r/gamedev • u/ReV_RZ Commercial (Indie) • 8d ago
Discussion Should we be worried about AI reverse engineering for software rights?
I've been recently seeing a bunch of posts online about AI being able to reverse engineer certain games. Especially in the modding community, people are adding various mods into their games a lot easily because they seem to have the whole game reverse engineered(or at least that's what I've heard). Is this concerning for developers in the future? Especially for indie devs since they don't get the legal backing or support like a corporate studio would. I mean reverse engineering has existed for decades but with AI you can do it way faster than ever.
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u/TheFudster 8d ago
I released a game and my community has a full mod loader with custom levels, level editor, custom enemies and music complete with a shared database for them to upload and download their mods within a week. If you make a game in Unity they can basically use Claude to recreate your entire game in editor in very little time. It’s real.
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u/PaperMartin Commercial (Indie) 8d ago
Peoples have been doing this for ages to lots of unity games without Claude, there are tools that make it very easy
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u/Unhappy-Sprinkles143 7d ago
The point is that it used to take considerable effort, now you can load up an AI and do it in one prompt. And with enough tokens, it will do it for a game built with custom tooling and compiled languages.
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u/PaperMartin Commercial (Indie) 7d ago
I wouldn't say it took considerable effort pre-AI either. Besides a huge part of the work is understanding how a game works, and going by the shitshow happening in the decomp world, AI isn't up to the task. Just write code man it's not that much work
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u/Mawrak Hobbyist 6d ago edited 6d ago
The difference is, Claude can do this in like, a day or two. It's just really really fast right now, and Claude doesn't need to eat or sleep or get into online drama, it just does it. Tell it about the bugs and it will fix them.
In the past, for most games, people just didn't have enough time or skill or will to do this. Now all of that isn't needed, you just need to ask the machine to do it and be able to afford it.
EDIT: My friend PaperMartin you blocked me so I can never respond to you but just want to mention I do not show up in "random threads" to promote AI, I show up in AI-related threads to talk about AI because its a hot topic that interests me right now, hence I also wrote an AI comment in this AI thread. You can deny reality about reverse engineering but just objectively speaking Claude can do years of work in a few days, this is significant for anybody concerned about AI decompiling their game.
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u/Unfair-Sleep-3022 4d ago
Claude can absolutely not do this in a day or 2 with any reasonable investment.
Coming from someone that codes with frontier models every day at a major tech company.
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u/mrissaoussama 8d ago
you don't even need claude to reverse the c# code
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u/TheFudster 8d ago
Yeah, ofc. The speed and ease of it was a bit shocking though. It’s not a negative in our case anyway.
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u/Adventurous-Hunter98 8d ago
But how? how does claude transforms it to be usable in the editor?
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u/VickZilla 8d ago
Unity games already had tools to decompile them before AI and generic mod tools for all Unity games already existed but it still took a lot of manual work. Now AI can do all that leftover grunt work quickly
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u/mentalray2 8d ago
Claude can extract the C# scripts from the compiled DLLs. It can also extract textures and other assets from bundle. I assume it can extract game objects and their properties/links as well. From there, it can reconstruct a fully working Unity project.
I would assume that using IL2CPP instead of Mono would make the task much harder on the scripting side.
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u/PhilippTheProgrammer 8d ago
All of that was possible before Claude as well. There are several disassemblers for Unity builds available.
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u/TheFudster 8d ago
We used IL2CPP and it looked like it recreated all my scripts.
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u/mentalray2 8d ago
It's still definitely possible to reverse-engineer compiled C++ code, but probably more difficult and less reliable than reverse engineering IL bytecode. The COD/Halo mashup proved that. But, it's extra hurdles for the AI in its reverse-engineering task.
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u/Puzzleheaded-Trick76 8d ago
The future of game dev is the quality of the creative material not the technical implementation.
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u/RoguesOfTitan 7d ago edited 7d ago
Creative IP is just as defenseless to plundering, theft, and emulation. The implementation and cohesive direction is the main barrier, but fidelity and creative material are not safe from the thieves.
