Normal people aren’t downloading a 100GB torrent to get this working. Nor would they setup an emulator.
At most less than half a percent of the target market would actually do this.
Still, I’d imagine Rockstar easily being able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play this illegally. It’ll probably just stick to Russia where buying a PS5 is basically impossible anyway.,
I think that there would be a swarm of step-by-step guides on every social media platform under the sun.
I don’t imagine Rockstar would easily be able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play. We haven’t seen that scenario play out with any other emulation or de/re-compilation situation.
How would they know who you are? The RIAA was only able to sue students on college campuses because they were able to get institutional help to match a human with an IP address.
An average Joe with a non-logging VPN defeats that effort immediately.
Someone downloading with Usenet is never at significant risk since they never upload and redistribute data, so they can’t really be sued for copyright infringement.
I’m not a lawyer but that’s my layperson’s understanding.
You underestimate the will to play gta 6 by people. Necessity is the mother of invention. GTA 6 on pc as a possibility is literally why this project gained attention.
Also underestimate that AI can be used to build a one click type installer (improve massively the install experience). The TitanFall 2 VR mod is an example of such a thing, the install experience is great, the mod is exceptional, it’s a great showcase of what AI coding will bring to the modding scene.
You don't need any llm to have that, its called FitGirl release and its standard on scene for at least a decade. Compressed aggressively to make much smaller packages, as bonus ripped away useless annoying things like long videos with companies logos or choking/seizures warnings playing every launch. Dodi repacks are cca same but usually bigger.
Not 1 click, its few on Next -> Next but thats really it. Checksums, full mod support, optional Direct X or .NET runtime installs bundled within.
You don't need LLMs for much really but it does lower the bar massively and will make that sort of polish more common in contexts that typically didn't have the resources (time or skill or whatever) to pull it off.
Why half percent? Why not 10? Not suiting your narrative or something else?
If it comes out usable, I will try it at least. I don't own consoles nor planning to buy any, no reason I can't run this on much more powerful hardware and enjoy power of modding scene or ie ReShade filters on top of basic game.
Ha you are completely wrong here all over your comment, that I can guarantee. If they get this working with at least 30 fps, expect millions of people will play this on PC. If they figure our performance parity, expect modding scene will go nuclear since it allows you to tinker with game in ways playstation will never ever allow.
I've never really dived into GTA series, but oh boy does GTA 6 has a massive momentum and it overshadows every single game release in second half of 2026, distributors moved many titles away from this period.
// Normal people aren’t downloading a 100GB torrent to get this working. Nor would they setup an emulator.
"CoPilot, download that PS5 emulator everyone is talking about and then set it up for me."
// Still, I’d imagine Rockstar easily being able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play this illegally
How on earth would they know? At the very least the gold master will be playable in perpetuity. If their netcode is anywhere near as bad as GTA V as well, every piece of DLC or online-service will be replicated on Private servers.
We already have a full eco-system and community-driven multiplayer modification framework for GTA V on PC in the form of FiveM. I'd imagine many talented people (and/or those with token capital) are chomping at the bit to replicate the same with GTA 6.
> Normal people aren’t downloading a 100GB torrent to get this working. Nor would they setup an emulator.
You do realize that by Sony going 100% digital, ALL games will have to be downloaded? I don't have a PS5 but many of my Xbox Series X games are ~100GB or more.
Soon most publishers will start going even before the official January 2028 deadline - as it helps them cut costs, simplify distribution, cuts PIRACY, leads to more sales/revenue (people cannot borrow - not even from the library, are forced to buy).
So if someone offers them a chance to break free, I think they'll take it.
Also if SO MANY people can try something like OpenClaw (which took a seasoned professional like me a day to set up) then we're underestimating 'normal' people!
Sony have already introduced a change via a March 2026 firmware update to combat refund exploits and digital piracy (specifically targeting web-store refund loopholes on jailbroken or manipulated consoles) - but this again is firmware and in-memory address storage which is easily parsed and manipulated by Agentic AI.
Simply put, GTA V thinks its running on real hardware. Any sort of hardware based validation check (e.g. hitting hardware specific functions that are HLE in the emulator as more general API calls) will be patched nightly if the likes of the dolphin devlog in recent times is anything to go by. Online checks are even more easily bypassed, unless there's some sort of esoteric quantum or one-time pad style implementation which I can't foresee.
> cash-in twice by delaying the PC release by a year.
You have the same game on PC and console but you have to pay twice to play it on both, despite the engineering effort to adapt the game between them being minimal relative to the whole development effort. But they charge full price for each version as if they go through the entire development effort for each individually. The players will be just as honest about saving money as the devs or publishers are about making money.
Daaaang you're gonna be pleasantly surprised if you haven't seen it already; look up what's happening with decompilations and recompilations now with AI :)
Asmongold also did a stream recently where he showed a bunch of insane mashups of AAA games that people are doing, like Mario in Elden Ring or Spiderman in the Arkum Asylum Batman map. You can find it on Youtube.
If this trajectory continues, the AAA games industry will be in trouble. It will be a golden age for game restoration and game modding.
I just had Claude get me a 1997 game up and running on modern Windows in 30 minutes, and few days of off-hours prompting later, I'm part-way into upscaling/remastering graphics, have a browser 3D level preview, asset viewer, headless rendering pipeline, and entire internal game logic VM reversed and scripts decompiled to Lisp code.
Getting the game to work and upgrading some graphics was something I dreamed of since childhood (and attempted myself several times). I casually threw Opus 5.5 at it and was surprised at the result.
Didn't know until now that everyone else is doing the same with their favorite old games now.
Huh - I played ‘A Final Unity’ but had no idea they’d turned Generations into a sequel. MicroProse probably made way too many of my fond childhood memories.
I never thought of "Generations" as a sequel, I didn't even know for a long time they were related. As far as I can tell, the main relationship between the two games is that "Generations" uses the same engine and assets in space combat as "A Final Unity".
FWIW, AFU is next on my list, I just need to... dig up an old copy of that too.
Shame GoG never got around to remastering either of them, but thankfully Claude has no problems helping here.
GTA 6 will probably be software as a service to some extend, namely the code will change all the time at somewhat high frequency for any port. If I am not too mistaken a big chunk of the GTA community does play online.
"AI porting" able to follow? (If that AI thing is actually true)
Unless GTA 6 is not hardwired to AMDGPU hardware at release, if they have a cross-platform engine, for PC, it is to click the right export button... and do the QA and debug to please the various 3D drivers out there.
Unfortunately, this is only going to push Sony/Nintendo/MS more towards cloud gaming. AI enabling these amazing reverse engineering efforts and democratizing access to gaming is amazing, and preventing vendor lock in is always something I'll support. However it's hard not to see them pushing gamers towards needing to play games on cloud only, preventing these kind of things happening.
Steam is larger than any single console now a days, has a DRM which can be trivially bypassed, and still does excellently. The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.
> the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer
Is that antiquated? PC gaming requires either (1) some technical knowledge to assemble a computer on par with modern consoles without breaking the bank, (2) spending more than $1000 to buy a complete computer on par with modern consoles, or (3) settling for worse performance to buy a system that costs the same as a console.
Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses, and they have much better economies of scale than most PC builders. See: Steam Machine.
Sony Is also Making 59% More Revenue Per PlayStation User since Lockdown, with $230 more spent by the average active PlayStation user now than in 2018.
I dunno, 2 feels pretty on point. Unless you're trying to match an Xbox Series S, I guess. The components in my aging midrange desktop are worth ~$600 more than than I paid for them in 2022.
On the other hand one of the main advantages of console gaming was that you could resell the games after you are done. Now with the move to digital games, what is the advantage of buying a console when Steam has regular discounts and a massive catalog?
Oh boy, that time is long gone. Today you wait an hour for the game to be installed from disk and then for the day 1 patch to be downloaded and installed.
> Lower up-front cost because of the subsidized hardware
I do not believe any current-gen console is subsidised? Though old stock thereof is probably cheaper because they locked the component prices in before RAM prices started going crazy
Console hardware has not been significantly subsidized since the PS3 era. From the PS4 on they all swapped to lightly modified retail hardware that's sold for profit. PS4 and PS5 both ended up profitable on the hardware alone less than a year after launch.
Power-wise Steam Deck isn't on par with current gen consoles nor even last gen consoles. It can play plenty of games, but we've reached a point that it can't run most new AAA games at an acceptable level of performance regardless of settings. With a console you can buy pretty much any game and assume that it will run at a playable frame rate (though there are of course exceptions).
And it doesn't have to be on-par. Show me a gameplay enhancement that the current gen hardware has enabled - something that just wasn't possible on previous gen hardware.
Well, PS5 has an incredible audio processing chip that can actually use GPU geometry directly - and it does its own equivalent of audio raytracing to model accurate behaviour of audio inside whatever room you're in, based on geometry and material properties. It's extremely cool and works pretty well, but unless you're an audio geek you won't notice.
And actually, the "what has this hardware enabled" works kinda backwards. I work in video games and every single design that we come up with usually hits the wall of "oh that's cool on PS5/XSX, but how will we make this run on the Switch" - and the answer is we won't, so the feature gets scrapped. Increases NPC counts, better AI, multiplayer sessions with hundreds of people on the screen - these are arguably gameplay features that the current gen enables but because games are always made for the lowest common denominator they rarely get implemented. And yes, of course there are always tricks to do these things regardless, switch has some impressive games despite being positively ancient now. But I've been part of the discussion about so many gameplay systems that got scrapped not because they couldn't run on the PS5 but because they also had to perform well on lesser hardware.
The scale of things has somewhat improved, but the gameplay improvements in GTA V over IV are hardly there due to hardware capabilities. Gran Turismo still, afaict, does not have a visual damage model, but of course the simulation has improved somewhat. I do not believe Fortnite would have captured a bigger market had it leaned harder into cool graphics.
Honestly, I think Civ games benefit the most from hardware advancement- the end game become more playable due to shorter wait times.
AMD TrueAudio was doing the audio raycasting thing many years before the PS5 released [1]
> The TrueAudio Next SDK was released as open source through AMD's GPUOpen suite in August 2016...TrueAudio Next uses the GPU's ray-casting technology to do the audio computation
It's a rather niche feature, don't think too many games ever used it.
I am aware. But the question was what can the current generation do that the last one didn't - well, PS4 couldn't so that, PS5 can. And because it's built right into Wwise a lot of games support it(whether it's wired in correctly in them is a different question, but I know all games I've worked on had it)
Doesn't "last gen consoles" include the original Nintendo Switch? That thing was underpowered when it came out, let alone compared to a Steam Deck. Also, PS4/5 and friends are not handhelds.
I was specifically referring to PS4 and Xbox One. Power-wise Nintendo platforms since Wii are essentially (at least) one generation behind the other consoles, and generally speaking Nintendo platforms have their own games rather than relying on big multiplats, outside of indie games.
I own a Steam Deck and its one of my favorite devices but its specs are now not really at par with standard (given its age it makes sense). They need to release a newer version but I doubt they can keep the same price value as they did with the original given the market conditions
On a tangential note, I tested Pyrowave last night streaming from my CachyOS gaming PC to my ROG Ally (running CachyOS) connected to the TV; there's 2 network switches and about 50m of ethernet between them.
Lowering the stream resolution to 1440p (from 4k) I was able to get 1440p@120Hz flawlessly playing DOOM TDA, <1ms input latency according to the overlay and display latency in the ~17ms range.
It took 900Mb/s of network bandwidth to stream that, so very close to the limit of my 1Gb LAN and still not at the quality and frame rate I'd normally play.
Add WiFi or internet streaming into the mix, and we're going to have to take a significant hit in visual fidelity and frame rates on top of all of the other issues you mention with cloud gaming.
20 years ago a $400 laptop could emulate most major psx games, and anything from n64 and prior.
A $1k laptop could dualbox WoW.. depending on the type of game you were playing consoles were not that much cheaper. Hardware prices in the mid oughts were getting very good.
Did we live in two different “2006s”? I remember 2000s laptops to be near-unusable for anything 3D, let alone a 400 dollar one. My mid-2000s gaming PC could do it at 60-ish FPS, but the graphics in that alone were like 300 dollars :D
You are way off with your recollection of 20 years old hardware (and its prices)
$400 buys you a decent laptop from 10 years before.
My $400 used Dell laptop from eBay is able to emulate PSX games and most PS2 games (albeit dipping in < 100% emulation speed at times) with its integrated Intel card.
20 years ago (2006) a $400 laptop from 1996 had a pre-Pentium CPU barely able to run Windows 95. In fact I’m not even sure you could find laptops that cheap, used or new.
In general dubious binaries aren't really a problem, because releases tend to be done by people or groups with reputations. Lots of people are ideologically or technologically motivated to release stuff and have been doing so for many years.
And now a days in the age of Denuvo and things like this, cracked binaries are sometimes even 'cleaner' than the official releases.
Unlikely most of the Denuvo cracks actually remove the virtualized code from the executable. Not feasible without extensive binary rewriter tooling (that, while being sloppable, still takes a lot of time to slop).
Interesting yeah you're right. Looking it up it seems that only 2 of the Denuvo cracks have completely removed Denuvo - oddly enough Assassin's Creed games both times. Usually they just use various tricks to fool the authentication, but leave the performance degradation and other issues of Denuvo.
It'll be interesting to see if LLMs do increase the rate of completely cleans.
I can't edit this post anymore but if you wanna read a bunch of stuff on the topic https://k0mkc.hatenablog.com/ is a nice blog. All in Japanese, but it should be perfectly translatable.
Funny thing is they removed all their blogposts on Griffin (an obfuscator several anticheats, including EA's, Riot's and FaceIT's utilize) for whatever reason.
This certainly doesn’t mirror my experience of cloud gaming (gfn) which is indistinguishable from local gaming to me, incl 4k. By and large it’s a significantly better experience than local gaming: silent, cheap, non configuration/setup, works almost everywhere for me etc .
Your article is 6 years old(!) , cloud gaming has gone a long way. If anything , try it first.
Cloud gaming has a latency problem that cannot be fixed because the speed of light being a thing. I play many titles that require fast reflexes and any latency is unacceptable.
Also I muck around with mods, emulators etc. PC Gaming isn't just whatever is on the Steam Store.
I used Nvidia GeForce now for some months and must admit that I can't feel a difference most of the time.
I tried call of duty warzone and even this was great multiplayer experience. (Game is a mess with GeForce now, can't remember shader cache and must recreate it every GeForce now session)
You don't feel the difference until you play without the lag.
I've got something like 1400 hours in HellDivers 2, playing Level 10 I don't want to experience any lag. I recently changed the configuration of my machine and I've able improve framerates/frame pacing and it make a lot of difference when playing the game i.e. some melee counters I can much more easily perform.
I used GeForce now for the summer as I wanted to avoid a hot pc in my room.
Any game I played with GeForce now I also played local, yes there is a minimal difference, but sometimes I got better feeling with multiplayer as the cloud service had better connection to the game servers than my local provider.
And I will prefer most multiplayer games with my local machine, but it impressed me very much (more than stadia and Xbox cloud)
If my provider has a bad peering to the gameservers, but a good peering to the cloud gaming servers, you get a better gaming experience with cloud gaming.
