alt Hacker NewsWith the slew of recomps these days enabled by AI, How much incentive is there for a game studio to pour their heart, soul and money in a product when it can be easily "stolen" and shared for free...
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People who want to support a game studio will buy the game anyway. People who do not want to support the studio will pirate the game anyway. It's the same reason why piracy does not matter at all, those people weren't going to pay for your game either way.
Video game piracy isn't new and indie games have always been trivial to pirate. In fact a lot of indie studios opt to put their catalog up on GOG, which is a famously DRM-Free store.
I don't understand this framing of recomps using the word "stolen". For most games the hard part and the valuable part is not "writing the code", it's everything else.
The incentive will always be there for games that build an organic community. Good examples are a lot of Valve games.
I mean, how much incentive is there to buy when the studios won't let you legally purchase from them, or at best don't actually consider it a purchase when they do?
Especially when, for games of this age, we're talking about going through the secondary market, and paying potentially hundreds of dollars for a physical copy, without the creators seeing a dime of that transaction to begin with.
No mention of AI at all in this repo.
Because good stuff will defend itself regardless. If Pratchett or Carlin was alive, I would still be waiting for his new stuff.. maybe even more so in the age of AI. Hell, I am doing a ton of personal projects now and I am still waiting for new divinity, because by know I trust them to do the stuff right. And this is the point: no more corporate slop! All hail AI slop. Second golden gaming age is upon us brothers!
The market doesn’t want them to invest half a decade to a decade into games anyway
Anything that shows its no longer worth it will accelerate that industry using newer tools to make games faster with multimodal language models powering audio, voice, asset generation, rendering as well as agentic workflows for the manual work humans would still be involved in
right now, AAA studios won’t do it and their audiences wont want them to do it, but any dedicated indie developer that would have never hired the teams of people needed for those aspects can do it. a nearby parallel reality where AAA do it based on no ability to protect high valued IP now looks closer with the decompilation route
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It's been 27 years since Napster. People are still making albums and movies. I don't think piracy moves the needle in any meaningful way, not with enforcement anyway.