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.,

Or introduce some kind of validation in code, to block it from running from PC?

Has any company ever done anything because of piracy, apart from trying to punish the pirates?

Can you provide any examples for us interested?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

Steam DRM is easy to bypass, but the convenience of one-click purchasing cannot be bypassed.

You’d be surprised with how much lag is actually tolerable when you have good prediction.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

Surely no one playing competitive real-time games are doing it on a PS5?

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"! :)

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

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.

No, I will pirate autogenerated movies/shows/games. Not paying for that sht.

It's basically a drug at that point, you'll be hooked up to the pleasure machine

I know 10 year olds already doing this. It’s great. Remove the barrier to imagining your own games !

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.

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

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.

Weird hardware is just worse. You can't beat mainstream CPUs or GPUs that now have decades of investment behind them.

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.

Is that borne out by Roblox? Making a game is only fun if you can get other people to play with you, no?

If revenues are going to suffer because of this, that is the way the industry will move towards

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.

Meh, overblown. Very easy to not go looking for that and just enjoy your games.

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.

Self-host gitlab in darknet.

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.

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.

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.

True, but if we (eventually) have models which can produce high quality games, who cares?

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

It was speculated that xbox streaming of GTA6 will be available on PC, but it was already denied.

No way Rockstar is doing this.

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.

False information. There are several examples of games that are patched to run on lower firmware.

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.

The music and movie streaming paradigm was developed partly to combat piracy, by making it more convenient to stream legally.

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.

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.

> 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.

That sounds like just Wine?

Could something like Rosetta be built out of this?

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.