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Comment by xvxvx | Hacker News Reader

I hear that groups are using AI to reverse-engineer video games, targeting PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo, with some success, and they’re now able to run natively on Linux and Windows.

Add that to the fact all 3 companies have seen massive declines in sales, and hardware costs increasing quite dramatically, this may be the end of the line for the console wars.

Interestingly, Sony released some of their exclusives on PC a few years ago and they sold extremely well. So what did Sony do? Announce that no more exclusives will port to PC. Nice work, guys!

No one hates Adobe more than their paying customers. I hope everyone involved in the move to subscriptions, including the gross cancellation fees, know that they killed the company.

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The backlash against vibecoded decomps and using a lot of compute for unimpactful projects was met with the counterargument "why can't you vibecode something useful like Photoshop instead?"

When they did vibecode Photoshop, well...

Just recently there was a massive kerfuffle in the Minecraft modding community because a mod called Thaumcraft was recreated after it was effectively abandoned for 7 years. The mod's management team threatened copyright legal action.

It's extremely ironic seeing the modding community, which generally play fast and loose with IP rights, all of a sudden care about them when AI made modding trivial.

You can see some of the community responses here, it's hilarious.

https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x2gu7j/so_wh...

https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x3b5pk/looki...

https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x0p9ap/when_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x1q6bx/from_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x1mqb2/the_c...

https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x3v6qw/what_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x3kw5r/glad_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/feedthememes/comments/1x2mx4w/reaso...

I have not seen such delicious drama in the Minecraft modding world in years ever since the Forge/Neoforge schism.

Was that specific mod team playing fast and loose with IP rights? If not, then it’s irrelevant

It's basically "you can't make a mod inspired by the other mod we're hugging the rights for"

Completely missing the part they didn't ask for permission to mod the base game either..... and that Thaumcraft (the original mod) had assets consisting mostly of random images copied off google images. Yes you can't make that up. "You can't steal what I've rightfully stolen!"

I am actually quite curious if the original Thaumcraft mod author Azanor is on HN. I know a lot of the original generation of Minecraft modders (pre twitch, mostly YouTube days, Minecraft modding changed a lot post twitch) are fairly senior software engineers (most famous one is probably Sethbling, though he didn't really do modding).

There's a "Direwolf20" on hacker news too but that user has nothing to do with the famous Minecraft modder afaik.

Reminds me of Sayre’s law[1], about the politics being vicious because the stakes are so small.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law

I didn't realize that Wadler's Law is just a reformulation of Sayre's Law!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality#Related_prin... directly referenced.

These are hilarious thanks for the rundown

I mean, the REAL backlash they got was "So, are you going to abandon this on in 72 hours too?" at which point, once again, without fail, they do.

You'll find drama for decomps of games with active projects. Which is why the DK64 styled all over the AI Slop. You find zero drama for those with not. You may find some with translation projects, but most people already figured out you can just give them 0 attention, there are live translation tools (that you can run on dual screen devices even).

And then there's morons like the PSO on the browser who tried adding merch links and got C&D'd within 12 hours.

I'm sorry but isn't this the whole point of free and open source software? We have been saying this for decades.

Maintainers, you don't owe anyone anything. Put your own life and mental health first. Things like we specifically disclaim all liability and that this software is available free of cost with no assumption of ongoing support etc.

No, the backlash was because vibecoded decomps were trash, incomplete, and quickly abandoned once the attention rush wore off. You'll never guess what's happening to these!

Take a look at the commit cadence of the Photoshop-clone-that-must-not-be-named: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/commits/main/

Irrelevant.

> they’re now able to run natively on Linux and Windows.

Well, no. I think a couple of very basic ps5 2d games are playable so far.

> Add that to the fact all 3 companies have seen massive declines in sales

What are you basing that on? That doesn’t seem to be true at all

Edit: I assumed you meant all sales, not just the physical console

Here you go: https://www.polygon.com/game-console-sales-down-ai-component...

For 2026 YTD ending August, Xbox hardware unit sales are down 33% versus a year ago in the US, while PlayStation hardware units are 25% lower.

And: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/nintendo-switch-2-uni...

Nintendo Switch 2 hardware sales are down 34.4 percent year-on-year.

Microsoft are secretly trying to offload Xbox and want out of the gaming business. It will happen soon.

Poor economy, higher component prices, rising costs, and they are still expecting a hardware shortage this holiday season.

That opening paragraph is comparing a single month of year-over-year overlap; the launch month in which there was supply meet practically all demand outside Japan. Also, a summer month..

I fail to see how any of this is linked to the very recent phenomena of recompiling (mostly)older games, or how that's going to kill the console business?

This feels like another brain broke doomer narrative in the vein of "the game industry is crashing!" we've been hearing about every year literally forever.. Brought to us by social media and social grifters(aka "influencers").

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