With the slew of recomps these days enabled by AI, How much incentive is there for a game studio to pour their heart, soul and money in a product when it can be easily "stolen" and shared for free...

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goosejuice 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It's been 27 years since Napster. People are still making albums and movies. I don't think piracy moves the needle in any meaningful way, not with enforcement anyway.

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Laremere 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Look at a graph of music industry earnings. Earnings peaked around 2000 mostly from CDs, before plumiting because of piracy and the transition to digital. To the people trying to make a living, it changed everything in every meaningful way. Sure enforcement happened eventually, but only after setting everything on fire and changing consumer expectations to be unaligned with artists actually making money for people listening to their music (foreshadowing). The industry has maybe only just recovered with streaming revenue, only for AI to come in like a wrecking ball again.

	▲	doublerabbit 26 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The music industry is a racketeering front; they sabotage themselves. If they actually embraced the digital era of mp3s rather than throwing lawsuits at the problem they would of been on top. Music should be free, however these dinosaurs are stuck in tar and will continue to sue, hoard and milk their old ways restricting innovation and progress. No sympathy for any of the wet teabags of the music industry.
	▲	sublinear 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think it's still debatable whether piracy was the sole cause, or if it was a watershed moment for all the problems that already existed long before napster. The internet sparked interest in independent music, artists had been fed up for a long time regarding earnings, and the music being made by the big labels was already pretty lackluster by this point in time.

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diath 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

People who want to support a game studio will buy the game anyway. People who do not want to support the studio will pirate the game anyway. It's the same reason why piracy does not matter at all, those people weren't going to pay for your game either way.

	▲	nullishdomain an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If GTA6 shows up for free in a web browser day one, it will for sure hurt sales. Not sure how anyone could argue otherwise: people are paying to play GTA, not paying to support Rockstar. These older games though, I agree with you.
	▲	jgalt212 an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Relying on support / the kindness of strangers is quick way to financial ruin. It's about providing a service / product that has value that consumers will, if forced to, pay for.

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arshxyz 22 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Video game piracy isn't new and indie games have always been trivial to pirate. In fact a lot of indie studios opt to put their catalog up on GOG, which is a famously DRM-Free store.

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chaosharmonic 44 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, how much incentive is there to buy when the studios won't let you legally purchase from them, or at best don't actually consider it a purchase when they do?

Especially when, for games of this age, we're talking about going through the secondary market, and paying potentially hundreds of dollars for a physical copy, without the creators seeing a dime of that transaction to begin with.

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treyd 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I don't understand this framing of recomps using the word "stolen". For most games the hard part and the valuable part is not "writing the code", it's everything else.

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fwip 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it's less that recompilation is stealing the code, and more that it is a piece of the puzzle to 'stealing' the game experience (the thing that you would pay for).

Emulators + ROM is one way to do that. Recompiling from the ROM is another. I think that for most people, your stance on if emulating is stealing or piracy, will well-predict how you feel about recompilation tools.

	▲	ndriscoll an hour ago \| parent [-]
		In what world would emulation (i.e. product compatibility) be stealing or piracy? In a functioning market, we would have e.g. a Steam Machine advertising fully supported PS5 compatibility (and PS4 and PS3 and PS2 and PS1 and Wii and Gamecube and N64 etc. etc.), or a Legion Go advertising Switch compatibility. We should all want competition. You shouldn't need to purchase an overpriced crappy handheld to play specific titles when a better, cheaper one could do it just as well. I swear gamers have the most insane Stockholm syndrome. It's super common to see them say that it's a problem that there aren't enough "exclusives" for a console. Like, dude, the problem is that the console sucks next to its competition. You shouldn't want product tying to try to make you buy it. They're literally all just branded commodity computers that are locked down to tie purchases (an illegal, anti-competitive practice) at this point. This was already litigated multiple times 20-30 years ago and the big companies consistently lost every case. Sega even lost a case where a company displayed the message "PRODUCED BY OR UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES LTD" for a game that Sega had not approved because it was required for the console to boot, and they couldn't try to use trademarks to stop someone from developing for their console.

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yieldcrv an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The market doesn’t want them to invest half a decade to a decade into games anyway

Anything that shows its no longer worth it will accelerate that industry using newer tools to make games faster with multimodal language models powering audio, voice, asset generation, rendering as well as agentic workflows for the manual work humans would still be involved in

right now, AAA studios won’t do it and their audiences wont want them to do it, but any dedicated indie developer that would have never hired the teams of people needed for those aspects can do it. a nearby parallel reality where AAA do it based on no ability to protect high valued IP now looks closer with the decompilation route

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vjsrinivas 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The incentive will always be there for games that build an organic community. Good examples are a lot of Valve games.

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iugtmkbdfil834 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Because good stuff will defend itself regardless. If Pratchett or Carlin was alive, I would still be waiting for his new stuff.. maybe even more so in the age of AI. Hell, I am doing a ton of personal projects now and I am still waiting for new divinity, because by know I trust them to do the stuff right. And this is the point: no more corporate slop! All hail AI slop. Second golden gaming age is upon us brothers!

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squidmaster 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]