No it isn't. You would have bad peering between you and the game server. It doesn't make much sense however you try to explain it away.
You are adding an extra latency between you, the game server and the other players. Playing mental gymnastics about how it could be better when it can't isn't going to convince me or anyone else.
Conversations like these feel like the sort of conversations people were having at the end of days of the Amiga where they were talking about the custom chips and all that jazz being better ignoring the fact that people were buying Voodoos and Soundblasters.
If i get 150-200 ping direct connected to the gameserver, vs 20ping on the cloud gaming vm + 60ms from connection to the cloud gaming, you get a better multiplayer experience.
Never said its the default or that i want convince someone, but it happens to me at least with two games at the evening.
I think gp was providing numbers just to give an example of why it might work, not actual numbers. Their point was mostly that internet routes are noisy and not guaranteed in performance ie you might not go through the best possible path.
While the numbers might differ , I know this is technically possible from my experience in corporate environments buying links to minimize latency. Basically your isp might optimize for a different function ( cost, etc ) than Nvidia ( who wants to make make players happy and subscribe ).
My isp used to throttle Netflix or YouTube ( I don’t remember ), and gfn users occasionally report better performance when using a vpn ( it’s usually throughput not latency though ).
It matters for anything multiplayer shooter and even single player games with quicktime events. Using WiFi, wireless controllers, TVs with frame pacing and bluetooth headsets adds latency already in your own house of around 10-50ms (although it is a combined latency, not network).
I know and I can't use cloud gaming myself in part because of the games I play and because I'm used to 240fps PC latency so no game can feel good, I can barely stand using steam link for couch gaming. But there are loads of people that wouldn't notice the difference if they're used to 30fps consoles and loads of games where the latency doesn't matter.
It matters in almost every game I play as well, but for some it doesn't really matter like Baldurs Gate 3, Blue Prince, etc. And I think if you're used to 30fps on console you might not notice a difference in most games, but if you're used to 240hz/fps on a PC any game will feel atrocious until you get used to it.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer.
Console are also single (or lately dual) target so it's theorically easier to debug and optimize compared to PC.
Myself I am very sensitive to latency, which is a bit more evidence that I have a somewhat unusual nervous system. People who are much better at other game genres are amazed that I can usually beat levels from any rhythm game the first time unseen but...
When I had 30 ms of display lag (a frame) I could not accomplish anything for my team in League Of Legends. With my old Samsung TV I would just get hit playing Titanfall and never be able to hit anybody (except with a falling Titan) until I turned on "game mode". I even had the same problem with certain single player games like SAO: Fatal Bullet. (Although there are some games, say DW 9 [fast action but not time sensitive] or Orcs Must Die [not twitchy at all] that I can play just fine with the wired LAN in my house in the first case and over the microwave link to my rental property in the second case)
And of course the lag is unreasonably distributed. The developers and executives might have offices across the street from a cloud gaming data center and of course it is OK. For the "rest of us" behind congested or underinvested networks not so much.
What I found the most disappointing about cloud gaming was despite it being all the rage for "Big Tech" for a year or so they never made an attempt to build a game that really took advantage of it. I mean, you can get machines in the cloud with an absurd amount of RAM, CPUs and GPUs. Such a machine could put 20-30 players in a shared world with 20-30 the complexity of a conventional game and stream out video to all of them... Google has fantastic resources and could have made a game which would have had gamers demanding cloud gaming but no, they didn't.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
Counterpoint: The benefit of consoles is that they're locked down hard. A lot of PC games are either unplayable in online mode due to rampant cheating or require a level of system access for their anticheat solutions that rivals antivirus software but without the scrutiny.
With consoles, the best cheat can only ever be as good as a human with zero latency - you need to parse the video signal and feed it into some kind of ML model. With PCs, these FPGA based hardware cheat cards can do much, much more.
And frankly, I'm not sure how to solve this dilemma. I do not want to spend north of a thousand of euros for a console I don't own and, most importantly, can and will get my account locked when I attempt to own it. But on the other side I have zero desire to waste the precious free time I have dealing with cheaters. The usual trolls and sex pests are bad enough - but there I can just mute the chat and go on with my life. With cheaters, there is no escape.
Just run a private server and kick/ban them? That's how things worked in the 00's and there is no reason why it wouldn't work now. You can even whitelist your vetted friends.
consoles and thus games are hacked just as thoroughly and completely as PC, for quite a few years. i cannot think of a single console ive played MP and not seen the same blatant cheating since xb360 days
Even in an online FPS all your inputs need to be sent to a server running the game logic so what you're seeing is not an actual state of the game but rather the predicted one. I think it would make sense to have a competetive game run all it's logic and rendering on a single machine for all the players in a given match so that it works a bit like a split-screen - the only difference being that instead of showing it on a single combined screen it would send those screens to remote players. This way a lot of problems with latency and movement prediction would be gone. Also cheating would be impossible which is a good enough reason to do it on it's own.
For things you can't control, like other players, prediction works fine and can be almost entirely invisible when well done. But prediction doesn't work fine with things you control, like your own character/weapon, because it feels very wrong when you send input and don't get an immediate response.
So for instance imagine you're playing an FPS and if you pressed the fire button, the weapon didn't fire until that packet traveled to the server, was processed, scene rendered, and finally returned. An extra 100ms or whatever might not seem like much, but it nonetheless feels very wrong, and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate. And 100ms is more of an aspirational goal than a typical norm. Stadia, for instance, had latency that could reach upwards of 250ms.
> like your own character/weapon, because it feels very wrong when you send input and don't get an immediate response.
Nothing says you can’t do some amount of local rendering to help with that feeling of prediction.
> and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate.
Professional twitch FPS gamers aren’t the target market. The target market is casuals who just want to pick up and not fight with installs, disk space, updates, etc etc.
The problem is that things are dynamic. Pressing fire does rather different things if the gun is loaded or empty. You might argue then you could just start doing some small amount of local computation, but then this small amount rapidly grows to a not so small amount because you bump into these issues endlessly and you end up learning why so much is done locally on most games to the point that cheating becomes possible.
It's also not just 'professional twitch FPS gamers' that this is an issue for. If you get anywhere near the latency that the Stadia had in certain games (280ms in that article) then that is going to be very jarring even to the most casual gamer. That's less than 4 frames a second! It's going to feel like your character controls like a tugboat. Even at more reasonable latencies you still end up with some significant frustration in games where time matters.
And now a days there's basically zero friction in gaming even on PC. You buy a game with one click, you install with one click, you're playing, often in a matter of seconds.
What if you render a spherical view from player's standpoint on a server and then merge it with locally rendered hud + weapon? The biggest source of cheating is that your pc knows the position of other players, only rendering your local state locally would make this kind of cheats impossible while maintaining ms-level response to actions like shooting and looking around (moving has a lot of inertia anyway).
Imagine you're at the corner just before a hallway and you want to quickly peak around the corner where you think an enemy might be. If you didn't have local copies of player locations, then when you look around that corner you might not see anything even if there's a guy right there. At best he'd do this weird pop-in thing which would look awful.
Maybe but VR FPS isn’t such a huge category. The biggest problem there I suspect is almost certainly variable lag (particularly random spikes) as that’s harder to compensate.
I love being downvoted for this statement by people who don’t know what I had worked on in the past.
This continues to be an absolute no-go for competitive real-time games due to input latency. I honestly think there's a chance that game clients might go the way of the recording industry, and they just might not be worth that much.
As doubtful as I am about the viability of cloud streaming, this IS going to cause a bigger push into live service functionality where maybe you have a light client but the server is authoritative over more and more aspects of the game. Even then, AI can write its own server, so it needs to be full of FOMO if you're not on the official server.
I don't even know if a smaller company like Nintendo can pull something like that off. They have been behind so much in the tech space because they spend modestly and their primary differentiating factor is their IP. Their lawyers are going to be working non stop until they figure something out. I guess have a strategic partner?
I'm not sure I'd totally agree with this characterization. They've certainly been behind in tech that's like "stuff the most FPS and fanciest graphics into this small box as possible", but I'd argue they've been pretty much the only one playing in the "make a good experience for most users without configuration with relatively cheap local hardware" up until relatively recently (SteamOS certainly has made some inroads, but I've yet to see anything particularly impressive in terms of an Xbox handheld, and Sony has basically given up it since the Vita). I don't think either of these broad technical areas are particularly aligned with making cloud streaming viable for gaming, but if I had to pick one side, I'm not sure I'd pick the side that's invested way more into expensive hardware on the local side rather than figuring out how to make the constraints of lower power go further.
You make a very valid point but it really sounds like you are describing whether a company provides immense value to their customers whereas I am describing: are they up to date technically?
Nintendo is excellent at providing that value using low tech. They managed to make a compelling product using cardboard and sell it for 80$. They are the masters at providing good experiences with relatively cheap local hardware.
Cloud game streaming has gotten to be extremely impressive, at least on a wired connection, to the point where it’s almost hard to tell you’re streaming. It’s been hard for me to consider upgrading my old gaming PC considering how good GeForce Now is for the $20 a month that I spend.
I subscribe to XBox Game Pass and used to subscribe to Geforce Now too. They're both really great for me as more of a casual gamer, but at the competitive level in the fighting game genre, it's totally insane and people will notice a sub-100ms lag in their inputs because they're sort of pushing the limits of human reaction time.
I didn’t say only on a wired connection. All of my experiences streaming wirelessly have also been great. I’m just not willing to make the same level of claim when I’ve probably spent less than ten hours streaming on WiFi and hundreds on a wired connection.
I can't tell if this is what they're talking about, but I frequently stream from my desktop to a SteamOS handheld on my home network, and on pretty much any game that I can max out on my desktop's specs (Radeon 6900 XT, so not exactly the newest GPU, but it's able to do quite a bit), I can get 120 FPS on the handheld without much noticeable input lag.
I don't have any reason to believe this would translate into a good cloud gaming experience though, because it mostly seems to have become viable from local wifi just getting a lot better in recent years. I would expect the latency to still be pretty high for a remote server, and it's possible that the streaming server I use is just able to "correct" things more easily for a local connection in a way that a fully remote connection might not be able to.
I’m talking about cloud streaming though I used to do local streaming through steam and remote streaming through parsec. GeForce now in my experience has worked better than either of those options running on my own hardware regardless of the hardware being local occasionally.
I did preface my comment with "I'm not sure if this is what they're talking about", because I didn't know if it was what you were talking about. I guess it's not.
I know that you did and didn’t mean anything by my comment if it came across a certain way. I just thought it would be worth clarifying and sharing my experience with having done local and self hosted streaming previously versus the cloud streaming I’ve been doing in place of it.
As someone who used to upgrade their GPU every year to the newest top card I find it to be indistinguishable from local hardware 95%+ of the time. It’s fairly mind blowing how well it works. Also just to clarify again I pay for the ultimate or whatever the highest tier of GeForce now is for like $20/month and use it primarily on a wired connection so that’s where my experience comes from. With their service you still need to pay for and own the games (though it also connects to Xbox game pass) so you’re only paying for the streaming. It’s also not something that depends on developers allowing it to be on the service so not every game is on there but the catalogue is quite large. I play on a 3440x1440p ultrawide at 100hz and I believe the ultimate sub supports up to 4k@120hz
I think this is only true if you assume the classic server model where the remote rendering streaming is overhead and not colocated with the game server itself.
Well Microsoft always seems to be making the wrong decision at the wrong time and this is probably yet another one. Probably due to competing factions hat don't really have a unifying vision for the company. It provides enormous amounts of comedy and I guess we will find out if this was another instance of "whoops we closed down that thing we could really use right now"! :)
Sony will happily shoot themselves in the face rather than give in to their customer's desires.
Microsoft will try and force their customers into something they don't want, because it's obviously better for Microsoft than their customers. They may succeed - success being "not completely losing all of their market share".
Nintendo will figure it out somehow, even if it means pivoting out of gaming altogether. Chances are - they will choose to make their customers happy instead of shooting themselves in the face. But they will try to shoot in the face youtubers and modders who make their customers happy.
On balance, Sony will most likely shoot themselves in the face, and survive to take whatever market share Microsoft gives up. Somehow.
Valve can be trusted to maintain its current customer friendly policies only as long as GabeN is in charge and he is approaching retirement age. Perhaps we'll be fortunate and he manages to appoint a successor that has the same vision he had and, then again, perhaps we won't.
People forget the social aspects of console gaming and underestimate the ”it just works” factor. Nintendo in particular has a rather unique hardware platform with their controllers. Sure, you _can_ somewhat replicate it on PC, but the portability and OOTB experience is pretty good. Of course the switch is underpowered as hell, but you don’t need PC perf for the games you want to play in the social console form factor. You pay for the complete experience.
Needless to say though, vendor lock-in still sucks, and the switch store is pretty terrible.
Cloud gaming is nice, I use GeforceNow regularly to play on my mac. However, there are several games that I couldn't complete/play due to the latency (around 60ms). Claire Obscures quicktime events were a pain (plus I used a PS5 controller which adds some latency), also Indiana Jones and the Great Circle had a bossfight mid-game with quicktime events that became so frustrating that I couldn't complete the game - halfway through. Same is true for Battlefield 6 - impossible to play, you just get continuesly fragged from player you didn't even see (remember the netcode does not consider you cloud gaming latency).
This is unfortunate that it would push them in that direction, but not for the reasons you speak of.
Before the PS4/WiiU era (I'm not including XBox for reasons that will be obvious), they actually tried to create hardware that was "ground breaking" and/or "revolutionary" (to some extent of those words).
The PS3 had the "Cell Processor" and the Wii was loosely based on a PPC architecture.
The PS4 and WiiU were essentially x86 AMD CPU's.
The PS5, Switch 1/2 and every XBox are basically just desktop COTS hardware slightly modified for power consumption to be "consoles".
Are you surprised that 10,000,000 machine hours compressed into a quantized token can "reverse" a very well known and documented architecture?
I'm not.
And that, in my humble opinion, is the unfortunate part.
Wii U and Switch aren't x86 at all. All of GameCube, Wii and Wii U used a PowerPC CPU and an ArtX/ATI/AMD GPU. And Switch has moved to Nvidia ARM chips; they had been using ARM for portables since GBA.
I could in principal see something that isn't clearly entirely derivative, like if a person takes their own original thought and uses generative AI to make it into a video instead of, for example, learning animation and animating it or finding (probably amateur) actors to film it with. This of course still has some derivative aspects that may be easier to avoid than in the non-generative-ai case, but it is also clearly distinct from a 100% generative AI case.
For example, ever since roughly the mid 2010s when I finished Star Trek: Enterprise, I've been thinking about someone using some sort of generative AI to complete this series, once its good enough to be entirely convincing.
There is an AI-generated YouTube series/channel called "TK-42 Greg" that follows the life of a hapless Star Wars stormtrooper as he pursues a career of menial jobs, unemployment and drifting about a galaxy far, far away.
It's dumb and derivative and isn't getting a lot of laughs from me, but at the same time, it is freakishly realistic, and absolutely ripping off every character and scene and locale of the Lucas series.
I don't know how long it will last against Disney's DMCA juggernaut, but the "Imperial HR Lady" is way funnier and she just has to throw on a turquoise necklace and grating accent.
