I feel GTA 6 will be the last mainline GTA that we run on our local systems.
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.
They can't simply copy your game and reship it, because that would be against the copyright laws in most places where these companies make their profits from. Making something sufficiently new would be technically legal, but it would also take massive computing resources even with LLMs. That's either local compute time or cloud spend.
I think the bigger risk is just brand new games being generated of all kinds rather than the more expensive and legally risky full decompilations. Mass generation could start saturating the market and soaking attention. The low end indie market is already pretty saturated and in the end games have to be appealing, review sufficiently well and find an audience. Plenty of good games have barely sold any copies.
So almost a bigger question will be, how will AI impact the marketing industry?
But also AI can just recreate games from gameplay videos.
What actually limits someone from doing this?
1) You need the hardware to play the games, still. You still need a good enough PC or a console like a PS5 to play all these emulated/cross-compiled games. Though, the cost is moderate these days: a used PS5 goes for $400-500?
2) You need to want to jailbreak your console, giving up "mainstream" features (multiplayer, warranty). This requires some interest and know-how, too. Though the jailbreak steps are easy these days.
3) If you lack a console, your PC needs to be strong enough to play WASM or emulated/cross-compiled games. I suppose for consoles like the Switch, that aren't super powerful, most PCs made the past few years could play a AAA Zelda game in the browser. But playing on PC is often not as fun as on a console, with the couch and controller and all.
I have a hard time people en masse want to give up multiplayer, by jailbreaking their consoles.
But single-player games are probably going to have a harder time.
The video game world is already super top heavy, with mass-market multi-player games (like Valorant), not to mention casino-like gacha games. So the trends may further favor this current track.
Someone started it, lots of other bored people, followed. Damage done, remedy already in store for gamers.