AI turned out to be exactly what was needed for accelerating gaming in the browser timeline. Could you port games to WebGPU/WASM before Opus 5.5? Sure you could, my startup has been in this exact business for over 5 years developing tools for this, and providing porting services for studios.
But now it's a complete paradign shift that anyone can port a popular hit game to the browser just by asking Fable or Opus. Optimization is a whole topic, because most people don't know the specifics around doing so. Streaming of assets is crucial so you don't have the big download problem. Still, someone can tell the model "make it run faster and start up quicker" and the model will largely obey and go ahead and implement that.
We're 100% going to see major portals of console-quality WebGPU games, both ports of well know titles as well as indies using the web as a way to get seen. For anyone interested in real cutting edge in WebGPU, below I've linked to an Unreal Engine 5 FPS running in the browser, you can check it out here: (does not run on mobile, only computers, not Firefox):
https://simplystream.dev/GWnafxMj
At the same time game dev competitions and showcases are being shutdown because “all the AI slop”. I agree with you completely but I also know there’s going to be a lot more noise as people try.
someone has to pay for the bandwith
> does not run on mobile, only computers, not Firefox
IE 6 is calling...
How's your startup doing?
We've been better, appreciate you asking. Epic shipping web platform support in 5.9 this month came as a bit of a shock, so we're focusing heavily on the hosting side because devs will need to upload their games somewhere.
Stuff like this basically means high budget games will become always live services with intrusive checks and lots of streamed encrypted content etc. starting next year or so.
A tragic loss of consumer surplus and incredibly inefficient in terms of resources, bandwidth and people’s time.
It’s sad but it seems inevitable at this stage.
Wouldn't that mean that the assets can be downloaded and with AI, one can piece all pieces together and make your own copy that works offline?
Existing streaming services (like NVIDIA GeForce NOW) just deliver video back to the client, so if companies become worried about this in the age of AI that's what'd they'd move towards.
And they are crap because of the lag and shitty video quality for 95% of the people
Not quite. Roughly 60% of people live in a city, and let's say 50% of them live in a city with an IPX (Internet exchange) nearby. That gives us a back of the envelope of 2 billion people. Roughly 20% of the people could have it good and the other 80%, not 95% of the people, at worst. Adjusting the numbers up a bit and assuming actual investment in it, what percentage of people would it take for you to find it acceptable?
Even with very low latency, the input delay is unacceptable for anything other than casual gaming. FPS games are by far the worst type for this.
The amount of actual gaming done via streaming versus local rendering says otherwise though, because we already have the options available. Multiple have shuttered because they were economically infeasible as no one used them. There's a reason most of us still game locally, and that seems very unlikely to change for mostly technical reasons.
Even in your optimal scenario adding another 20-40ms (or more) on top of already existent engine input lag, for most of us this means only a fairly basic game with minimal input is acceptable. On top of that, you're asking us to endure compression effects that are readily apparent.
There are lots of ways to ensure that assets are only valid for a certain period with important logic living in the server :(
Heck, a while back I was wondering if, instead of Moonlight / Sunshine style video streaming, you could stream geometry or some sort of intermediate representation and let the client GPU do some of the final shading / rendering (the idea was that you might be able to recover some frame latency and maybe even do some local reprojection like they do in VR headsets to improve controller responsiveness etc.)
That's probably a trick that somebody at the big gaming companies is going to start looking at.
Before desktop UI was drawn on the GPU, the best remote admin tools did exactly that and it was glorious. If you were close enough you could have essentially instant window opening/movement/interactions over 50kbps or less on a 1024x768 32bit resolution
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You can already play WoW in a browser on an unofficial server as an example.
I think the correct answer is that the video games industry will be a little fucked for the foreseeable future.
Not just the games industry. I think most art is going to be upset in some way or another.
Yeah, live service games are having their backend services emulated and made self-hostable. The future is going to be streamed games. Google may be digging stadia out of the trash soon.
Why would they do that? They shut down Stadia because they wanted all those GPUs so GCP could rent them out to higher paying, less annoying customers.
I'm no conspiracy theorist - but considering GPU and storage prices, I wonder if this is the end game. Nvidia has all but abandoned the consumer gaming market. If the AI bubble does pop, it remains to be seen if the manufacturing capacity will then go back to consumer hardware.
