I wrote a blog post on the current trend of game decompilations using AI and where we’re going with this. It’s all very promising but oh boy are the implications scary.
The compiler was never meant to be a source code obfuscating tool anyway, the real sea change is Copyright being ignored. I’ve always wanted Copyright to go away, but it’s going away in a way different than anything I’d imagined and I don’t know what to think about that.
The obvious upside is we can sort of return to a time when every game was openly moddable. 25 years ago almost every hot game was a mod of another game.
It’s not really copyright that you want to go away. It’s corporations exploiting the work of individuals. There are countries that have much saner, a lot more ethical laws around it.
The AI issue here is their theft, and since the theft is not addressed, it’s going to get ugly, and the big game producers will just lock games behind networks , so unless you’re online and likely paying a subscription, you ain’t gonna be pLaying thaT game.
Decompilation offers you the possibility of cutting out network-required features, if you dream a little bigger.
They’re not talking about individual features, they’re talking about locking the entire game behind a network (such as game streaming) so the game can’t be downloaded to be decompiled in the first place.