| ▲ | yogthos 4 hours ago |
| Closed source software model is basically dead now. |
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| ▲ | XenophileJKO 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I don't think this is true. People are lazy, they won't want to make all the creative decisions and play test to figure out what is fun. What is true is that the price points are going to be affected, the economics have changed. |
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| ▲ | Uehreka 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | So the problem is that “people” writ large can be lazy, it only takes one person with initiative to open source your closed source software. I just got let go from my job, and I was thinking yesterday about trying to start a startup around a piece of software I wrote on the side that I think has a market. But I also know that if my marketing page gets posted on HN it’s curtains for that business (since the main thing I’d be selling is software). I think we can all agree that software is valuable, in that it provides value to us. And I know a lot of us hate when a company that should be “just providing software” tries to “pivot to services” or find another unnecessary way to get their hooks into us. But if making good software is no longer a way to make money, then the only companies left will be the ones providing “services”. | | |
| ▲ | sejje 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > But I also know that if my marketing page gets posted on HN it’s curtains for that business (since the main thing I’d be selling is software). Why can't you have an edge in marketing your product? In fact, seems like you assume they'll have the edge. You probably have a network, too--even if small, it puts you above 99% of others. Ship it! |
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| ▲ | hightrix 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Agreed, people are lazy. So lazy, in fact, that they will try to "Make a game like WoW but in space" over and over again until the tools are good enough to simply do it. They don't need to make all the decisions, they will take what the tool spits out and that will be the "content". For more content, they will just say, "Make an expansion and do something with black holes" and it'll be done. Why would I buy your game when I can make my game exactly how I want it. | | |
| ▲ | enigmoid 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | When it comes to MMOs, your game is no fun if you're the only one playing it. Maybe this will lead to some stickiness. But a lot is going to change. | | |
| ▲ | hightrix 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why would I be the only one playing it? I'd spin up a few hundred agents to play along with me. Or make a NPC system that acts like real players. The bonus is these players are all friendly and willing to play with you no matter your gear/skill. Add in small multiplayer, 2-6 people, and now you are basically playing modern WoW. |
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| ▲ | sejje 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | But they're cloning things. There is no creative decision making. And in fact, the less creativity, probably the better result--because the models are great with an exact specification. |
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| ▲ | pjmlp 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| At least it makes quite clear the point that shipping machine code isn't a bullet proof solution against shipping bytecode instead. |
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| ▲ | rvz 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Closed source downloadable software is "dead" unless it doesn't require you to login to their servers at the start of the game and acts as a thin client. These publishers will find a way to lock it down for new games and tie it to their servers to run it, or have the game streamed to you; simulated via a world model or not. |
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| ▲ | sneurlax 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | You can still run it in a VM and access files on disk. Or if they're 1337 haxorz and keep the game in RAM you can still inspect RAM There's no way to deliver a running program which you can't decompile aiui. Like literally last night I did this to decompile an Android game whose APK on the Play Store is just a thin wrapper that downloads the real Unity game at runtime. It was a 30 second barrier | | |
| ▲ | CharlesW 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > There's no way to deliver a running program which you can't decompile aiui. This may be straightforward on Android, but is it on iOS? "No way to deliver a running program which you can't decompile" seems less like a rule of nature than the way it happens to work now. I don't think it's extreme to imagine that likely a side effect of this AI-driven gold rush to "free the IP" will be the further lockdown of general purpose computing. | |
| ▲ | BugsJustFindMe 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Screen-sharing, not code-sharing. | | |
| ▲ | hightrix 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | So then have the AI tool watch the screenshare for some amount of time and then recreate it entirely locally. | | |
| ▲ | BugsJustFindMe 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's naive to think that you can enumerate all the interactions of complex software like a modern game purely by observation let alone over a network link. Anyway all you're proposing here is an even more rapid industry death. |
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| ▲ | 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | deltoidmaximus 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hard to say if publishers are going to want to pay the (now increased) hardware costs to stream hosted games when before the AI boom they kept failing to get the idea of the ground. Certainly I don't think we'll see it happen unless the AI bubble pops reducing hardware demand for AI. | |
| ▲ | Geonode 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | This won't matter. AI will be able to build the game from video of gameplay. | | |
| ▲ | BugsJustFindMe 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Without decompilation, it's impossible to say that you've experienced every aspect of a game. So AI will be able to build something that approximates part of the game from video of gameplay, but it will not be able to completely build the game with reliable consistency. | | |
| ▲ | Geonode 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Streaming won't stop it, just have the AI play the game and do every possible thing. | | |
| ▲ | BugsJustFindMe 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Every possible thing! We can't even enumerate every possible thing in chess with a compact set of rules let alone every possible thing in something like Red Dead Redemption with unbounded complexity. "Thing" is not "what happens when you shoot an enemy". "Thing" is "what happens when you shoot this particular enemy in this particular place at this particular in-game time and this particular not-in-game time after doing this particular long sequence of other very particular things". | | |
| ▲ | _aavaa_ 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | That's what the issue tracker is for. If someone notices a subtle difference and they want it added they'll file an issue. If nobody notices the untested space it doesn't matter. | | |
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| ▲ | ThrowawayR2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Good luck doing "every possible thing" in Minecraft or Factorio. |
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| ▲ | polski-g 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Most people are not Hacker News posters. This is like saying "cabinet manufacturers are dead" -- but normal people don't like making their own cabinets, they just want them and are willing to pay for them. |
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| ▲ | za_creature 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Wouldn't your LLM be able to ship the "original" specs to a CNC router near you and have your custom cabinet shipped? |
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| ▲ | plastic-enjoyer 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Maybe for now, but hard to predict this will hold in the future. Where there is strong economic motivation to secure software, innovation in protective technologies inevitably follows. |