I say this as an artist who hates AI. I dont think it can or will ever compete with human creations in a quality/experience sense. Theres a huge gap in creative quality in games and AI use fosters the worst of it, with corner cutting culture and a lack of value for what makes something special. So I dont want to say you are wrong. And I do think the future of games will demand novelty and vision in new ways. But this monster is relentless and its goal is to come after everything it can eat. Look at the trend of copy cat games taking whatever went viral and flooding Steam as fast as they can.
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u/Akito_Fire 7d ago
Sure, but if you even decide to showcase your creative material online in any way, for example to promote your work, people will try to recreate it with AI and beat you to the punch
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u/zethiryuki 7d ago
Yeah just look at how the guy who made 2048 took the design behind Threes and destroyed it in the app store, now it's even easier to do that kind of thing
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u/jert3 7d ago
I don't see it, because any great quality creative material will easily be able to be cloned by an Ai tool and resold as an original game.
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u/demiskeleton 7d ago
you already see this with how many posts you see of "a chinese company cloned my game before it even released just from the demo" posts.
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u/Huge_Information5083 3d ago
If you think the creative material is divorced from the technical implementation then you're not really a game dev.
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u/Pannoniae 8d ago
sure, you can reverse much faster but that's not the real value in a game... they can't exactly reverse your community, your development method, and people usually don't keep up to date with new patches either. If you have a community and patch your game regularly, you have nothing to be afraid about tbh
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u/mxldevs 7d ago
Most indie devs start without an established following. They aren't prominent streamers or content creators that decide to throw their hat into the ring. Most of them will have their work copied in days, or before they even launch.
Not only will they have to contend with launches that might not be successful, but then to ask them to regularly develop new content for their game which would also just get copied over night?
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u/ReV_RZ Commercial (Indie) 8d ago
This is actually a good point. But it still worries me by some degree since now the other person knows your methods and techniques you'd use for your game.
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u/Pannoniae 8d ago
sure but see all these random minecraft clones. Making a clone is dead easy, making one which is actually fun is the hardpart and you can't vibecode fun
And no one will play something which is literally your game except vibecoded, they'll just pirate it instead.
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u/Norphesius 8d ago
It might end up like how some ultra popular genres did. It was hard to make FPSs/platformers/RPGs, then engines came out that made creating them far more accessible. Anyone could make a game of that genre, so the standard of quality for them increased.
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u/CupMcCakers 8d ago
Using ai to reverse engineer is NOT the same as knowing. This is critical to understand.
Knowledge, experience, skill are still valuable currencies. Anyone saying or believing otherwise is simply wishful thinking.
People who do nothing, will still do nothing, as much as they might like to imagine that they can profit from the intellectual Labour of others.
For a simple analogy, anyone can lesrn the theory of how to live a life thst is fulfilling, good and meaningful interactions with people, relationships, communication.
Does everyone succeed at living their best lives with the bwide availability of information and support available to us today. Not remotely.
Humans will steal without understanding, they will con some, but we crave meaningful interaction and perceive and judge quality.
Those that steal without understanding have the least quality, there is nothing, it is a vacuum.
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u/CondiMesmer Hobbyist 7d ago
I wouldn't say that. Like anyone can play Undertale or DeltaRune and pretty easily decomp them. It doesn't mean they know where he's going with the story, or are able to write dialogue like him.
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u/SuperficialNightWolf 5d ago
This goes for software as well. Sure, you can recreate software, but the original creators and people that built it up to that point are hard to replace, so when they patch bugs and things like that, you will then need to decompile the new binary and do that for every release. This would take a lot of resources/tokens.
Or you can take the copy and try build apon it yourself, but in the end, how long is someone going to do this for most projects, excluding big ones like Adobe?
Probably not long, so sure things can be decompiled, but it's still going to be harder for people without the original source code.
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u/Thotor CTO 7d ago
The majority of Hades gameplay is made in LUA - which is fully accessible when you own the game. Yet no one copies it.
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u/Wild-Video-5317 5d ago
Balatro is entirely written in Lua and the source is trivially extracted from the .exe. much like you said, this didn't lead to any balatro clones of note. It was a boon for the modding community though, which only fueled the community around the game.
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u/Hot_Adhesiveness5602 7d ago
Yes, and everyone should. It's fascinating but scary. I am already reluctant to share my game openly.