Speaking of self-vibe-coding games, I wouldn't see the point. When I was a younger boy, I did write games for myself, and it was an arduous project that was mostly aimed at teaching myself programming rather than gaming per se. And eventually the big didactic moments were hacking someone else's game code in terms of debugging and extending it, and that was more exciting than building my own from scratch.
Also, copyright is an issue! If consumer AI could ignore copyright and just code me, say, "Freecell but it's Harry Potter" or "Put me in the cockpit of a Y-Wing video game!" then it'd be exciting. People pay big bucks and invest big bucks for in-universe games of certain franchises like that. But AI won't provide for the consumer in this way, ever.
Much of the joy of gaming for me, is seeing a polished product that is well-balanced in terms of rules and fairness, and has good sound/graphic assets, and challenges or surprises me in novel ways as I go along. I don't think I would mind if someone else vibe-codes a game for me to play, if it's good enough and engaging, but it seems that designing/coding one for myself would feel empty and unfulfilling. And I wouldn't apply the same principle to utility software, but really I'd rather not invest a lot of time in building an office suite for myself, rather than just grabbing it off the shelf.
I've had AI make little learning games, coloring stories, etc for my kid. I and it absolutely will ignore copyright. So far it's never objected. It'll also happily reverse engineer binaries, extract art assets, whatever.
There is a lot of work and research behind the (quality) major learning tools you are possibly likely overlooking. How do you know these learning games and activities are actually doing anything for your kid? Why not just use them?
I’m genuinely asking here. This isn’t bait or a challenge, and I’m not really sure how to avoid that tone so apologies if seems antagonistic.
It could just be that I don't know the right words to use, but my attempts to find some kind of quality edutainment has led me to conclude that basically the only thing that exists since the 90s is Khan Academy Kids, which itself just doesn't have a very tight loop. So I've made some variations on number munchers/word munchers, e.g. find all expressions that sum to N. Or a "what's the missing number" that deletes a number from a sequence of e.g. counting by 4, and they have to answer. It then immediately gives them the same sequence with a different number deleted. Or have expressions pop up/disappear and they need to quickly click the ones with the target sum. Or just straight up rapid answer math questions lol.
Basically, quick arcade-style games that can give them "points" so they feel good about just doing problems over and over for repetition. I can handle the conceptual discussions myself, but I find that gamifying works well for the portions where there's no alternative but to just practice until memorized.
I had also been working on a Treasure Mountain/Mathstorm/Galaxy clone with expanded activities, but I think the arcade format actually works better and is easier to make.
My daughter can also read a couple years ahead, but her writing's still very basic/phonetic. So I had codex whip up a standard template where I can put a picture (that codex generates) and she can write about what's happening in the picture and then color it. The template includes a word bank where I can add words relevant to what's happening (e.g. that I used to prompt the picture creation) that have irregular spelling, and I had it print a reminder sheet of different ways to spell the same sounds (ai, a_e, ay, etc) that she can refer to while trying to remember how to spell words. Previously when she was earlier in learning to read, I had used it to generate a couple simple coloring storybooks as a little fun activity.
That doesn't really answer your question about how I know it's effective, but I get a general sense that educational research struggles with that question too.
Huh? Maybe this is a reasonable take if you only consider the original series, but TNG heavily used holodecks as a form of entertainment, with computer-run characters factoring in heavily to plot advancement in the episodes.
Moreover, the exploration of Data’s personhood as an android is like… incredibly pervasive throughout all of the seasons of the show.
Absolutely and I was thinking about this when I wrote my initial comment. It's a good consideration. Star Trek _does_ have an AI computer capable of generating code and stories and all it requires of the user is a little prompting.
TNG shows humans are using this technology to engage themselves. People rock climb, ski, perform Shakespeare. Holodeck authors are well-respected throughout the galaxy. They also warned us of holodeck psychosis.
Data is an android, but what about his story suggests we should slurp up doggerel? His existence is the pursuit of humanity's "essence."
It really depends his good it is. There are so many shows where stories just don't pay off well. I could see an AI developing a show with a complex web of throughlines kept logically consistent and fleshed out.
But why? I feel like there is always this implied notion that media is just about “being good.” But “being good” requires a lot of things, and a big part of that is somebody sitting down and deciding they have a story to tell. An LLM cannot do that. It cannot speak from experience, it cannot explore novel concepts, it cannot express actual meaning.
A pretty photo is not enough on its own. Hotel lobbies have all kinds of pretty photography. That’s not the stuff people hang on the walls in their home. There is nothing wrong with it, it is fine to have hotel lobby photos. But acting like that is the ultimate target, that we should use AI to just manufacture this at a large scale… I mean what is even the purpose of that? Am I missing something here? Do people really just want to sit around with their local agent generating facsimiles of existing shows/movies for cheap entertainment?
There is always space for cotton candy and general purpose work, but we should not be advocating for a massive facsimile machine to drown out all media. People have been whining about Hollywood not writing new things for decades, so the alternative is to accelerate that? I just don’t understand the draw. I have no desire to sit around watching my computer make a fake, derivative Star Wars show for me to watch later.
The most popular human-made media is all derivative. Look at a list of the top games and movies for the last 10 years: sequels, spinoffs, and adaptations.
Call of Duty 27, the myriad sports franchises, Halo 8, Fast and Furious 11, a remake of some Disney movie, the latest Marvel-slop...
I’m not arguing about what is popular I’m arguing about what is worth our attention and consideration. And I don’t think I at any point implied I think those movies aren’t derivative, but clearly we’re not talking about the same type of “derivative.” LLM’s literaly make facsimiles of existing content in a direct way.
It also bears mentioning that Coke and Pepsi are popular too.
Well isn't Roblox kinda this? I play it all the time with my niece and nephew...it sucks, its enshittification to the max. Part of an entertainment property is you are devoting time to enjoying the creative process of someone who put in the effort to produce something polished and with effort. The end result is the culmination of all the work done (possibly years/decades) to get to that point and you are paying for the result of all that effort. Could a Roblox game be like that? Possibly but the incentives dont seem to be as aligned despite the democratizing force it has had.
I am reminded of a scene from the Jobs movie where they were arguing Open vs Closed systems. This feels similar...
Unfortunately, I don't know if you've tried cloud gaming. It's just not very good now. Also to force people to use it given the current cost climate for components, it would be extremely expensive.
It'll happen regardless, as of now the public internet infrastructure still isn't fast enough to be comparable to local rendering, cloud gaming needs to deliver >50mbps bandwidth at sub 16ms latency.
The clock is ticking even for that. We're not far off from anything being able to be copied, including streaming only games. If it can be observed, a reasonable facsimile can be created. The reasonableness will increase over time.
Gacha games do this, e.g. Genshin Impact. When you turn off your internet while playing a lot of game logic fails (e.g. damage calculation) before it tries to reconnect.
> Unfortunately, this is only going to push Sony/Nintendo/MS more towards cloud gaming. AI enabling these amazing reverse engineering efforts and democratizing access to gaming is amazing
Within 5-10 years, kids will just be asking AI to generate customized games for them on the spot.
Maybe some indie games will even be delivered as prompts too, and the current download/installation times will be replaced by generation times :)
(not saying this is the future I want very much, but it's not unlikely)
We're not far away from playing a screen grab and prompting "Hey $HOTTEST_LLM, make a clone of this game". There really isn't anything new under the sun with gaming. The assets can be easily reverse engineered, reconstruct the 3D world, and work out the inner logic (damage, etc).
Even if it starts out really crappy, people will iterate and contribute until it's virtually identical to the real thing.
But nobody will play it? Steam exists and all those games get pirated. You can’t force gamers to buy duds. I have a gigabit connection wired and found a cloud version of Control to be totally unplayable.
It is in the realm of design to make games playable within the context of their technological limits.
In this case, I could see games moving towards being turn-based i.e. online chess.
I could imagine a Counter Strike RTS,
Also one of the best selling games, Pokemon, is a turn-based game.
Genres are design problems rather than descriptions
No one thinks RuneScape is a "topdown RPG", rather than a "fantasy game with a lot of freedom and many things to do"
The genre can be made secondary to the design, so I don't doubt game designers can make turn-based games widely appealing
Turn based isn't really a genre, it's a play style. A lot of people out there actually want fast paced action and wouldn't enjoy Pokemon. Baldur's Gate 3 also did quite well recently but real time games consistently perform better.
RuneScape as an example is a funny one because it is comparable to turn based games at a competitive level due to its slow tick rate. You're basically taking very fast (0.6s) turns and can stack certain actions within those turns to do better. But there is no pause between turns so it's just (ab)using game mechanics, which also means it is latency sensitive.
there will be eventually people who grew up with nothing but lag introduced by the cloud streaming. They won't know how much better they could have it. So they won't complain.
Revenues suffer because game studios and publishers make awful decisions. See the botched releases of Marathon (Bungie) and the more infamous examples — concord and split gate.
Also a use case for world models to hide the actual source of the game and have it stream a simulation of the real game; never to be exposed or downloaded.
How would cloud-only prevent this? Do you think LLMs can't exfil the game from the server? They're incredibly persistent and are willing to try many things. Random credentials, vulnerabilities in the game servers / dev machines, or even social engineering the devs/the deployment.
I honestly welcome cloud gaming.
Action RPGs might be dead in the water,
But there were many games suffering from data mining, and having their secrets revealed day 1.
Bringing games to cloud gaming could restore the mystery in games
This is saying you'd be ok with books being only permitted to be read at the library, behind a sealed kiosk screen, because otherwise people might post spoilers online.
If the library is completely AI generated, and only the sealed kiosk screen contains (possibly) human-authored content,
How does the equation change?
I am saying I'd rather enjoy POSSIBLY human content, than AI generated ones. And if cloud gaming cannot deliver on this, I'd rather stop gaming altogether. The idea of consuming AI generated content is completely disgusting to me.
Also if that's what you believe, players who start after day 1 will not have mystery. Even players who start day 1 but can't dedicate all of their time to the game will inevitably spoil themselves when they have to do anything else, meaning someone will progress farther than they and will share that info.
It's always nice to have local git clone backups/mirrors of these projects because they may eventually be taken down through legal threats eg, Yuzu and Ryujinx.
Nice moment to hook the git-maintenance[1] command, which setups automatic pre-fetching of a repository in a scheduled manner. That way you don't need to remember to manually update your mirrors. Since the repo is public, cloning with https is a simpler setup for prefetching, but ssh is also supported with some configuring.
I can also recommend hosting your own Gitea/Forgejo instance, it has an automatic repository mirroring feature that fetches the repo regularly. I use it to mirror some "high-risk" repos.
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.
These two concerns weren't really noticeable when I played games on Stadia. That isn't to say you wouldn't notice them, but I certainly didn't.
I'd guess maybe 90% of gamers probably wouldn't either. And those negatives are somewhat balanced by the positives that cloud-streamed games enables: no disk space management (minor) and no cheaters (huge!).
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
funny, the thing that stands out to me is how some open source voice models are farrr better than anything I’ve seen on ChatGPT or Elevenlabs or videos or spam calls, but everyone seems to just plug into those services
the voice models are small too so it’s just a matter of time until someone is intentional enough sending that payload down in a download
A counter-force to pulling more into the cloud against RE might be the general (geo)political instability + general rising tensions.
It might in the near future simply not be possible to build products that are tethered to that degree, as they'd be too fragile for the market to accept.
Additionally, it might be that the market simply starts caring less about specific products, as their value can be recreated freely using said LLM inference. So the vendor might cloud-tether it, but the thing that is tethered might simply be not interesting enough to matter.
"Fine, I'll do it myself" is getting easier by the day, and a lot of products are rather mid.
__
The only things that will be troublesome are heavily regulated things like cars or heavily monopolized things like mobile phone OS'.
The latter currently demonstrating how little interest Google has in there being something like Graphene and holding everything built on the idea of mobile phones hostage.
Both of these are mere legislative issues though and could be resolved with a majority of normal people. But one dollar one vote kinda interferes there.
You think people play Dark Souls because it is "hard" and "dark fantasy"
Or do people play it because the gaming community at large plays it, and people want to join in the conversation and have fun with the community?
High quality games were never the point, look at Roblox
Then surely you should discuss your ideas with ChatGPT instead?
Why do you bother soliciting opinions on a forum?
Why do you insult others by saying that if they are interested in community, these people believe the quality of a game to be proportional to the amount of TikTok they watch?
There are many titles of a certain genre I keep meaning to sit down and play through someday, but keep pushing them out because I realized I have no one to talk about it with, just archived threads from 10+ years ago on various boards and forums of a discussion that once was.
I don't think streaming only, but instead always-online, paid subscription required. Sure, you might be able to play the game on another platform but that'll be useless without the server component. Nothing even new, lots of online games do this already. No reason they couldn't extend this to single player without making everything streaming.
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
Gacha and MOBA games, for example, probably wouldn't make less money because someone rewrote the client program in Rust. And players would cancel those clones spontaneously in the name of anti-cheat.
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
People might also just stick to certain pre enshittified games. I hop on TF2 every now and then still. The game is pushing 20 years old and still pretty active. People are still having Super Smash Bros Melee tournaments. If it stays relegated to the increasingly old farts so be it, but we will have our things.
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.
It's a response to the loss of ancilliary income that used to be derived from "home video" (which used to make up about 50% of a movie's total income). So it's directly analogous.
From the amount of activity and how much this all smells like heavy AI usage, I have zero doubt that something will be working shortly after launch. The agents won’t sleep until it boots.
This project is the first hint I’ve seen of the complete destruction of all copy protection schemes. Scary times for any industry that relies on those!
You are less likely to double dip as a PC player if it’s available in a timely manner. However right now there is a lot of PC players that will buy the console version just because it’s available and there is no announcement for the PC version. And then buy again in a year or so when the PC version comes out with the ability to crank the graphics settings up.
No, to decrypt the game and make it possible to rip you need a current firmware exploit/jailbreak. Until the firmware that GTA 6 requires is jailbroken it won't even be possible to rip it, nevermind emulate it.
This was my initial thought and a sentiment I've seen expressed elsewhere, but I think I'm missing something about how they'd implement this.
Sure, Rockstar can enforce a minimum software revision to launch the game, but couldn't some homebrew software just (a) lie about the software revision to any running game, or (b) apply any relevant software updates minus patching the kernel vuln?
That's not how attestation infrastructures work. Obviously they thought of all that.
Modern hardware attestation is - if implemented correctly - not beatable unless you decap chips and start trying to extract hardware keys. But the silicon itself is often heavily obfuscated and such a feat has not been demonstrated for modern hardware.
All breaks of modern console security rely on finding bugs or mistakes in the implementation. If the PS5 has got serious exploits then either:
1. They will patch it and revoke old firmwares, as the infrastructure lets them do. Then you have to try and find a new exploit in the firmware that GTA6 was released for.
2. It won't be released for PS5 until later. Xbox security has been undefeated for a long time now, so Microsoft might have an advantage there.
The way downloading games works on PS5 is your console asks PSN for a ticket using hardware attestation and account tokens, PSN checks if you own the game and gives you the keys. It's not doing attestation on every game start because that would make offline play impossible, and it wouldn't be effective against jailbreaks anyway.
