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Comment by jasomill | Hacker News Reader

Not going to be viable for entire genres of games because latency.

AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.

But pirates have historically done a pretty good job without AI.

Existing trends towards games with required online components, subscription-based content and microtransactions will no doubt continue, of course.

Not streaming, other than as an extra-cost option, because the margins on subscriptions and microtransactions are bound to be orders of magnitude higher while providing more value to the majority of players.

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The reality is that proprietary HW from past console generations can be significantly improved and made less expensive via modern tech advancements to provide a superior gaming experience without load times or latency. A $200 modernized PS2 or $100 modernized SNES will dominate gaming long before streaming does.

> AIs can't open source games, they can only assist in pirating them.

AIs should be able to use the same clean room reverse engineering techniques humans use in order to produce a legally clean open source game engine that can use the original game's copyrighted assets.

... A clean room, means that you aren't reverse engineering. You're producing the same result, with zero awareness of the process, or it isn't a clean room.

LLMs are created through mass ingestion of data, and so, by definition, cannot be a clean room. They are trained on the things that they're tasked with copying.

How is Claude going to be trained on GTA5'S game engine source code if it's closed source?

It isn't that it will have been trained on the source code. The "decompilation" craze has it in the name... it is being done by decompiling the game and then modifying it. I don't think it's even a question as to whether or not the game companies are going to come down hard on this and I would not recommend to anyone that they jump up and volunteer to be the legal test case for that.

A clean-room implementation is going to be much, much more effort than a "decompilation". Even a decompilation is, I think, more than the hype is claiming. You can't just point at a game, say "decompile it and make it work on Windows" and get a result in one shot. It will take playtesting, cycling around, QA, and time to polish it up. But that will still itself be much easier than an actual clean room implementation. Let alone getting sued by the owner anyhow and having to prove it was clean room in a typical chaotic individual dev environment.

It's not though. We get the machine code for programs we run on our PCs. All the logic is provided to the end user. The only protection these days, is not doing all the game logic on the end users PC.

Well funny enough, the code for GTA5 did leak not too long ago...

How could the possibly have been trained on the proprietary source code of games made many years ago?

How could they have trained on books that they didn't buy or source from libraries?

I'm afraid, the companies in question, have been more than happy to ingest pirated material.

Game copies don't usually include their source code.

Older games tend to have their source code leaked [0], and cracks generally are designed from reverse engineering, revealing parts of how systems work.

And the forefront models have intentionally been trained on quite a bit of reverse-engineering.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_commercial_video_games...

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