As a guy who is generally opposed to a lot of AI crap… if it can be turned against those who have turned gaming against the people… I say good. Fuck 'em. Gaming publishers have glazed Microsoft and Nvidia for far too long, and if Mac and Linux users can get native ports of PC and console games, I think that’s fine.
I’d prefer people pretty much stick to games they actually paid for, but I’m also aware of what world I live in. Would I play a vibe-coded Deus Ex port on my Mac? Oh, abso-fucking-lutely! Same with Unreal Tournament. I feel like these nearly 30 year old games shouldn’t be that hard to port. I’ve actually ran Deus Ex on the Mac via Whisky, when that was a thing, and it didn’t work, and I had to make it work by using “Deus Exe” (which modernizes the launching of the game) and a newer renderer (sorry, I forget which one). The same work should work for Unreal Tournament as well, as Deus Ex was based on it (more specifically, the OG Unreal Engine).
If the game companies wanted to profit from this, they could have pulled Microsoft’s […] (self-censoring there) out of their mouths and done the work themselves. Far as I’m concerned, most of these games are functionally abandonware. They aren’t releasing them for modern platforms, so the money lost due to piracy is effectively $0. I mean, even if I wanted to run Windows on my Mac, it wouldn’t work (since they’re all ARM64 these days, and even if Windows for ARM didn’t suck, it wouldn’t run the old x86 games). So publishers abandoned modern computing platforms. I wish games just got ported to work on whatever people use, go with the flow, but if they don’t wanna sell it to me — noting that we’re talking about stuff I’ve already bought — I see no ethical dilemma in downloading it.
As for Nintendo stuff, that’s just exciting. I used to play the shit outta Animal Crossing on the Switch. I think the 3DS one, New Leaf, is actually the better game, and with an emulator, about half of it actually looks better. You look at AC New Leaf running on my MacBook next to AC New Horizons on my Switch, and if you weren’t an Animal Crossing player, I’m not sure you could tell me which is the newer one. New Horizons natively ported to Mac, Linux, and Windows would be an incredible experience, especially if we could play online and do the cheat islands (or just use console commands to spawn the shit we want). And make it so we can get to the other (official) islands (the hippie commune, and the resort archipelago) without a loading screen? Heck yeah. The game could be so much better, and I can’t wait to see how the next one is. Otherwise, I just wanna see a native Mac (/others) port of Zelda 3.
I don’t think it’ll be bad scary though. I mean companies lock down everything by software. It’ll probably not do any harm to us if we decompiled the software on our TVs, cars, games, anticheat, …, smart toasters, and learn how they work.
Companies letting go of 30% of their workforce, security vulnerabilities and all the copyright theft in a top-down way is what worries me. And we get that anyway with AI. So… idk… maybe this is one small upside? We can decompile and AI-wash software, too? (It is part of an ugly, bigger picture, though.)
If anything, this will expedite the mass migration to web apps. For better or worse.
Huh? Your computer literally downloads the html, css and js/wasm of a web app and you can look at it with your eyes and read it.
Oh … you mean serverside?
Well, it doesn’t need to be a web app then. It can be an authoritative server and a regulat old client app (like path of exile for example)
Hoo boy, this is the scariest take of all that I’ve seen so far about this story. This could spell the end of proprietary software on personal computing devices, which would eventually lead to a major threat to personal computing as it currently exists.
In other words, if all proprietary software were to stop releasing versions that we could run on our own devices, the big moneyed interests that currently still promote personal computing (i.e., Microsoft and Apple) would all of a sudden have no reason for doing so. Personal computing hardware manufacturers, who would also have an interest in this, could simply switch to producing server hardware instead. This would leave us with only open source software and hardware for personal computing. From a certain perspective, open source software and hardware sounds like a good result; however, the problem is that it leaves no industry behemoths (read: big money) defending personal computing from future waves of “let’s protect people / the nation from child porn, hackers, and scammers” legislation. Scary scenario for sure.
I can see that happening, and everything getting locked in secure servers that you can only access through the cloud… but there are too many things that need to happen locally, so I don’t see something like game streaming ever replacing playing a game on your device.
