For now. In the next few years I bet we'll see AAA games releasing streaming-only.

Funnily enough I ended a recent blog post on this topic with "You will own nothing and you will be kinda pissed off about it."

https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/reversing.html

Perhaps, but I doubt it. The immersiveness and suspension of disbelief come partially from the richness and massive bandwidth of the data stream players receive. Streaming degrades it massively. Even with media streaming, e.g. Netflix, there are many folks (including myself) who can't stand the low-ish bitrate they _have_ to supply to customers because of the infrastructure strain / $REASONS. With games it will be even worse. And there's also the latency problem, which is kinda massive for this. Unless of course they invent some kind of protocol where assets are stored and loaded on the console, but the logic of the game is received via a low-bandwidth stream.

Regarding your post: I think the future of RE of server-side bound software will be something like 1. Point your AI robot with eyes and ears to an interface designed for you (the human customer). 2. Make it explore software at massive speeds, map and record every possible behavior, closely construct/approximate the human-computer interaction model. 3. Rewrite it completely in Rust. 4. Profit.

There will be no moat. Popular non-FOSS will be laughed at and rewritten by its users in hours/days. Proletariat will finally own the means of production, and the Stallman dream will finally become real.

Your post makes sense, but most software was moving to the cloud even before AI. Why sell someone a copy of ms office when you can get them to subscribe to O365?

I think the self hosting moment will gather steam and maybe prove itself superior for certain cases

in a few years, won't I have an agent that can play the game via the video stream and then code my own local copy of the game? it might have to iterate through story branching, but that's hardly an obstacle

True, but if we (eventually) have models which can produce high quality games, who cares?

I think AAA games as we know it will go away

Nobody wants 15 year lead times for sequels that cant innovate because its too risky. Their audience will also have a major backlash towards any generative AI use or known agentic workflows in development

All while indie developers wont be constrained by any of this and can even do a full voice suite thats more immersive and even dynamic, in a smaller payload because there wont be audio files, just the voice model

I think streaming vs downloadable is a red herring, AAA games are on their last breath. The indie developers that break through will be the AAA experiences if the market chooses a title enough times

The Hollywood equivalent to this is to make only AAA blockbuster titles in order to drive theatrical ticket sales. It is a strategy with diminishing returns - just look at the box office trajectory over the last 25 years.