If AI gets good enough eventually it'll be able to reverse engineer whole games from video recordings. Worst case scenario, you hook it up to the game and have it fill in any missing gaps of its video-based implementation.
The people who love video games will keep doing it and the market will adapt. Maybe it'll cause a revival of arcades or interactive theater experiences. Maybe some games will only be playable from gaming cafes with special hardware requirements, in order to guarantee there's no cheating.
there is already enough high quality games to last couple of lifetimes.
Do you think people are going to buy it? All the money in the world didn't make people buy Stadia.
I guess if there is no other way of playing good games, but I find that hard to believe.
Stadia is an inferior experience, until it becomes the only experience, at which point your choice is Stadia or nothing. Do you really think people are going to choose nothing?
I'd bet more on Steam adding nextlevel anticheat, mandatory live service components. Or AAA games no longer being a thing, just like AAA albums are not a thing.
I find it hard to imagine a world of choice between what everyone hates or nothing. That's not how gaming ever worked, or how a (relatively) free market works.
Even Steam monopoly is only possible because people always genuinely loved Steam.
ChatGPT, when was GTA V cracked.
- Grand Theft Auto V (GTA 5) for PC was cracked in April 2015, launching almost immediately—on the same day as the official PC release—by the Chinese cracking group 3DM (version 1.24)
kind of a different thing entirely to have it live-streaming on the web with no download required and no need to use sketchy software locally on your computer
While GTA V has aged well, it is a decade+ old game. If someone can get GTA VI running well on the browser even with LLMs it will be an incredible achievement.
It was coming anyways, hardware is too expensive the next consoles would be $1k+
Everything will be streamed and locked behind subscriptions, as god intended
Current consoles are already >$1k
Wouldn’t be the first time mortals accused other mortals of playing god.
I don’t think this is necessarily true.
Pirated games have always existed. Pirated versions of GTA 5 have been around for years.
Like GabeN said…piracy is a service issue not a price issue.
"article" it's just copy pasted Claude output lol
Saved the rest of us having to read it
If a living being didn't write it. It's not worth reading
How living does this being have to be in order for it to be worth reading? If a dissected mouse brain was used instead of a silicon GPU, does that make it worth reading? What if it's a cat or a dolphin?
They're living beings
A pile of algebra isn't alive
You have a shockingly high opinion of humans, lol
Not necessarily. If you have the view that humans can be incredibly lazy then someone going through the effort to research and write an article such as this would be reason enough to read it.
Does copyright law no longer exist?
It absolutely does, and will be used and enforced by those who want to protect their IP. Within the existing frameworks.
Let's no go down the rabbit hole of "since it's easier now, we need new laws..." to make new laws and regulations about what AI coding can and can't do when the existing copyright laws work perfectly well.
edit: Want to decomp/recomp a game and modify it and change it so you have more fun? Go right ahead. Have a blast. Want to then publish that? You don't have the right to republish their materials without permission. If you do, the owner can run the math of how much it damages them to decide if they pursue it. We don't need the AI generator to police that for us.
considering how AI models were/are created, not really, no.
OpenAI/Anthropic et al killed it
Funny ... once upon a time, I can remember the US getting hyperventilated about China and their lack of concern about copyright. I guess, not so much now.
Disclaimer: I'm in neither camp, but just making a note of yet another hypocrisy. I'm into my 17th volume.
Copyright is not really criminal law, so companies have to sue people and it's relatively easy to be anonymous enough on the internet for that threat model, and you can't successfully sue someone if you don't know who they are.
Yeah, piracy is doing better than ever. FMHY shows the entire ecosystem—it's huge: https://fmhy.net/
This will be taken down though if Rockstar tries to because dot coms are not DMCA resistant.
At the end of the day, copyright is trying to constrain information which is not easy on the internet.
ps: For the creator, add your website to https://donatemonero.org
I don't understand how it hasn't been taken down yet.
Not since cell division started.
"possession is nine-tenths of the law"
And it even comes with the GTA-6 map..
Unfortunately the game locked up after about 2 minutes of getting in.
I wonder how many tokens and human steering it took to get this done.
GTA6 leaker promised leaks based on value of his coin. GTA5 cracker wants you to know his Monero.
Given how brazen these things are becoming, are we entering a new era of piracy where people hack, crack, rip and distribute entire franchises for free and get paid anonymously?