If someone manages to download and decrypt the game on 1 single hacked console then it's out forever. Even if Sony decides to only allow unhacked firmware it's only a matter of time (months not years) before that version gets a jailbreak too because no complex system can be totally secure.
The only way to prevent this is making the game online only. That would be an extreme sales and reputation hit because it's the type of thing people expect from EA games where single player is a side mode. Not Rockstar famous for their incredible story modes that have always been offline.
Then you can see from projects like ReSkate that to successfully pull it off you would need to make the game effectively a thin client, because if you leave any logic on the console it will get reversed even if parts of it are server only.
And running a full game engine millions of times on your servers gets expensive real fast. Take Two can't afford it, and even if they could, the hit to their profits would be way more than what they can lose from the game getting cracked day 1.
So it's not feasible to fiddle with incoming firmware
updates, even with the level of access Relapse gives? I couldn't imagine how such a thing would be implemented. A hypervisor?
Yes all modern console RA systems have a verified boot rooted in hardware that chains to a hypervisor. They also encrypt all code and network traffic, use revokable per-CPU hardware keys, and can tie game releases or updates to revokable firmware versions.
The underlying architectures are quite complex but there are some good tech talks about them online. One of the best is by Tony Chen, which covers Xbox One security. It's many years obsolete now, but even that security system wasn't cracked until long after obsolescence. Microsoft have proven you can build an effectively unbeatable security system for general computing devices even though they only use it for games and multiplayer anti-cheat. It seems Sony might have not reached Microsoft's level.
Maybe AI will speed things up by making it easier to find obscure bugs, but design wise the architectures are sound and can work well.
You need to get the game in the first place, which requires a console that’s authorized to download games from PSN.
I don’t know how Sonys attestation works, and how resistant it is; but presumably it’s a bit harder than “lie to the game about what firmware you’re running”.
(GTA VI will famously not have a physical release, so you can’t rip data off the disk.)
A trivial scheme would be to distribute some shared secret key in a new update, and require it to be supplied back on connections to Sony's servers. In order to extract that key in order to replay it from an older firmware, you'd need to have root on the new firmware.
Don't be fooled by this percentage. A 2 minute look at the code and what they called mapped is simply a lot of functions returning ok.
As in:
if (vvgvg) {
return ok
}
People talking about GTA6 being playable after launch is possible but I doubt it will impact their sales much as somebody will first have to rip this from the console then it has to work (I suspect the hardware requirements will make it harder to run than we think, limiting the mass appeal). Finally the money for blizzard is in the GTA Online its way more important for them long term than the single player campaign. And I do not see how AnyPS5 can help anyone there.
In general though bad news for all the small games out there more than the blockbusters.
- interesting but what i am talking about would be 3d mainstream games like you are able to drag / drop call of duty black ops 1 into the repo and it ll make it 2 player coop or 4 player
- it ll decompile the exe, analyze the makeup of the game
- create a networking stack if doesnt exist and generate a new exe that has coop on it
- drag metro 2033 boom, it is now coopable
- this would be the MOST ultimate agentic AI use if anyone can actually cook it
I always wonder who the folks who build these things are. If they become too popular, it seems like a good way to have the government pay you a visit you will not enjoy. But they also seem like technically interesting problems to solve. Glad someone is out there preserving these games in any case.
They might be technically interesting problems to solve but these days they're just using AI to solve them so they aren't really learning anything about those interesting problems.
A lot of people live in places where the government does not really care to use police to enforce copyright, or where this just isn’t really considered illegal.
The PlayStation platform in general is the easiest console to reverse engineer. There’s a lack of security in depth that makes it easy to reverse engineer.
It’s only recently (earlier this year) that the _last gen_ of xbox was cracked.
GTA 6 is releasing on PS5 right?
Who is going to pay a single cent for software if everything can be ripped day 1?
Countries with a huge stake in the software industry are going to get crushed?
There is not much goodwill in the world left towards Sony. They have screwed their customers over repeatedly (removal of PS3 Linux, PC spyware, removal of physical disks, banning arbitrary users online etc.), which makes the moral case for Sony piracy more ambiguous.
Movie situation is terrible these days. You need to maintain $100/mo of services to cover your bases and you are still told its only available for a $3.99 4 day digital "rent" which feels like worse terms than what blockbuster was offering.
That’s pretty cheap, a new release blockbuster movie cost $3.79 - in 1999! And you had to drive there, and drive back to return it, and could only borrow what they had in stock, and they charged you fees if you forgot.
Basic cable (with 3 minutes of commercials every 10 minutes) plus HBO was like $80-100 adjusted for inflation. Now you can get a HBO/Disney/Hulu bundle, with no ads, for $35/month and watch anything in their entire catalogue instantly.
New spider man movie is being rented for $25 now. Prices just keep moving with no real competition. Used to be the grocery store had a bin of older dvds for a dollar each.
False, myth. This is a common claim pushed by MPAA/RIAA (the copyright police for music and film industry).
Consumers want _access_ to their games/content. For example, netflix made it easy to "rent" or stream content. But as they slowly clawback those features (multi-streaming, password sharing, incorporate ads, increase prices beyond inflation). Then access to content decreases, visibility decreases.
Piracy is a service problem! If they release a good PC port, I will buy it, as I have done for nearly every other Rockstar game. Hell, if they were to even just automate the port using a similar tool, I wouldn't really mind if the end result were indistinguishable from a decent PC port. I just really don't want to buy a PS5 for a couple exclusives.
Most software and games is available pirated already and has been for decades.
You could get pirate games on the original PlayStation two decades ago. Cracking the most recent PlayStation is not going to change things
> Who is going to pay a single cent for software if everything can be ripped day 1?
Billions of people pay dozen if not hundreds of dollars per months for movies, tv shows, etc. that are available for free via torrent on day 1, or even earlier sometimes.
Do people pay only because there's no pirate alternative? Valve showed this with Steam, people pay for convenience and for good service quality. Piracy is an answer to lack of corporate respect about culture and art that's used to create a commercial product, which manifests in enshitification.
To decrypt the game and make it possible to rip you need a current firmware exploit/jailbreak. Until the firmware that GTA 6 requires is jailbroken it won't be possible to rip it
There’s also a big factual error in the submission title because the project readme has this caveat
> System libraries: percentage of the functions known to the project so far (declared in core/libs/prx), not of every PS5 system function. The total grows as more functions are declared.
I think the replies to my comment are not realistic.
The Goldilocks zone for earning revenue for movies & games were always: Day 1 earnings = Week 1 earnings = Year 1 earnings
The revenue in this case is heavily protected by your IP NOT being copied in a single day, and that people want to experience the product together with their friends.
When people talk about convenience, is there really any inconvenience in downloading a pirated game/movie on release day?
Especially for GTA6. The most amount of money is riding on this. It's still going to be a lot if it's copied on day1, but there is no way it is near their projections.
Since the PS5 is already x86-64, the main friction point here is likely the proprietary graphics API rather than CPU instruction translation. I wonder if they handle GNM command buffers by pre-compiling them into Vulkan during that static relinking phase or if there is still some runtime interception happening when the game tries to queue those draw calls.
AGC (the PS5 version of GNM) is around 80% complete on CPU side and 98% on shader side. Of course this says nothing about bugs or missing edge case behavior but it's still impressive.
I checked the code and it rewrites shaders from RDNA to SPIR-V at runtime. There is a disk cache and it's a binary format so it shouldn't be much slower than vkd3d translating from DXIL.
The PS5's 3D audio chip might also present some difficulty to work around, since it's proprietary. I wonder if the 1st party games that feature it have any issues.
I have been in the PlayStation jail breaking scene for a while, and my God is this news.
Despite using AI all the time for other engineering projects, I never considered the console scene as something to be explored.
If this ends up allowing me to play GTA 6 on my PC within a few months of release I will be euphoric.
> If this ends up allowing me to play GTA 6 on my PC within a few months of release I will be euphoric
I think it could even force rockstar to release PC version earlier than planned.
Normal people aren’t downloading a 100GB torrent to get this working. Nor would they setup an emulator.
At most less than half a percent of the target market would actually do this.
Still, I’d imagine Rockstar easily being able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play this illegally. It’ll probably just stick to Russia where buying a PS5 is basically impossible anyway.,
I think that there would be a swarm of step-by-step guides on every social media platform under the sun.
I don’t imagine Rockstar would easily be able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play. We haven’t seen that scenario play out with any other emulation or de/re-compilation situation.
How would they know who you are? The RIAA was only able to sue students on college campuses because they were able to get institutional help to match a human with an IP address.
An average Joe with a non-logging VPN defeats that effort immediately.
Someone downloading with Usenet is never at significant risk since they never upload and redistribute data, so they can’t really be sued for copyright infringement.
I’m not a lawyer but that’s my layperson’s understanding.
You overestimate how much effort most people want to put in here.
I just talked to a colleague who’s trying to find an in stock PS5 for GTA6.
Going to sketchy torrents, and configuring it to run locally is beyond what most people really want to do.
I can imagine maybe a few hundred thousand people doing this. Even then it’s going to be like using a hackintosh, the experience will be full of bugs.
> who’s trying to find an in stock PS5 for GTA6.
How hard is it really? Is he looking for them abandoned in the street?
Tte ps5 has been in the market for years, it is widely and easily available everywhere.
It's sold out basically everywhere.
Amazon says it's in stock right now. Costco also has it online and says it's on the shelf at my local warehouse.
It was literally available from the first two places I checked.
Possibly in your area. Everywhere? Not true.
Do you mean the pro specifically?
Ah yes, you're right. The base PS5 seems to still be available for now.
I’m not saying everyone will do it or most people will do it.
You underestimate the will to play gta 6 by people. Necessity is the mother of invention. GTA 6 on pc as a possibility is literally why this project gained attention.
Also underestimate that AI can be used to build a one click type installer (improve massively the install experience). The TitanFall 2 VR mod is an example of such a thing, the install experience is great, the mod is exceptional, it’s a great showcase of what AI coding will bring to the modding scene.
You don't need any llm to have that, its called FitGirl release and its standard on scene for at least a decade. Compressed aggressively to make much smaller packages, as bonus ripped away useless annoying things like long videos with companies logos or choking/seizures warnings playing every launch. Dodi repacks are cca same but usually bigger.
Not 1 click, its few on Next -> Next but thats really it. Checksums, full mod support, optional Direct X or .NET runtime installs bundled within.
You don't need LLMs for much really but it does lower the bar massively and will make that sort of polish more common in contexts that typically didn't have the resources (time or skill or whatever) to pull it off.
The game is going to sell like 100 million copies, half a percent is still 500k people .
Most folks will just do something else.
Why half percent? Why not 10? Not suiting your narrative or something else?
If it comes out usable, I will try it at least. I don't own consoles nor planning to buy any, no reason I can't run this on much more powerful hardware and enjoy power of modding scene or ie ReShade filters on top of basic game.
Because getting this to work, with Sony actively sending Cease and Desist letters and Rockstar taking down torrents, is going to be very difficult.
ISPs can be obligated to suspend infringing customers.
Why not 99% ? Then Rockstar can go out of business, the entire game industry can collapse and I guess we can all play board games.
It’s not like they’re depriving you of water or something. You’ll be fine if you don’t play GTA6.
Or Rockstar does consider this to be a big deal and delays the release to incorporate Games as a Service style DRM which is much harder to beat.
Ah the American mind. You only know of 2 other countries
My man it will be a double click, easier to install than Steam torrent by the end of the month.
They already have BOTW torrents that are pre-setup and as easy as it gets.
Ha you are completely wrong here all over your comment, that I can guarantee. If they get this working with at least 30 fps, expect millions of people will play this on PC. If they figure our performance parity, expect modding scene will go nuclear since it allows you to tinker with game in ways playstation will never ever allow.
I've never really dived into GTA series, but oh boy does GTA 6 has a massive momentum and it overshadows every single game release in second half of 2026, distributors moved many titles away from this period.
GTA 5 is the single highest grossing entertainment product in history. This overshadows every game ever made.
> Normal people aren’t downloading a 100GB torrent to get this working. Nor would they setup an emulator.
As soon as someone vibe-codes a one-click installer that does all the work for them, they will.
// Normal people aren’t downloading a 100GB torrent to get this working. Nor would they setup an emulator.
"CoPilot, download that PS5 emulator everyone is talking about and then set it up for me."
// Still, I’d imagine Rockstar easily being able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play this illegally
How on earth would they know? At the very least the gold master will be playable in perpetuity. If their netcode is anywhere near as bad as GTA V as well, every piece of DLC or online-service will be replicated on Private servers.
We already have a full eco-system and community-driven multiplayer modification framework for GTA V on PC in the form of FiveM. I'd imagine many talented people (and/or those with token capital) are chomping at the bit to replicate the same with GTA 6.
> Normal people aren’t downloading a 100GB torrent to get this working. Nor would they setup an emulator.
You do realize that by Sony going 100% digital, ALL games will have to be downloaded? I don't have a PS5 but many of my Xbox Series X games are ~100GB or more.
Soon most publishers will start going even before the official January 2028 deadline - as it helps them cut costs, simplify distribution, cuts PIRACY, leads to more sales/revenue (people cannot borrow - not even from the library, are forced to buy).
So if someone offers them a chance to break free, I think they'll take it.
Also if SO MANY people can try something like OpenClaw (which took a seasoned professional like me a day to set up) then we're underestimating 'normal' people!
Or introduce some kind of validation in code, to block it from running from PC?
Hey, they could even call it something catchy like Extended Copy Protection (XCP) software.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Sony have already introduced a change via a March 2026 firmware update to combat refund exploits and digital piracy (specifically targeting web-store refund loopholes on jailbroken or manipulated consoles) - but this again is firmware and in-memory address storage which is easily parsed and manipulated by Agentic AI.
Simply put, GTA V thinks its running on real hardware. Any sort of hardware based validation check (e.g. hitting hardware specific functions that are HLE in the emulator as more general API calls) will be patched nightly if the likes of the dolphin devlog in recent times is anything to go by. Online checks are even more easily bypassed, unless there's some sort of esoteric quantum or one-time pad style implementation which I can't foresee.
That DRM-like stuff has been broken every single time.
Sony Rootkit II: Rockstar edition?
If you have the code on disk, you can also patch the code on disk.
With GTA 6, I really would not worry about this, given just how much interest there is in it. Someone will crack whatever they come up with.
...and that could all be avoided by not trying to cash-in twice by delaying the PC release by a year.
(To be fair though, I kinda do not expect it to be worth all of this hype. It is just more of the same from what I have seen)
> cash-in twice by delaying the PC release by a year.
You have the same game on PC and console but you have to pay twice to play it on both, despite the engineering effort to adapt the game between them being minimal relative to the whole development effort. But they charge full price for each version as if they go through the entire development effort for each individually. The players will be just as honest about saving money as the devs or publishers are about making money.
Has any company ever done anything because of piracy, apart from trying to punish the pirates?
Daaaang you're gonna be pleasantly surprised if you haven't seen it already; look up what's happening with decompilations and recompilations now with AI :)
Can you provide any examples for us interested?
https://fangamesdb.com
Asmongold also did a stream recently where he showed a bunch of insane mashups of AAA games that people are doing, like Mario in Elden Ring or Spiderman in the Arkum Asylum Batman map. You can find it on Youtube.
