> I don't really understand the IP protection angle here [...] What's more interesting is the new ability to easily create ports of old games that let you play old games legally: Bringing your copy of the original's data files and playing on a modernised engine with high-resolution, unlocked FPS, bugfixes, etc. In the past couple of months, I've seen a bunch of vibe-coded ports of DOS games for which the source code was lost.

If you've noticed the obscene amount of ports, remakes, and remasters (most of which are done terribly) in recent years, it's obvious why certain people are pushing this as IP infringement. Companies were loving the fact that they could pull from a back-catalog of their PS2 games, get it compiling again, do some minor fixes to support modern widescreen/controllers/etc, maybe do some minor graphical enhancements, then resell a 20-year-old game for $60. Far less work than a new title, and far less risk since it has a built-in fanbase.

It's exploitative and shitty, to be clear, but it's understandable why some people are very upset about this.

[flagged]

To be fair that was already the case before ai hit the scene: halo and GTA have relied on the same gameplay for over 20 years by now.

most of that is trivial to get around by claiming permission. really.

"X license disallows this current use without express permission"

"Z gave me permission , here's the pdf, they gave us permission regardless of what licensing says going forward."

<insert pdf generated from a text file that says "I'm Z and I gave permission.">

"Okay, we will continue forward while noting that Z gave us permission regardless of what licensing says going forward."

>I miss when these were done legitimately.

Before LLM-assistance there were barely any fully playable recomps.

How many recompilation projects have you helped with? I get annoyed with non-contributors complaining about the people that contribute.

If the decomp scene is about the art of decompiling I would agree, but looking at r/decomps it seems the audience is gamers who just want to play the games. Do they also think it's terrible? Considering how anti Kotaku is it sounds like they are actually working well.

No it doesn't.

The point of decomps/recomps was never for some altruistic reason related to skill or art.

The point was people wanting to play games. This just adds to that. Yes - the people who did it before were skilled, smart and deserve recognition. But these ports are exactly that - ports so that people can play their old games or relive them.

What's low quality about a working transpile? Missing out on engine details/optimizations is a shame, but if someone cares about that they can do that themselves, it doesn't make the transpile itself low quality.

The thing is they are actually good, that's why they are getting so popular even when you can emulate many of them already.

I thought the same, but players will probably push back and just don't sign up. You can't charge AAA prices for only streaming the game.

By the time we get there, AI can probably be able to recreate the game based on the video alone. I think we are already there, the fidelity of it might vary.

What will probably happen is that frontier models will lobotomize models to refuse reverse engineering. That will buy some time, however with open weight models, some will find the way to fine tune the models to support RE if magically everybody agrees on the consensus that RE should be blocked.

I could see somewhat of a way around this. Feed AI hours of gameplay footage of a completed gameplay run and have it review it, then have it try to recreate the game to the best of its ability. Won't be perfect, but could work.

Wait until AI can vibe code from videos of the game rather than binaries.

Imagine Google shutting down Stadia in 2023 only for it to be revived in another form as a copyright infringement prevention tool somewhere else