increasing majority of the game anyway as time goes on. If it's playable for a year's worth of hours, good luck downloading enough video to replicate it.
Maybe Twitch or youtube could if they incentivised enough streamers to stream their play sessions? Of course, why would Twitch or Youtube give that dataset to you?
It's just not as easy as people are making it out to be.
I don't think it's the technology OR the people that the author doesn't like—I think it's what the people produce with that technology. Namely, the slop and bots currently overwhelming the internet.
If Windows dies, Linux gaming will kind of go down with it. Existing games will continue to work under Wine of course but I doubt developers will do the upkeep to keep their games working on a dead platform.
Considering they just announced a laptop where the sole focus is running AI locally it definitely seems like they're not interested in letting Windows die. And anyway a lot of their money comes from enterprise where they rely on Windows to continue running some shitty old software that hasn't been updated in 30+ years. It's not going away anytime soon.
> I doubt developers will do the upkeep to keep their games working on a dead platform.
They don't need to, communities make mods to make the games continue to be playable. Dragon Age Origins needs a community-made patch to stop the game from crashing on modern systems.
And now with AI you don't even need a particularly technical skillset to do fixes like this yourself.
What is true is that the price points are going to be affected, the economics have changed.
I just got let go from my job, and I was thinking yesterday about trying to start a startup around a piece of software I wrote on the side that I think has a market. But I also know that if my marketing page gets posted on HN it’s curtains for that business (since the main thing I’d be selling is software).
I think we can all agree that software is valuable, in that it provides value to us. And I know a lot of us hate when a company that should be “just providing software” tries to “pivot to services” or find another unnecessary way to get their hooks into us. But if making good software is no longer a way to make money, then the only companies left will be the ones providing “services”.
They don't need to make all the decisions, they will take what the tool spits out and that will be the "content". For more content, they will just say, "Make an expansion and do something with black holes" and it'll be done.
Why would I buy your game when I can make my game exactly how I want it.
There is no creative decision making. And in fact, the less creativity, probably the better result--because the models are great with an exact specification.
These publishers will find a way to lock it down for new games and tie it to their servers to run it, or have the game streamed to you; simulated via a world model or not.
There's no way to deliver a running program which you can't decompile aiui.
Like literally last night I did this to decompile an Android game whose APK on the Play Store is just a thin wrapper that downloads the real Unity game at runtime. It was a 30 second barrier
:)
Why can't you have an edge in marketing your product?
In fact, seems like you assume they'll have the edge.
You probably have a network, too--even if small, it puts you above 99% of others.
Ship it!
If it’s functional, good enough, and the price is right people will prompt generate games and share them with or without the gate keeping game industry.
There’s a lot more to this world than software developers.
Quality free game engines have been available for years. Being a game developer has gotten so accessible that the market is completely jammed with titles and discoverability is very difficult.
I get the feeling from your post that you feel “ability to write code” was something put in place by “gatekeepers” but not only is that not what “gatekeepers” means, but software developers make up a small part of a game’s production team.
Add in small multiplayer, 2-6 people, and now you are basically playing modern WoW.
The idea that this will next year be possible for more polished 3D games with a larger scope is far from ridiculous.
If a community of users get together on Discord to collaborate on a project, I see no reason why this should not work.
How are planning to block that? If they can create Zelda MMO, they can modify your game as much as they want as well, right?
They can create their own world but then they need to get people to migrate to it.
This may be straightforward on Android, but is it on iOS?
"No way to deliver a running program which you can't decompile" seems less like a rule of nature than the way it happens to work now. I don't think it's extreme to imagine that likely a side effect of this AI-driven gold rush to "free the IP" will be the further lockdown of general purpose computing.
Astra Max can do 12%: https://balrogai.com/
Though after improving the harness it can fare better, but still no completion: https://roger-creus.github.io/blog/astra-craftax-nethack/