If this trajectory continues, the AAA games industry will be in trouble. It will be a golden age for game restoration and game modding.
https://www.theverge.com/games/1004869/reverse-engineered-ga...
https://github.com/SamidyFR/Game-Decompilations
I just had Claude get me a 1997 game up and running on modern Windows in 30 minutes, and few days of off-hours prompting later, I'm part-way into upscaling/remastering graphics, have a browser 3D level preview, asset viewer, headless rendering pipeline, and entire internal game logic VM reversed and scripts decompiled to Lisp code.
Getting the game to work and upgrading some graphics was something I dreamed of since childhood (and attempted myself several times). I casually threw Opus 5.5 at it and was surprised at the result.
Didn't know until now that everyone else is doing the same with their favorite old games now.
(In my case, the game is Star Trek: Generations.)
Huh - I played ‘A Final Unity’ but had no idea they’d turned Generations into a sequel. MicroProse probably made way too many of my fond childhood memories.
I never thought of "Generations" as a sequel, I didn't even know for a long time they were related. As far as I can tell, the main relationship between the two games is that "Generations" uses the same engine and assets in space combat as "A Final Unity".
FWIW, AFU is next on my list, I just need to... dig up an old copy of that too.
Shame GoG never got around to remastering either of them, but thankfully Claude has no problems helping here.
GTA 6 will probably be software as a service to some extend, namely the code will change all the time at somewhat high frequency for any port. If I am not too mistaken a big chunk of the GTA community does play online.
"AI porting" able to follow? (If that AI thing is actually true)
Unless GTA 6 is not hardwired to AMDGPU hardware at release, if they have a cross-platform engine, for PC, it is to click the right export button... and do the QA and debug to please the various 3D drivers out there.
Usually only the story gets ported.
Unfortunately, this is only going to push Sony/Nintendo/MS more towards cloud gaming. AI enabling these amazing reverse engineering efforts and democratizing access to gaming is amazing, and preventing vendor lock in is always something I'll support. However it's hard not to see them pushing gamers towards needing to play games on cloud only, preventing these kind of things happening.
Steam is larger than any single console now a days, has a DRM which can be trivially bypassed, and still does excellently. The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.
[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...
> the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer
Is that antiquated? PC gaming requires either (1) some technical knowledge to assemble a computer on par with modern consoles without breaking the bank, (2) spending more than $1000 to buy a complete computer on par with modern consoles, or (3) settling for worse performance to buy a system that costs the same as a console.
Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses, and they have much better economies of scale than most PC builders. See: Steam Machine.
(1) - Youtube or AI (2) - Not remotely the case (3) - PS5 Pro @ 1k was easily matched by an equivalent BOM-cost PC until the GPU/RAM shortage
//Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses,
The PlayStation 5 @ $499 became profitable to manufacture within its first year on the market.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
Sony Is also Making 59% More Revenue Per PlayStation User since Lockdown, with $230 more spent by the average active PlayStation user now than in 2018.
https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-is-making-59-more-revenue-...
I dunno, 2 feels pretty on point. Unless you're trying to match an Xbox Series S, I guess. The components in my aging midrange desktop are worth ~$600 more than than I paid for them in 2022.
On the other hand one of the main advantages of console gaming was that you could resell the games after you are done. Now with the move to digital games, what is the advantage of buying a console when Steam has regular discounts and a massive catalog?
And the fact that you put in a disk and got to play, instead of waiting for an update the next 2 hours.
Oh boy, that time is long gone. Today you wait an hour for the game to be installed from disk and then for the day 1 patch to be downloaded and installed.
Lower up-front cost because of the subsidized hardware. Also games exclusive to your favorite console
I don't own a console, but the offer of saving money now at the expense of spending more over time is still a solid business model
> Lower up-front cost because of the subsidized hardware
I do not believe any current-gen console is subsidised? Though old stock thereof is probably cheaper because they locked the component prices in before RAM prices started going crazy
And then raised the prices of them because why the hell not.
Console hardware has not been significantly subsidized since the PS3 era. From the PS4 on they all swapped to lightly modified retail hardware that's sold for profit. PS4 and PS5 both ended up profitable on the hardware alone less than a year after launch.
Steam Deck/Rog Ally/etc.?
Power-wise Steam Deck isn't on par with current gen consoles nor even last gen consoles. It can play plenty of games, but we've reached a point that it can't run most new AAA games at an acceptable level of performance regardless of settings. With a console you can buy pretty much any game and assume that it will run at a playable frame rate (though there are of course exceptions).
And it doesn't have to be on-par. Show me a gameplay enhancement that the current gen hardware has enabled - something that just wasn't possible on previous gen hardware.
Well, PS5 has an incredible audio processing chip that can actually use GPU geometry directly - and it does its own equivalent of audio raytracing to model accurate behaviour of audio inside whatever room you're in, based on geometry and material properties. It's extremely cool and works pretty well, but unless you're an audio geek you won't notice.
And actually, the "what has this hardware enabled" works kinda backwards. I work in video games and every single design that we come up with usually hits the wall of "oh that's cool on PS5/XSX, but how will we make this run on the Switch" - and the answer is we won't, so the feature gets scrapped. Increases NPC counts, better AI, multiplayer sessions with hundreds of people on the screen - these are arguably gameplay features that the current gen enables but because games are always made for the lowest common denominator they rarely get implemented. And yes, of course there are always tricks to do these things regardless, switch has some impressive games despite being positively ancient now. But I've been part of the discussion about so many gameplay systems that got scrapped not because they couldn't run on the PS5 but because they also had to perform well on lesser hardware.
The scale of things has somewhat improved, but the gameplay improvements in GTA V over IV are hardly there due to hardware capabilities. Gran Turismo still, afaict, does not have a visual damage model, but of course the simulation has improved somewhat. I do not believe Fortnite would have captured a bigger market had it leaned harder into cool graphics.
Honestly, I think Civ games benefit the most from hardware advancement- the end game become more playable due to shorter wait times.
AMD TrueAudio was doing the audio raycasting thing many years before the PS5 released [1]
> The TrueAudio Next SDK was released as open source through AMD's GPUOpen suite in August 2016...TrueAudio Next uses the GPU's ray-casting technology to do the audio computation
It's a rather niche feature, don't think too many games ever used it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_TrueAudio
I am aware. But the question was what can the current generation do that the last one didn't - well, PS4 couldn't so that, PS5 can. And because it's built right into Wwise a lot of games support it(whether it's wired in correctly in them is a different question, but I know all games I've worked on had it)
Doesn't "last gen consoles" include the original Nintendo Switch? That thing was underpowered when it came out, let alone compared to a Steam Deck. Also, PS4/5 and friends are not handhelds.
I was specifically referring to PS4 and Xbox One. Power-wise Nintendo platforms since Wii are essentially (at least) one generation behind the other consoles, and generally speaking Nintendo platforms have their own games rather than relying on big multiplats, outside of indie games.
I own a Steam Deck and its one of my favorite devices but its specs are now not really at par with standard (given its age it makes sense). They need to release a newer version but I doubt they can keep the same price value as they did with the original given the market conditions
Steam Machine was supposed to be their next-gen, but it was dead on arrival price wise. 2TB w/Controller is about $1500 and should be closer to $850.
You can thank AI snake oil sellers for that - it is not Valves fault.
OTH: cheaper games, more aggressive sales, and modding(!).
On a tangential note, I tested Pyrowave last night streaming from my CachyOS gaming PC to my ROG Ally (running CachyOS) connected to the TV; there's 2 network switches and about 50m of ethernet between them.
Lowering the stream resolution to 1440p (from 4k) I was able to get 1440p@120Hz flawlessly playing DOOM TDA, <1ms input latency according to the overlay and display latency in the ~17ms range.
It took 900Mb/s of network bandwidth to stream that, so very close to the limit of my 1Gb LAN and still not at the quality and frame rate I'd normally play.
Add WiFi or internet streaming into the mix, and we're going to have to take a significant hit in visual fidelity and frame rates on top of all of the other issues you mention with cloud gaming.
20 years ago a $400 laptop could emulate most major psx games, and anything from n64 and prior.
A $1k laptop could dualbox WoW.. depending on the type of game you were playing consoles were not that much cheaper. Hardware prices in the mid oughts were getting very good.
Did we live in two different “2006s”? I remember 2000s laptops to be near-unusable for anything 3D, let alone a 400 dollar one. My mid-2000s gaming PC could do it at 60-ish FPS, but the graphics in that alone were like 300 dollars :D
You mean like the plethora of workstations from HP and Compaq with Nvidia Quadro FX 1500M or similar platforms?
You are way off with your recollection of 20 years old hardware (and its prices)
$400 buys you a decent laptop from 10 years before.
My $400 used Dell laptop from eBay is able to emulate PSX games and most PS2 games (albeit dipping in < 100% emulation speed at times) with its integrated Intel card.
20 years ago (2006) a $400 laptop from 1996 had a pre-Pentium CPU barely able to run Windows 95. In fact I’m not even sure you could find laptops that cheap, used or new.
Steam DRM is easy to bypass, but the convenience of one-click purchasing cannot be bypassed.
It could be, remember "Popcorn time" ?
Getting a dubious stream is far less risky than running a dubious binary. But maybe people would not care supporting bot networks and other maladies.
In general dubious binaries aren't really a problem, because releases tend to be done by people or groups with reputations. Lots of people are ideologically or technologically motivated to release stuff and have been doing so for many years.
And now a days in the age of Denuvo and things like this, cracked binaries are sometimes even 'cleaner' than the official releases.
Unlikely most of the Denuvo cracks actually remove the virtualized code from the executable. Not feasible without extensive binary rewriter tooling (that, while being sloppable, still takes a lot of time to slop).
Interesting yeah you're right. Looking it up it seems that only 2 of the Denuvo cracks have completely removed Denuvo - oddly enough Assassin's Creed games both times. Usually they just use various tricks to fool the authentication, but leave the performance degradation and other issues of Denuvo.
It'll be interesting to see if LLMs do increase the rate of completely cleans.
Devirtualization and recompilation is unfortunately a really, really tough task even for clank assisted RE.
I can't edit this post anymore but if you wanna read a bunch of stuff on the topic https://k0mkc.hatenablog.com/ is a nice blog. All in Japanese, but it should be perfectly translatable.
Funny thing is they removed all their blogposts on Griffin (an obfuscator several anticheats, including EA's, Riot's and FaceIT's utilize) for whatever reason.
This certainly doesn’t mirror my experience of cloud gaming (gfn) which is indistinguishable from local gaming to me, incl 4k. By and large it’s a significantly better experience than local gaming: silent, cheap, non configuration/setup, works almost everywhere for me etc .
Your article is 6 years old(!) , cloud gaming has gone a long way. If anything , try it first.
Cloud gaming has a latency problem that cannot be fixed because the speed of light being a thing. I play many titles that require fast reflexes and any latency is unacceptable.
Also I muck around with mods, emulators etc. PC Gaming isn't just whatever is on the Steam Store.
I used Nvidia GeForce now for some months and must admit that I can't feel a difference most of the time. I tried call of duty warzone and even this was great multiplayer experience. (Game is a mess with GeForce now, can't remember shader cache and must recreate it every GeForce now session)
You don't feel the difference until you play without the lag.
I've got something like 1400 hours in HellDivers 2, playing Level 10 I don't want to experience any lag. I recently changed the configuration of my machine and I've able improve framerates/frame pacing and it make a lot of difference when playing the game i.e. some melee counters I can much more easily perform.
I used GeForce now for the summer as I wanted to avoid a hot pc in my room.
Any game I played with GeForce now I also played local, yes there is a minimal difference, but sometimes I got better feeling with multiplayer as the cloud service had better connection to the game servers than my local provider.
And I will prefer most multiplayer games with my local machine, but it impressed me very much (more than stadia and Xbox cloud)
There is no way that a latency between their servers and whatever you are playing it on would have less latency it isn't mathematically possible.
Bad peering.
If my provider has a bad peering to the gameservers, but a good peering to the cloud gaming servers, you get a better gaming experience with cloud gaming.
Its possible.
No it isn't. You would have bad peering between you and the game server. It doesn't make much sense however you try to explain it away.
You are adding an extra latency between you, the game server and the other players. Playing mental gymnastics about how it could be better when it can't isn't going to convince me or anyone else.
Conversations like these feel like the sort of conversations people were having at the end of days of the Amiga where they were talking about the custom chips and all that jazz being better ignoring the fact that people were buying Voodoos and Soundblasters.
If i get 150-200 ping direct connected to the gameserver, vs 20ping on the cloud gaming vm + 60ms from connection to the cloud gaming, you get a better multiplayer experience.
Never said its the default or that i want convince someone, but it happens to me at least with two games at the evening.
150-200 ping is when you are playing someone on another continent. I used to get a 150-200 ping when playing someone in the US (I am in the UK) on CS.
You aren't going to magically get a better ping because the VM is somewhere else. So I find this hard to believe.
I think gp was providing numbers just to give an example of why it might work, not actual numbers. Their point was mostly that internet routes are noisy and not guaranteed in performance ie you might not go through the best possible path.
While the numbers might differ , I know this is technically possible from my experience in corporate environments buying links to minimize latency. Basically your isp might optimize for a different function ( cost, etc ) than Nvidia ( who wants to make make players happy and subscribe ).
My isp used to throttle Netflix or YouTube ( I don’t remember ), and gfn users occasionally report better performance when using a vpn ( it’s usually throughput not latency though ).
Latency isn't great, but it doesn't matter for many games.
It matters for anything multiplayer shooter and even single player games with quicktime events. Using WiFi, wireless controllers, TVs with frame pacing and bluetooth headsets adds latency already in your own house of around 10-50ms (although it is a combined latency, not network).
I know and I can't use cloud gaming myself in part because of the games I play and because I'm used to 240fps PC latency so no game can feel good, I can barely stand using steam link for couch gaming. But there are loads of people that wouldn't notice the difference if they're used to 30fps consoles and loads of games where the latency doesn't matter.
it matters in every single game i play.
It matters in almost every game I play as well, but for some it doesn't really matter like Baldurs Gate 3, Blue Prince, etc. And I think if you're used to 30fps on console you might not notice a difference in most games, but if you're used to 240hz/fps on a PC any game will feel atrocious until you get used to it.
I'm on 1gb/s and it's still pretty terrible to me
gb/s is a measure of bandwidth, not latency. but thats just the thing, the ping time is too high for any game of interest if its > 0.
They’re not a hardware company*. Sony and Nintendo are. MS is kinda questionable.
* Yes they’ve started making their own but it’s hardly a primary business.
Console makers don’t make money on selling the consoles, they’re making money on selling games.
Just another example proving that "razor & blades" business model itself should've been banned the moment it was conceived.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer.
Console are also single (or lately dual) target so it's theorically easier to debug and optimize compared to PC.
Yup I can see that. My PC games always have a lot more issues and glitches than any of my PS5 games have had.
Myself I am very sensitive to latency, which is a bit more evidence that I have a somewhat unusual nervous system. People who are much better at other game genres are amazed that I can usually beat levels from any rhythm game the first time unseen but...
