People have always been able to steal PC games. There's an entire genre (keygen chiptunes) of music that came from it. I guess this will make it easier to do so, but why do we think suddenly nobody will buy games anymore? I can buy that this might hurt the industry but "the end of AAA gaming" seems extreme?

▲

Eridrus 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, people are massively overreacting.

Single player PC games are a small fraction of the market these days, and once people have a job, they are generally happy to pay for the things they like.

I think the "clean room" Photoshop example is much more interesting because Photoshop is far more expensive and Adobe has a semi-antagonistic relationship with creatives.

	▲	autoexec 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Photoshop already has alternatives (including open source ones) that can replace it. I'm more interested in seeing if this helps make commercial software without multiple free alternatives more accessible. What I hope is that we don't just end up with a bunch of vibe coded clones, that may or may not contain AI introduced bugs or even malware, that get uploaded without being run/tested and then become instantly abandoned. Instead, I hope that AI's ability to help decompile software helps people develop open source projects that are maintained and further developed to go beyond what the commercial software was capable of.

▲

hallgrim 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But have people been able to put the copies/clones on steam, without much cost or risk for themselves?

	▲	nogbit 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Nail on the head, this is new. When someone can steal your release date then why bother making a game? Make a game, release a demo, demo is stolen and published the same week, 6 months before the dev was ready to release. Demos are (up until this week) the #1 for studios to do marketing. Marketing will change now, to more socials being required (YT etc), and even then only small bits here and there as decomp will happen from video as well. The marketplaces that adapt to this and enable devs will help, hopefully.