i really worry about what the big game developers are going to do to fight against these types of projects. wondering if we are fucking up the future of game preservation because people want to generate web versions of games they like
Same as always. Get services (google, github, chatgpt, reddit, etc.) to not help you find it. There is really no difference between distributing a decomp with assets and the real game with assets.
Use yandex for this sort of thing.
If you actually recreated entirely new assets then it would get interesting. I suppose we will get there, and perhaps sooner rather than later.
I imagine they will just switch to offering cloud gaming exclusively. It allows them to sell to anyone with a screen, regardless of specs. It also aligns perfectly with the ongoing death of local gaming hardware.
People have been claiming this in response to piracy for decades, yet people still go out and buy the official game.
Perhaps game developers already have the tools they need: try distributing your browser version of a game anybody cares about instead of a 20 year old game. This game isn't even available on Steam/GOG.
> why would anyone pay for a game running in a browser?
The same reason you buy any game. Why did anyone pay for Runescape when it ran in the browser? Btw, with webgl/webgpu/wasm you can make high fidelity, high performant 3D games. The top games on Twitch are World of Warcraft, League of Legends, and Minecraft -- all trivial to build in the browser.
But browser gaming isn't relevant to the point. It's just piracy. The only reason this is on HN is because "click here to play this pirated game" is a lot more interesting than "download this pirated game".
Piracy didn't kill the gaming industry. I think the bigger threat is indie games that are trivial to clone with AI.
It didn't outright kill it, but it did have a negative effect on it, and this effect might get a lot worse now with LLMs cracking various copy protection mechanisms.
> the people that just put out a cute site and stay low tend not to attract lawyers
Some lawyers are extremely litigious.
This might be daydreaming and wholly unreasonable, but I think that it should go like this: “As a developer/publisher you either provide a product available for purchase for a reasonable price (not larger than release price, adjusted for inflation) OR you are not allowed to take down game preservation efforts.”
Can’t afford to patch the game for vulnerabilities in the code or host servers? That’s okay, the community will do that for you after they reverse engineer it.
But that’s not the world we live in. Personally I think that even projects like SPT-AKI are okay.
> As a developer/publisher you either provide a product available for purchase for a reasonable price (not larger than release price, adjusted for inflation) OR you are not allowed to take down game preservation efforts.
i worked at a place where to get anything done, you had to demonstrate "Business Impact": is what you're about to do going to actually help revenue? if not, move on to something that does
i agree, a suit should only be taken seriously if the company can demonstrate that they are actively losing revenue because of the game preservation effort, otherwise toss it in the bin
why are big name businesses wasting money on litigating against small sites that dont actually impact them anyway? perhaps if they knew that their lawyers were wasting time chasing frivolous suits and actually costing their company's good will, while not actually giving their business impact...
> why are big name businesses wasting money on litigating against small sites that dont actually impact them anyway? perhaps if they knew that their lawyers were wasting time chasing frivolous suits and actually costing their company's good will, while not actually giving their business impact...
Because the lawyers can for example, argue that their current games can be future targets of unauthorized recomp'd redistributions that will impact the sales of the business.
Nintendo also sells and offers old games digitally and they have the correct rights in redistributing them which this still counts as a "actively commercial game" even if it is old.
These companies don't care about ripped and recompiled games if it is done for private use. They only care if the game and its assets are redistributed in an unauthorized manner.
I worry more about how this affects smaller and indie developers. As soon as you put out a trailer or any footage a hundred clones of your game will appear on Steam. Development blogs and community building are just attack surfaces for the slop machine now.
Yeah I feel like cheap enough AI will make having internet connected appliances such a huge liability that most devices will have to go back to as dumb as possible
it's very interesting how devoid celebrity culture is of videogame references, it is now finally slowly shifting, but it still is surprising when you hear a celeb talking about games.
my favorite one in recent memory is discovering that singer The Weeknd is really into indie games. (play Arctic Eggs y'all)
The first time I realised gaming was actually happening everywhere and it was actually just that nobody was talking about it was when lady gaga was posting about playing Bayonetta.
Can you say anything about how much variance is there in energy use between models and effort levels. I'm very curious about the difference between the fronteer and things like GLM 5.3 flash.
We publish live stats comparing model energy here: https://portal.neuralwatt.com/energy-pricing though since we are ZDR we don't really have any information about what effort levels these are run at but I'll try and put together some sort of analysis. Its not entirely clear cut as higher effort certainly uses a lot more energy but you might take fewer requests to solve a task.
On a blend of about 300 agentic/coding tasks, for GLM-5.3 Flash, low was about 1.3M tok/ans, medium was ~2M tok/ans, and xhigh/max was 4.8M tok/ans. This was dominated by output tokens btw (only about a 2X input token spread, but closers to a 5X spread for output tokens from low to xhigh).
These differ by model and set of tasks, but for GLM-5.3 Flash, the best $/pass was medium effort. Max did get about 5% higher scores, but at >2X the $/pass.
I see a lot of AI-pilled commenters in the YouTube comments saying it is just sour grapes, but I think there really is a difference between 2 human mathematician's scooping each other and a human + human + ai team being scooped by a full swarm.
I really feel like this is a precursor to these companies throwing their weight around in other fields. Like what if you are a pharma company spending years and years on a new medicine and then open ai gets wind and spends their considerable resources to scoop you. or your software gets cloned by them right before release. it feels like an anti-competitveness problem and I think it's probably best if a regulator steps in and forbids them from competing with companies/people in other fields? they should just rent out intelligence and not use it themselves for achieving stuff in different fields.
at least with GLM the banks can also use it to defend themselves for cheap, in the world Anthropic and co want everyone in the world is paying them an enormous sum in protection money every month to be allowed to defend themselves from hackers. it's such a racket.
They set themselves up as White Knights compared to those evil open model users who are all really just criminals.
That said, they do have a point: all of these models put capabilities in the hands of people that probably shouldn't have them. But they have been working really hard at making it so, and now that that is done the ketchup most likely will not want to go back into the bottle.
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