When I had 30 ms of display lag (a frame) I could not accomplish anything for my team in League Of Legends. With my old Samsung TV I would just get hit playing Titanfall and never be able to hit anybody (except with a falling Titan) until I turned on "game mode". I even had the same problem with certain single player games like SAO: Fatal Bullet. (Although there are some games, say DW 9 [fast action but not time sensitive] or Orcs Must Die [not twitchy at all] that I can play just fine with the wired LAN in my house in the first case and over the microwave link to my rental property in the second case)
And of course the lag is unreasonably distributed. The developers and executives might have offices across the street from a cloud gaming data center and of course it is OK. For the "rest of us" behind congested or underinvested networks not so much.
What I found the most disappointing about cloud gaming was despite it being all the rage for "Big Tech" for a year or so they never made an attempt to build a game that really took advantage of it. I mean, you can get machines in the cloud with an absurd amount of RAM, CPUs and GPUs. Such a machine could put 20-30 players in a shared world with 20-30 the complexity of a conventional game and stream out video to all of them... Google has fantastic resources and could have made a game which would have had gamers demanding cloud gaming but no, they didn't.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
Counterpoint: The benefit of consoles is that they're locked down hard. A lot of PC games are either unplayable in online mode due to rampant cheating or require a level of system access for their anticheat solutions that rivals antivirus software but without the scrutiny.
With consoles, the best cheat can only ever be as good as a human with zero latency - you need to parse the video signal and feed it into some kind of ML model. With PCs, these FPGA based hardware cheat cards can do much, much more.
And frankly, I'm not sure how to solve this dilemma. I do not want to spend north of a thousand of euros for a console I don't own and, most importantly, can and will get my account locked when I attempt to own it. But on the other side I have zero desire to waste the precious free time I have dealing with cheaters. The usual trolls and sex pests are bad enough - but there I can just mute the chat and go on with my life. With cheaters, there is no escape.
Just run a private server and kick/ban them? That's how things worked in the 00's and there is no reason why it wouldn't work now. You can even whitelist your vetted friends.
Game developers however can't get that sweet sweet MRR nectar out of the players.
Enshittification galore.
consoles and thus games are hacked just as thoroughly and completely as PC, for quite a few years. i cannot think of a single console ive played MP and not seen the same blatant cheating since xb360 days
You’d be surprised with how much lag is actually tolerable when you have good prediction.
In an online FPS though?
Even in an online FPS all your inputs need to be sent to a server running the game logic so what you're seeing is not an actual state of the game but rather the predicted one. I think it would make sense to have a competetive game run all it's logic and rendering on a single machine for all the players in a given match so that it works a bit like a split-screen - the only difference being that instead of showing it on a single combined screen it would send those screens to remote players. This way a lot of problems with latency and movement prediction would be gone. Also cheating would be impossible which is a good enough reason to do it on it's own.
For things you can't control, like other players, prediction works fine and can be almost entirely invisible when well done. But prediction doesn't work fine with things you control, like your own character/weapon, because it feels very wrong when you send input and don't get an immediate response.
So for instance imagine you're playing an FPS and if you pressed the fire button, the weapon didn't fire until that packet traveled to the server, was processed, scene rendered, and finally returned. An extra 100ms or whatever might not seem like much, but it nonetheless feels very wrong, and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate. And 100ms is more of an aspirational goal than a typical norm. Stadia, for instance, had latency that could reach upwards of 250ms.
> like your own character/weapon, because it feels very wrong when you send input and don't get an immediate response.
Nothing says you can’t do some amount of local rendering to help with that feeling of prediction.
> and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate.
Professional twitch FPS gamers aren’t the target market. The target market is casuals who just want to pick up and not fight with installs, disk space, updates, etc etc.
The problem is that things are dynamic. Pressing fire does rather different things if the gun is loaded or empty. You might argue then you could just start doing some small amount of local computation, but then this small amount rapidly grows to a not so small amount because you bump into these issues endlessly and you end up learning why so much is done locally on most games to the point that cheating becomes possible.
It's also not just 'professional twitch FPS gamers' that this is an issue for. If you get anywhere near the latency that the Stadia had in certain games (280ms in that article) then that is going to be very jarring even to the most casual gamer. That's less than 4 frames a second! It's going to feel like your character controls like a tugboat. Even at more reasonable latencies you still end up with some significant frustration in games where time matters.
And now a days there's basically zero friction in gaming even on PC. You buy a game with one click, you install with one click, you're playing, often in a matter of seconds.
What if you render a spherical view from player's standpoint on a server and then merge it with locally rendered hud + weapon? The biggest source of cheating is that your pc knows the position of other players, only rendering your local state locally would make this kind of cheats impossible while maintaining ms-level response to actions like shooting and looking around (moving has a lot of inertia anyway).
Imagine you're at the corner just before a hallway and you want to quickly peak around the corner where you think an enemy might be. If you didn't have local copies of player locations, then when you look around that corner you might not see anything even if there's a guy right there. At best he'd do this weird pop-in thing which would look awful.
Maybe but VR FPS isn’t such a huge category. The biggest problem there I suspect is almost certainly variable lag (particularly random spikes) as that’s harder to compensate.
I love being downvoted for this statement by people who don’t know what I had worked on in the past.
This continues to be an absolute no-go for competitive real-time games due to input latency. I honestly think there's a chance that game clients might go the way of the recording industry, and they just might not be worth that much.
As doubtful as I am about the viability of cloud streaming, this IS going to cause a bigger push into live service functionality where maybe you have a light client but the server is authoritative over more and more aspects of the game. Even then, AI can write its own server, so it needs to be full of FOMO if you're not on the official server.
I don't even know if a smaller company like Nintendo can pull something like that off. They have been behind so much in the tech space because they spend modestly and their primary differentiating factor is their IP. Their lawyers are going to be working non stop until they figure something out. I guess have a strategic partner?
I'm not sure I'd totally agree with this characterization. They've certainly been behind in tech that's like "stuff the most FPS and fanciest graphics into this small box as possible", but I'd argue they've been pretty much the only one playing in the "make a good experience for most users without configuration with relatively cheap local hardware" up until relatively recently (SteamOS certainly has made some inroads, but I've yet to see anything particularly impressive in terms of an Xbox handheld, and Sony has basically given up it since the Vita). I don't think either of these broad technical areas are particularly aligned with making cloud streaming viable for gaming, but if I had to pick one side, I'm not sure I'd pick the side that's invested way more into expensive hardware on the local side rather than figuring out how to make the constraints of lower power go further.
You make a very valid point but it really sounds like you are describing whether a company provides immense value to their customers whereas I am describing: are they up to date technically?
Nintendo is excellent at providing that value using low tech. They managed to make a compelling product using cardboard and sell it for 80$. They are the masters at providing good experiences with relatively cheap local hardware.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Labo
Cloud game streaming has gotten to be extremely impressive, at least on a wired connection, to the point where it’s almost hard to tell you’re streaming. It’s been hard for me to consider upgrading my old gaming PC considering how good GeForce Now is for the $20 a month that I spend.
I subscribe to XBox Game Pass and used to subscribe to Geforce Now too. They're both really great for me as more of a casual gamer, but at the competitive level in the fighting game genre, it's totally insane and people will notice a sub-100ms lag in their inputs because they're sort of pushing the limits of human reaction time.
> at least on a wired connection
There goes 95% of your market. If not more.
I didn’t say only on a wired connection. All of my experiences streaming wirelessly have also been great. I’m just not willing to make the same level of claim when I’ve probably spent less than ten hours streaming on WiFi and hundreds on a wired connection.
If I as a person who only plays on local hardware; went to streaming tomorrow, do you think I would notice the difference?
Or is it something you get used to like playing at 60hz, then going back to a PS2/etc at 30hz for awhile?
I can't tell if this is what they're talking about, but I frequently stream from my desktop to a SteamOS handheld on my home network, and on pretty much any game that I can max out on my desktop's specs (Radeon 6900 XT, so not exactly the newest GPU, but it's able to do quite a bit), I can get 120 FPS on the handheld without much noticeable input lag.
I don't have any reason to believe this would translate into a good cloud gaming experience though, because it mostly seems to have become viable from local wifi just getting a lot better in recent years. I would expect the latency to still be pretty high for a remote server, and it's possible that the streaming server I use is just able to "correct" things more easily for a local connection in a way that a fully remote connection might not be able to.
I’m talking about cloud streaming though I used to do local streaming through steam and remote streaming through parsec. GeForce now in my experience has worked better than either of those options running on my own hardware regardless of the hardware being local occasionally.
I did preface my comment with "I'm not sure if this is what they're talking about", because I didn't know if it was what you were talking about. I guess it's not.
I know that you did and didn’t mean anything by my comment if it came across a certain way. I just thought it would be worth clarifying and sharing my experience with having done local and self hosted streaming previously versus the cloud streaming I’ve been doing in place of it.
Fair enough, apologies for misunderstanding. It is a genuinely interesting data point!
As someone who used to upgrade their GPU every year to the newest top card I find it to be indistinguishable from local hardware 95%+ of the time. It’s fairly mind blowing how well it works. Also just to clarify again I pay for the ultimate or whatever the highest tier of GeForce now is for like $20/month and use it primarily on a wired connection so that’s where my experience comes from. With their service you still need to pay for and own the games (though it also connects to Xbox game pass) so you’re only paying for the streaming. It’s also not something that depends on developers allowing it to be on the service so not every game is on there but the catalogue is quite large. I play on a 3440x1440p ultrawide at 100hz and I believe the ultimate sub supports up to 4k@120hz
I think this is only true if you assume the classic server model where the remote rendering streaming is overhead and not colocated with the game server itself.
Surely no one playing competitive real-time games are doing it on a PS5?
Basically all fighting game competitions are done on consoles
Ahh .. yep. Completely forgot about that genre!
Microsoft just cut their cloud gaming offering significantly (https://kotaku.com/xbox-cloud-gaming-controller-microsoft-as... and https://kotaku.com/game-pass-will-start-capping-the-number-o...) so that's not happening any time soon.
But they've just announced exclusive GTA VI streaming rights: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49987245
Microsoft also made it significantly easier to put play their xbox games on the PC, even their xbox 360 games.
Well Microsoft always seems to be making the wrong decision at the wrong time and this is probably yet another one. Probably due to competing factions hat don't really have a unifying vision for the company. It provides enormous amounts of comedy and I guess we will find out if this was another instance of "whoops we closed down that thing we could really use right now"! :)
Sony will happily shoot themselves in the face rather than give in to their customer's desires.
Microsoft will try and force their customers into something they don't want, because it's obviously better for Microsoft than their customers. They may succeed - success being "not completely losing all of their market share".
Nintendo will figure it out somehow, even if it means pivoting out of gaming altogether. Chances are - they will choose to make their customers happy instead of shooting themselves in the face. But they will try to shoot in the face youtubers and modders who make their customers happy.
On balance, Sony will most likely shoot themselves in the face, and survive to take whatever market share Microsoft gives up. Somehow.
Don't forget PC gaming. Steam will keep growing, without even having to try that hard, simply because they:
1. already have their foot in the door
2. are not overwhelmingly hostile towards their customers
Valve can be trusted to maintain its current customer friendly policies only as long as GabeN is in charge and he is approaching retirement age. Perhaps we'll be fortunate and he manages to appoint a successor that has the same vision he had and, then again, perhaps we won't.
Means don't be a stock company or comparable, as you are forced to generate money for the shareholders.
People forget the social aspects of console gaming and underestimate the ”it just works” factor. Nintendo in particular has a rather unique hardware platform with their controllers. Sure, you _can_ somewhat replicate it on PC, but the portability and OOTB experience is pretty good. Of course the switch is underpowered as hell, but you don’t need PC perf for the games you want to play in the social console form factor. You pay for the complete experience.
Needless to say though, vendor lock-in still sucks, and the switch store is pretty terrible.
Cloud gaming is nice, I use GeforceNow regularly to play on my mac. However, there are several games that I couldn't complete/play due to the latency (around 60ms). Claire Obscures quicktime events were a pain (plus I used a PS5 controller which adds some latency), also Indiana Jones and the Great Circle had a bossfight mid-game with quicktime events that became so frustrating that I couldn't complete the game - halfway through. Same is true for Battlefield 6 - impossible to play, you just get continuesly fragged from player you didn't even see (remember the netcode does not consider you cloud gaming latency).
This is unfortunate that it would push them in that direction, but not for the reasons you speak of.
Before the PS4/WiiU era (I'm not including XBox for reasons that will be obvious), they actually tried to create hardware that was "ground breaking" and/or "revolutionary" (to some extent of those words).
The PS3 had the "Cell Processor" and the Wii was loosely based on a PPC architecture.
The PS4 and WiiU were essentially x86 AMD CPU's.
The PS5, Switch 1/2 and every XBox are basically just desktop COTS hardware slightly modified for power consumption to be "consoles".
Are you surprised that 10,000,000 machine hours compressed into a quantized token can "reverse" a very well known and documented architecture?
I'm not.
And that, in my humble opinion, is the unfortunate part.
While you are right about the PS4 (and xbox), the Nintendo consoles are nothing like desktop platforms.
WiiU is the same architecture as the Wii and the Switch is the same platform as Nvidia Shield.
Wii U and Switch aren't x86 at all. All of GameCube, Wii and Wii U used a PowerPC CPU and an ArtX/ATI/AMD GPU. And Switch has moved to Nvidia ARM chips; they had been using ARM for portables since GBA.
Weird hardware is just worse. You can't beat mainstream CPUs or GPUs that now have decades of investment behind them.
Feel like eventually ai will get so good people will just autogenerate games just for themselves. Same for movies/shows/etc.
Why on earth would anyone watch that nonsense? Who cares if it’s even cohesive. It’s the bedrock of “derivative.”
Ugh I know the answer but it’s just sad. I don’t want all media to become cotton candy.
I could in principal see something that isn't clearly entirely derivative, like if a person takes their own original thought and uses generative AI to make it into a video instead of, for example, learning animation and animating it or finding (probably amateur) actors to film it with. This of course still has some derivative aspects that may be easier to avoid than in the non-generative-ai case, but it is also clearly distinct from a 100% generative AI case.
For example, ever since roughly the mid 2010s when I finished Star Trek: Enterprise, I've been thinking about someone using some sort of generative AI to complete this series, once its good enough to be entirely convincing.
AI generated Star Trek is an oxymoron. Gene Roddenberry's ghost stirs the longer we even consider the idea.
Two quotes from Star Trek "The Ultimate Computer" - a very prescient episode.
KIRK There are certain things men must do to remain men. Your computer would take that away.
---
BONES Compassion. That's the one thing no machine ever had. Maybe it's the one thing that keeps men ahead of them. Care to debate that, Spock?
SPOCK No, Doctor. I simply maintain that computers are more efficient than human beings, not better.
There is an AI-generated YouTube series/channel called "TK-42 Greg" that follows the life of a hapless Star Wars stormtrooper as he pursues a career of menial jobs, unemployment and drifting about a galaxy far, far away.
It's dumb and derivative and isn't getting a lot of laughs from me, but at the same time, it is freakishly realistic, and absolutely ripping off every character and scene and locale of the Lucas series.
