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."
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."
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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
High quality games were never the point, look at Roblox
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 :)
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 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.