I don't know how long it will last against Disney's DMCA juggernaut, but the "Imperial HR Lady" is way funnier and she just has to throw on a turquoise necklace and grating accent.
Speaking of self-vibe-coding games, I wouldn't see the point. When I was a younger boy, I did write games for myself, and it was an arduous project that was mostly aimed at teaching myself programming rather than gaming per se. And eventually the big didactic moments were hacking someone else's game code in terms of debugging and extending it, and that was more exciting than building my own from scratch.
Also, copyright is an issue! If consumer AI could ignore copyright and just code me, say, "Freecell but it's Harry Potter" or "Put me in the cockpit of a Y-Wing video game!" then it'd be exciting. People pay big bucks and invest big bucks for in-universe games of certain franchises like that. But AI won't provide for the consumer in this way, ever.
Much of the joy of gaming for me, is seeing a polished product that is well-balanced in terms of rules and fairness, and has good sound/graphic assets, and challenges or surprises me in novel ways as I go along. I don't think I would mind if someone else vibe-codes a game for me to play, if it's good enough and engaging, but it seems that designing/coding one for myself would feel empty and unfulfilling. And I wouldn't apply the same principle to utility software, but really I'd rather not invest a lot of time in building an office suite for myself, rather than just grabbing it off the shelf.
I've had AI make little learning games, coloring stories, etc for my kid. I and it absolutely will ignore copyright. So far it's never objected. It'll also happily reverse engineer binaries, extract art assets, whatever.
There is a lot of work and research behind the (quality) major learning tools you are possibly likely overlooking. How do you know these learning games and activities are actually doing anything for your kid? Why not just use them?
I’m genuinely asking here. This isn’t bait or a challenge, and I’m not really sure how to avoid that tone so apologies if seems antagonistic.
It could just be that I don't know the right words to use, but my attempts to find some kind of quality edutainment has led me to conclude that basically the only thing that exists since the 90s is Khan Academy Kids, which itself just doesn't have a very tight loop. So I've made some variations on number munchers/word munchers, e.g. find all expressions that sum to N. Or a "what's the missing number" that deletes a number from a sequence of e.g. counting by 4, and they have to answer. It then immediately gives them the same sequence with a different number deleted. Or have expressions pop up/disappear and they need to quickly click the ones with the target sum. Or just straight up rapid answer math questions lol.
Basically, quick arcade-style games that can give them "points" so they feel good about just doing problems over and over for repetition. I can handle the conceptual discussions myself, but I find that gamifying works well for the portions where there's no alternative but to just practice until memorized.
I had also been working on a Treasure Mountain/Mathstorm/Galaxy clone with expanded activities, but I think the arcade format actually works better and is easier to make.
My daughter can also read a couple years ahead, but her writing's still very basic/phonetic. So I had codex whip up a standard template where I can put a picture (that codex generates) and she can write about what's happening in the picture and then color it. The template includes a word bank where I can add words relevant to what's happening (e.g. that I used to prompt the picture creation) that have irregular spelling, and I had it print a reminder sheet of different ways to spell the same sounds (ai, a_e, ay, etc) that she can refer to while trying to remember how to spell words. Previously when she was earlier in learning to read, I had used it to generate a couple simple coloring storybooks as a little fun activity.
That doesn't really answer your question about how I know it's effective, but I get a general sense that educational research struggles with that question too.
Why feed your child slop?
Huh? Maybe this is a reasonable take if you only consider the original series, but TNG heavily used holodecks as a form of entertainment, with computer-run characters factoring in heavily to plot advancement in the episodes.
Moreover, the exploration of Data’s personhood as an android is like… incredibly pervasive throughout all of the seasons of the show.
> as a form of entertainment
Absolutely and I was thinking about this when I wrote my initial comment. It's a good consideration. Star Trek _does_ have an AI computer capable of generating code and stories and all it requires of the user is a little prompting.
TNG shows humans are using this technology to engage themselves. People rock climb, ski, perform Shakespeare. Holodeck authors are well-respected throughout the galaxy. They also warned us of holodeck psychosis.
Data is an android, but what about his story suggests we should slurp up doggerel? His existence is the pursuit of humanity's "essence."
It really depends his good it is. There are so many shows where stories just don't pay off well. I could see an AI developing a show with a complex web of throughlines kept logically consistent and fleshed out.
But why? I feel like there is always this implied notion that media is just about “being good.” But “being good” requires a lot of things, and a big part of that is somebody sitting down and deciding they have a story to tell. An LLM cannot do that. It cannot speak from experience, it cannot explore novel concepts, it cannot express actual meaning.
A pretty photo is not enough on its own. Hotel lobbies have all kinds of pretty photography. That’s not the stuff people hang on the walls in their home. There is nothing wrong with it, it is fine to have hotel lobby photos. But acting like that is the ultimate target, that we should use AI to just manufacture this at a large scale… I mean what is even the purpose of that? Am I missing something here? Do people really just want to sit around with their local agent generating facsimiles of existing shows/movies for cheap entertainment?
There is always space for cotton candy and general purpose work, but we should not be advocating for a massive facsimile machine to drown out all media. People have been whining about Hollywood not writing new things for decades, so the alternative is to accelerate that? I just don’t understand the draw. I have no desire to sit around watching my computer make a fake, derivative Star Wars show for me to watch later.
The most popular human-made media is all derivative. Look at a list of the top games and movies for the last 10 years: sequels, spinoffs, and adaptations.
Call of Duty 27, the myriad sports franchises, Halo 8, Fast and Furious 11, a remake of some Disney movie, the latest Marvel-slop...
I’m not arguing about what is popular I’m arguing about what is worth our attention and consideration. And I don’t think I at any point implied I think those movies aren’t derivative, but clearly we’re not talking about the same type of “derivative.” LLM’s literaly make facsimiles of existing content in a direct way.
It also bears mentioning that Coke and Pepsi are popular too.
It's basically a drug at that point, you'll be hooked up to the pleasure machine
No, I will pirate autogenerated movies/shows/games. Not paying for that sht.
I know 10 year olds already doing this. It’s great. Remove the barrier to imagining your own games !
Already happening on insta and tiktok with genAI stuff, people are creating a lot of funny stuff
Well isn't Roblox kinda this? I play it all the time with my niece and nephew...it sucks, its enshittification to the max. Part of an entertainment property is you are devoting time to enjoying the creative process of someone who put in the effort to produce something polished and with effort. The end result is the culmination of all the work done (possibly years/decades) to get to that point and you are paying for the result of all that effort. Could a Roblox game be like that? Possibly but the incentives dont seem to be as aligned despite the democratizing force it has had.
I am reminded of a scene from the Jobs movie where they were arguing Open vs Closed systems. This feels similar...
[1]:https://youtu.be/TYvXOHAJTiU?t=81
Unfortunately, I don't know if you've tried cloud gaming. It's just not very good now. Also to force people to use it given the current cost climate for components, it would be extremely expensive.
It'll happen regardless, as of now the public internet infrastructure still isn't fast enough to be comparable to local rendering, cloud gaming needs to deliver >50mbps bandwidth at sub 16ms latency.
I wonder if there is some hybrid where the graphics rendering and input processing happens on device but the brains of the game live on the server.
At this point, code might be less valuable than art assets.
Considering the economics, the graphics rendering would have to be shifted to the server too and output as video
The clock is ticking even for that. We're not far off from anything being able to be copied, including streaming only games. If it can be observed, a reasonable facsimile can be created. The reasonableness will increase over time.
Gacha games do this, e.g. Genshin Impact. When you turn off your internet while playing a lot of game logic fails (e.g. damage calculation) before it tries to reconnect.
Any MMORPG?
> Unfortunately, this is only going to push Sony/Nintendo/MS more towards cloud gaming. AI enabling these amazing reverse engineering efforts and democratizing access to gaming is amazing
Within 5-10 years, kids will just be asking AI to generate customized games for them on the spot.
Maybe some indie games will even be delivered as prompts too, and the current download/installation times will be replaced by generation times :)
(not saying this is the future I want very much, but it's not unlikely)
Is that borne out by Roblox? Making a game is only fun if you can get other people to play with you, no?
We're not far away from playing a screen grab and prompting "Hey $HOTTEST_LLM, make a clone of this game". There really isn't anything new under the sun with gaming. The assets can be easily reverse engineered, reconstruct the 3D world, and work out the inner logic (damage, etc).
Even if it starts out really crappy, people will iterate and contribute until it's virtually identical to the real thing.
It's already over. At the very least this will push for more internet connectivity and be good for PC gaming.
Sony's greed has been incredible, let's just accelerate tbh
It's already happening, every effort into preservation of what already exists is important
Have agents play the game 1000s of times and distil the gameplay itself into a new game.
Have you even tried "cloud gaming"? It’s useless for any game that is latency sensitive (fps, moba, …).
I have only had success with single player games.
If revenues are going to suffer because of this, that is the way the industry will move towards
But nobody will play it? Steam exists and all those games get pirated. You can’t force gamers to buy duds. I have a gigabit connection wired and found a cloud version of Control to be totally unplayable.
It is in the realm of design to make games playable within the context of their technological limits. In this case, I could see games moving towards being turn-based i.e. online chess.
Turn based games are relatively niche. Players would rather play an unresponsive FPS than switch to turn based games.
I could imagine a Counter Strike RTS, Also one of the best selling games, Pokemon, is a turn-based game.
Genres are design problems rather than descriptions
No one thinks RuneScape is a "topdown RPG", rather than a "fantasy game with a lot of freedom and many things to do" The genre can be made secondary to the design, so I don't doubt game designers can make turn-based games widely appealing
Turn based isn't really a genre, it's a play style. A lot of people out there actually want fast paced action and wouldn't enjoy Pokemon. Baldur's Gate 3 also did quite well recently but real time games consistently perform better.
RuneScape as an example is a funny one because it is comparable to turn based games at a competitive level due to its slow tick rate. You're basically taking very fast (0.6s) turns and can stack certain actions within those turns to do better. But there is no pause between turns so it's just (ab)using game mechanics, which also means it is latency sensitive.
there will be eventually people who grew up with nothing but lag introduced by the cloud streaming. They won't know how much better they could have it. So they won't complain.
The gaming industry as you know it is dead. The only survivors will be the prolific sloppers who can outslop the hoi polloi.
Revenues suffer because game studios and publishers make awful decisions. See the botched releases of Marathon (Bungie) and the more infamous examples — concord and split gate.
Gamers won’t tolerate cloud gaming for long. I remember when QuakeLive was supposed to revolutionize publishing. Cheat free games!
Except the UX is horrid. If studios will certainly try it but there will be massive backlash.
Also a use case for world models to hide the actual source of the game and have it stream a simulation of the real game; never to be exposed or downloaded.
Maybe they'll go streaming-only, but I'd at least wait until the Switch 2 is hacked before making that prediction.
Cloud gaming just doesn't have as good a feel, even with negative latency and everything.
Then they'd have RAM as their own capex cost rather than pushing that on to the consumers.
How would cloud-only prevent this? Do you think LLMs can't exfil the game from the server? They're incredibly persistent and are willing to try many things. Random credentials, vulnerabilities in the game servers / dev machines, or even social engineering the devs/the deployment.
[dead]
I honestly welcome cloud gaming. Action RPGs might be dead in the water, But there were many games suffering from data mining, and having their secrets revealed day 1. Bringing games to cloud gaming could restore the mystery in games
This is saying you'd be ok with books being only permitted to be read at the library, behind a sealed kiosk screen, because otherwise people might post spoilers online.
If the library is completely AI generated, and only the sealed kiosk screen contains (possibly) human-authored content,
How does the equation change?
I am saying I'd rather enjoy POSSIBLY human content, than AI generated ones. And if cloud gaming cannot deliver on this, I'd rather stop gaming altogether. The idea of consuming AI generated content is completely disgusting to me.
You should stop using internet. High chance that the code run the infrastructure you use is partly modified by LLM.
A braindead comment, that can only be attributed to malice
and saying ai generated content is all "worthless" and "disgusting" is not malicious? both are just signaling imo
Meh, overblown. Very easy to not go looking for that and just enjoy your games.
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."
This relates to game design, not outside actions.
Also if that's what you believe, players who start after day 1 will not have mystery. Even players who start day 1 but can't dedicate all of their time to the game will inevitably spoil themselves when they have to do anything else, meaning someone will progress farther than they and will share that info.
It's always nice to have local git clone backups/mirrors of these projects because they may eventually be taken down through legal threats eg, Yuzu and Ryujinx.
Eg. https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-wipes-out-400-switch-emula...
Nice moment to hook the git-maintenance[1] command, which setups automatic pre-fetching of a repository in a scheduled manner. That way you don't need to remember to manually update your mirrors. Since the repo is public, cloning with https is a simpler setup for prefetching, but ssh is also supported with some configuring.
Edit: wrong link
[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-maintenance
I can also recommend hosting your own Gitea/Forgejo instance, it has an automatic repository mirroring feature that fetches the repo regularly. I use it to mirror some "high-risk" repos.
Keep them in a private GitHub repository so Nintendo can't see them. Slowly release it to different Githubs on a different account.
Self-host gitlab in darknet.
Guide:
http://opbible7nans45sg33cbyeiwqmlp5fu7lklu6jd6f3mivrjeqadco...
Legend
Just download the zip file
You will own everything and be happy.
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.
These two concerns weren't really noticeable when I played games on Stadia. That isn't to say you wouldn't notice them, but I certainly didn't.
I'd guess maybe 90% of gamers probably wouldn't either. And those negatives are somewhat balanced by the positives that cloud-streamed games enables: no disk space management (minor) and no cheaters (huge!).
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
Funny to think about how the first fully ai generated dialog character is inevitably going to be a skyrim gf mod if its not already on nexus
funny, the thing that stands out to me is how some open source voice models are farrr better than anything I’ve seen on ChatGPT or Elevenlabs or videos or spam calls, but everyone seems to just plug into those services
the voice models are small too so it’s just a matter of time until someone is intentional enough sending that payload down in a download
RE: Your blog post ending
A counter-force to pulling more into the cloud against RE might be the general (geo)political instability + general rising tensions.
It might in the near future simply not be possible to build products that are tethered to that degree, as they'd be too fragile for the market to accept.
Additionally, it might be that the market simply starts caring less about specific products, as their value can be recreated freely using said LLM inference. So the vendor might cloud-tether it, but the thing that is tethered might simply be not interesting enough to matter.
"Fine, I'll do it myself" is getting easier by the day, and a lot of products are rather mid.
__
The only things that will be troublesome are heavily regulated things like cars or heavily monopolized things like mobile phone OS'.
The latter currently demonstrating how little interest Google has in there being something like Graphene and holding everything built on the idea of mobile phones hostage.
Both of these are mere legislative issues though and could be resolved with a majority of normal people. But one dollar one vote kinda interferes there.
True, but if we (eventually) have models which can produce high quality games, who cares?
You think people play Dark Souls because it is "hard" and "dark fantasy" Or do people play it because the gaming community at large plays it, and people want to join in the conversation and have fun with the community?
High quality games were never the point, look at Roblox
There are two kinds of gamers actually. Those who play for the social aspect and those who play for the ... let's call it experience.
If you're not in the latter category you'll probably assume a game's quality is proportional to the # of tiktok videos about it of course.
You'll also think all games are multiplayer live service :)
Then surely you should discuss your ideas with ChatGPT instead? Why do you bother soliciting opinions on a forum? Why do you insult others by saying that if they are interested in community, these people believe the quality of a game to be proportional to the amount of TikTok they watch?
> to join in the conversation and have fun with the community
So what does this mean then, for a single player game, if not discussion outside the game?
Btw at a quick search 80% of Elden Ring players have not used the multiplayer component at all.
I just mean if AAA games become inaccessible, I imagine there will be large community efforts on creating alternatives to that.
Games are shared cultural artefacts
All entertainment is, to some extent.
There are many titles of a certain genre I keep meaning to sit down and play through someday, but keep pushing them out because I realized I have no one to talk about it with, just archived threads from 10+ years ago on various boards and forums of a discussion that once was.
I don't think streaming only, but instead always-online, paid subscription required. Sure, you might be able to play the game on another platform but that'll be useless without the server component. Nothing even new, lots of online games do this already. No reason they couldn't extend this to single player without making everything streaming.
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
Or they will just stop releasing certain genres.
Gacha and MOBA games, for example, probably wouldn't make less money because someone rewrote the client program in Rust. And players would cancel those clones spontaneously in the name of anti-cheat.
So we just ignore the cloud only garbage ?
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
People might also just stick to certain pre enshittified games. I hop on TF2 every now and then still. The game is pushing 20 years old and still pretty active. People are still having Super Smash Bros Melee tournaments. If it stays relegated to the increasingly old farts so be it, but we will have our things.
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.
That could also just be that they're all competing for a slice of the attention pie that's getting gobbled up by tiktok reels and sports gambling.
It's a response to the loss of ancilliary income that used to be derived from "home video" (which used to make up about 50% of a movie's total income). So it's directly analogous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6n0rinKTFY
Are we gonna get a PC port of GTA 6 on day one?
From the amount of activity and how much this all smells like heavy AI usage, I have zero doubt that something will be working shortly after launch. The agents won’t sleep until it boots.
This project is the first hint I’ve seen of the complete destruction of all copy protection schemes. Scary times for any industry that relies on those!
This hopefully pushes Rockstar to accelerate the official PC release.
What would be the incentive for Rockstar to not have the earliest possible official PC release?
You are less likely to double dip as a PC player if it’s available in a timely manner. However right now there is a lot of PC players that will buy the console version just because it’s available and there is no announcement for the PC version. And then buy again in a year or so when the PC version comes out with the ability to crank the graphics settings up.
Now I understand, thank you, I know little about the gaming industry.
No, to decrypt the game and make it possible to rip you need a current firmware exploit/jailbreak. Until the firmware that GTA 6 requires is jailbroken it won't even be possible to rip it, nevermind emulate it.
This was my initial thought and a sentiment I've seen expressed elsewhere, but I think I'm missing something about how they'd implement this.
Sure, Rockstar can enforce a minimum software revision to launch the game, but couldn't some homebrew software just (a) lie about the software revision to any running game, or (b) apply any relevant software updates minus patching the kernel vuln?
It seems to me that the cat's out the bag now.
That's not how attestation infrastructures work. Obviously they thought of all that.
Modern hardware attestation is - if implemented correctly - not beatable unless you decap chips and start trying to extract hardware keys. But the silicon itself is often heavily obfuscated and such a feat has not been demonstrated for modern hardware.
All breaks of modern console security rely on finding bugs or mistakes in the implementation. If the PS5 has got serious exploits then either:
1. They will patch it and revoke old firmwares, as the infrastructure lets them do. Then you have to try and find a new exploit in the firmware that GTA6 was released for.
2. It won't be released for PS5 until later. Xbox security has been undefeated for a long time now, so Microsoft might have an advantage there.
The way downloading games works on PS5 is your console asks PSN for a ticket using hardware attestation and account tokens, PSN checks if you own the game and gives you the keys. It's not doing attestation on every game start because that would make offline play impossible, and it wouldn't be effective against jailbreaks anyway.
If someone manages to download and decrypt the game on 1 single hacked console then it's out forever. Even if Sony decides to only allow unhacked firmware it's only a matter of time (months not years) before that version gets a jailbreak too because no complex system can be totally secure.
The only way to prevent this is making the game online only. That would be an extreme sales and reputation hit because it's the type of thing people expect from EA games where single player is a side mode. Not Rockstar famous for their incredible story modes that have always been offline.
Then you can see from projects like ReSkate that to successfully pull it off you would need to make the game effectively a thin client, because if you leave any logic on the console it will get reversed even if parts of it are server only.
And running a full game engine millions of times on your servers gets expensive real fast. Take Two can't afford it, and even if they could, the hit to their profits would be way more than what they can lose from the game getting cracked day 1.
So it's not feasible to fiddle with incoming firmware updates, even with the level of access Relapse gives? I couldn't imagine how such a thing would be implemented. A hypervisor?
Yes all modern console RA systems have a verified boot rooted in hardware that chains to a hypervisor. They also encrypt all code and network traffic, use revokable per-CPU hardware keys, and can tie game releases or updates to revokable firmware versions.
The underlying architectures are quite complex but there are some good tech talks about them online. One of the best is by Tony Chen, which covers Xbox One security. It's many years obsolete now, but even that security system wasn't cracked until long after obsolescence. Microsoft have proven you can build an effectively unbeatable security system for general computing devices even though they only use it for games and multiplayer anti-cheat. It seems Sony might have not reached Microsoft's level.
Maybe AI will speed things up by making it easier to find obscure bugs, but design wise the architectures are sound and can work well.
Right on. I'll check it out, thank you!
You need to get the game in the first place, which requires a console that’s authorized to download games from PSN.
I don’t know how Sonys attestation works, and how resistant it is; but presumably it’s a bit harder than “lie to the game about what firmware you’re running”.
(GTA VI will famously not have a physical release, so you can’t rip data off the disk.)
A trivial scheme would be to distribute some shared secret key in a new update, and require it to be supplied back on connections to Sony's servers. In order to extract that key in order to replay it from an older firmware, you'd need to have root on the new firmware.
False information. There are several examples of games that are patched to run on lower firmware.
You need a firmware version that can run the game in order to dump it in the first place. Then you can backport it to older firmwares.
(Also a reminder that GTA 6 won't have a physical release. And downloding from the store requires the latest firmware)
Xbox cloud or whatever it is called will stream this without an actual xbox
It was speculated that xbox streaming of GTA6 will be available on PC, but it was already denied.
No way Rockstar is doing this.
Wrong firmware is being worked on, you would need a version of the firmware that GTA6 is being targeted towards to have a vuln found.
Don't be fooled by this percentage. A 2 minute look at the code and what they called mapped is simply a lot of functions returning ok. As in: if (vvgvg) { return ok }
People talking about GTA6 being playable after launch is possible but I doubt it will impact their sales much as somebody will first have to rip this from the console then it has to work (I suspect the hardware requirements will make it harder to run than we think, limiting the mass appeal). Finally the money for blizzard is in the GTA Online its way more important for them long term than the single player campaign. And I do not see how AnyPS5 can help anyone there.
In general though bad news for all the small games out there more than the blockbusters.
> the money for blizzard is in the GTA Online
GTA is not made by Blizzard =)
You are right of course it's rockstar lol
- can we get an AnyGameCOOP mod?
- drag any single player game executable
- run a swarm of agents to decompile and build a networking layer
- turn it into a coop game
We are basically doing that on https://retroportingtoolkit.com
- interesting but what i am talking about would be 3d mainstream games like you are able to drag / drop call of duty black ops 1 into the repo and it ll make it 2 player coop or 4 player
- it ll decompile the exe, analyze the makeup of the game
- create a networking stack if doesnt exist and generate a new exe that has coop on it
- drag metro 2033 boom, it is now coopable
- this would be the MOST ultimate agentic AI use if anyone can actually cook it
That’s quite far away. There are some fake ones that approximate it by doing mods
I always wonder who the folks who build these things are. If they become too popular, it seems like a good way to have the government pay you a visit you will not enjoy. But they also seem like technically interesting problems to solve. Glad someone is out there preserving these games in any case.
They might be technically interesting problems to solve but these days they're just using AI to solve them so they aren't really learning anything about those interesting problems.
This one is made by Russians. Their government has bigger problems to deal with. They turn a blind eye as long as Russian companies are not targeted.
A lot of people live in places where the government does not really care to use police to enforce copyright, or where this just isn’t really considered illegal.
Yes come and visit me in a country where I effectively own the police with bribes
This generation's "geohot" and friends, most likely. Curiosity, youth and a much lower entry barrier will always win.
The PlayStation platform in general is the easiest console to reverse engineer. There’s a lack of security in depth that makes it easy to reverse engineer.
It’s only recently (earlier this year) that the _last gen_ of xbox was cracked.
> It’s only recently (earlier this year) that the _last gen_ of xbox was cracked.
Maybe that's due to lack of interest?
The Xbox is flopping commercially, and doesn't have any exclusives that are not on PC.
On the other hand, The Nintendo Switch got a jailbreak fairly early in its lifecycle.
Surely, if there's enough motivation, hacking any console is possible.
Xbox games typically come to windows too.
AI is developing these kind of things faster than Sony could send C&D Letters - crazy stuff
is this like the WINE approach?
Halfway between Wine and Rosetta. The binary itself gets modified, but both source and target are x86 so no transpilation.
That sounds like just Wine?
WINE doesn't modify binaries, does it?
It doesn't, it is a runtime for running Portable Executables[1] on the fly while also mocking windows API libraries to Linux implementations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable
Yeah, that's the key difference. Wine leaves the binary intact, while AnyPS5 actually patches/relinks it.
Does Rosetta modify binaries in-place?
No. It's effectively a JIT.
(It saves copies of translated binaries behind the scenes, but it still behaves like a JIT overall.)
Could something like Rosetta be built out of this?
I think so.
> Dreaming Sarah (2D platformer) runs at a stable 60 fps on a GTX 1050 Ti / i5-7500 3.4GHz
Glad to see this type of hardware still included in the testing flows!
GTA 6 is releasing on PS5 right? Who is going to pay a single cent for software if everything can be ripped day 1? Countries with a huge stake in the software industry are going to get crushed?
Music and movies can be ripped day 1, and it hasn't done a whole lot.
There is not much goodwill in the world left towards Sony. They have screwed their customers over repeatedly (removal of PS3 Linux, PC spyware, removal of physical disks, banning arbitrary users online etc.), which makes the moral case for Sony piracy more ambiguous.
I do not pirate music but I will always steal from Hollywood studios
The music and movie streaming paradigm was developed partly to combat piracy, by making it more convenient to stream legally.
It was never about convenience. I will always steal from Netflix and distribute their “content”
Movie situation is terrible these days. You need to maintain $100/mo of services to cover your bases and you are still told its only available for a $3.99 4 day digital "rent" which feels like worse terms than what blockbuster was offering.
That’s pretty cheap, a new release blockbuster movie cost $3.79 - in 1999! And you had to drive there, and drive back to return it, and could only borrow what they had in stock, and they charged you fees if you forgot.
Basic cable (with 3 minutes of commercials every 10 minutes) plus HBO was like $80-100 adjusted for inflation. Now you can get a HBO/Disney/Hulu bundle, with no ads, for $35/month and watch anything in their entire catalogue instantly.
Truly amazing times
New spider man movie is being rented for $25 now. Prices just keep moving with no real competition. Used to be the grocery store had a bin of older dvds for a dollar each.
False, myth. This is a common claim pushed by MPAA/RIAA (the copyright police for music and film industry).
Consumers want _access_ to their games/content. For example, netflix made it easy to "rent" or stream content. But as they slowly clawback those features (multi-streaming, password sharing, incorporate ads, increase prices beyond inflation). Then access to content decreases, visibility decreases.
Piracy is a service problem! If they release a good PC port, I will buy it, as I have done for nearly every other Rockstar game. Hell, if they were to even just automate the port using a similar tool, I wouldn't really mind if the end result were indistinguishable from a decent PC port. I just really don't want to buy a PS5 for a couple exclusives.
Most software and games is available pirated already and has been for decades. You could get pirate games on the original PlayStation two decades ago. Cracking the most recent PlayStation is not going to change things
> Who is going to pay a single cent for software if everything can be ripped day 1?
Billions of people pay dozen if not hundreds of dollars per months for movies, tv shows, etc. that are available for free via torrent on day 1, or even earlier sometimes.
Most games today can be ripped day 1 and they're doing fine. Pirates are a tiny minority
Do people pay only because there's no pirate alternative? Valve showed this with Steam, people pay for convenience and for good service quality. Piracy is an answer to lack of corporate respect about culture and art that's used to create a commercial product, which manifests in enshitification.
To decrypt the game and make it possible to rip you need a current firmware exploit/jailbreak. Until the firmware that GTA 6 requires is jailbroken it won't be possible to rip it
Everything has always been able to be ripped day 1. People pay for convenience or because it's expected, not because there's no other option
Check steam game sales
Ads can still be served to pirates, especially if they’re product placements baked into the assets shipped.
If you think this project, not even month old, can recompile gta6 to pc and it be in anyway playable on release have I got a bridge to sell you.
Yes, not exactly a compelling compatibility matrix so far: https://github.com/boykopovar/AnyPS5/blob/main/docs/user/COM...
There’s also a big factual error in the submission title because the project readme has this caveat
> System libraries: percentage of the functions known to the project so far (declared in core/libs/prx), not of every PS5 system function. The total grows as more functions are declared.
I think the replies to my comment are not realistic.
The Goldilocks zone for earning revenue for movies & games were always: Day 1 earnings = Week 1 earnings = Year 1 earnings
The revenue in this case is heavily protected by your IP NOT being copied in a single day, and that people want to experience the product together with their friends.
When people talk about convenience, is there really any inconvenience in downloading a pirated game/movie on release day?
Especially for GTA6. The most amount of money is riding on this. It's still going to be a lot if it's copied on day1, but there is no way it is near their projections.
Does the compatibility list contains only one game currently?
Since the PS5 is already x86-64, the main friction point here is likely the proprietary graphics API rather than CPU instruction translation. I wonder if they handle GNM command buffers by pre-compiling them into Vulkan during that static relinking phase or if there is still some runtime interception happening when the game tries to queue those draw calls.
AGC (the PS5 version of GNM) is around 80% complete on CPU side and 98% on shader side. Of course this says nothing about bugs or missing edge case behavior but it's still impressive.
I checked the code and it rewrites shaders from RDNA to SPIR-V at runtime. There is a disk cache and it's a binary format so it shouldn't be much slower than vkd3d translating from DXIL.
The PS5's 3D audio chip might also present some difficulty to work around, since it's proprietary. I wonder if the 1st party games that feature it have any issues.
No human knows the answer to that question or to any any other technical question. that will be the world we live in
i asked copilot it says runtime interception and translation
Just because you're unable to figure that out doesn't mean everybody is? The code might be AI assisted/generated but it's still fairly readable.
Good old confirmation bias.
> No human knows
source?
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