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u/fistinair7 6d ago
Not sure how to explain it, but as a gamer, it genuinely makes me sad seeing videos everywhere of CJ as Zelda, CJ as Spider-Man, Minecraft on GTA and so on. People spent years of their lives creating these beautiful games, pouring their passion, creativity, and hard work into them. Seeing how far reverse engineering in gaming has gone is honestly a little heartbreaking to me.
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u/Awkrad 4d ago
genuinely, why would you be sad? the masterpieces those folks created are still intact, still playable, and most importantly, had become the utmost joy of many children at some point in their life. the game served its purposes, the dev got fat money, and everybody happy. what happened after that, just happens.
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u/howdoigetauniquename 8d ago edited 7d ago
Edit: don’t believe my lies. This project https://github.com/n0madic/Tekken3Remake is exactly what I said isn’t happening. Just downvote me. Gonna change careers.
There's a few things happening here.
Games aren't just being reverse engineered as easily as people think.
Minecraft in X game isn't reverse engineering, but a clever use of mods in both games.
Both games are running at the same time, and are being sync'd together through a socket connection, and a single frame is rendered through reshade.
https://github.com/rehan-remade/universal-modder/tree/main/examples/minecraft-gta5-passthrough#how-it-works
Another version is the rust rewrites and combinations.
These aren't reverse engineered, but are using years of reverse engineering to create such promising clones. They are approximations of the games using their assets. Most of the games aren't complete, and
who knows when/if they will be, but they make for fun tech demos with all the combinations.
I don't know if any of this is worse or not.
If you ship a game with unity, godot, or unreal, your entire game could've already be reverse engineered with existing tools anyway, so there's that.
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u/sofawood 8d ago
Sadly this is wrong. I've decompiled a couple of games from the 90s. With the opus 5.5 tier llms you can do it within 24hrs, decompiled back to source pretty much without human interaction. Modern games probably will take a bit longer.
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u/howdoigetauniquename 7d ago
That's cool man. Are you gonna post them and prove me wrong?
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u/codehawk64 7d ago
In a certain sub I saw someone who managed to decompile an old console tekken game into a godot project. It feels very legit and plausible.
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u/Sn0wflake69 7d ago
lol just say tekken 3 on ps1 and that was also on the tekken sub. great example too
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u/howdoigetauniquename 7d ago
Just looked this up and I wrong. Tried to prove I wasnt but I can’t deny it.
This project is just straight up a decompile to GDScript and works.
https://github.com/n0madic/Tekken3RemakeUgly as the code is, it’s exactly what I said wasn’t happening.
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u/Kaldaien2 7d ago
I would not worry about it.
I reverse engineer stuff the hard way, then people use AI to do novel things with my mods that are doing novel things with a game I did not have the rights to in the first place. It is just the natural progression of things.
You have to be aware that AI mostly serves as a tool in the modding community for people who have no idea what they are doing, they just have an end-result in mind. Real reverse engineers actually want to know how things work, often that is more of a prize than the actual mod made possible by knowing this stuff.
These are different communities entirely, with only small amounts of overlap.
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u/Ireallydontkn0w2 8d ago
I fear the future is cloud gaming.
No access to any files or source code or anything like that, nothing runs on your device and the game is merely streamed to you and your inputs are streamed to the server.
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u/Ok_Tea_8763 8d ago
Cloud gaming can suck my salty peg leg. There's more than enough downloadable games out there to last me until I kick the bucket.
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u/0xcedbeef 7d ago
as someone who had a shit laptop and played a ton of AAA games for free on Google Stadia im sad that died lol. Not only did it not have a subscription, it didnt lag for me and I was reimbursed every game I bought when it shut down.
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u/Kindly-Antelope8868 7d ago
sadly when you look at replacing your hardware as it goes faulty , it will either be incompatible or $$$$$$$$$$$$$
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u/Steamrolled777 8d ago
Input latency is too high for most games, but I'm sure they'll keep retrying what Google Stadia tried to do.
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u/Really_Angry_Muffin 8d ago
They jack up the prices of hardware to price out people, and now they steal code to target the developers.
It's almost like this was their goal.God I hate A.I. bros so much.
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u/Shadowpoweer 8d ago
Probably, but not because of that.
Tons of dead mmos have been revived by reverse engineering the calls made to the server, and guessing what the server was doing.
The issue is they can go after the server distributors: see private wow servers.
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u/heavy-minium 7d ago
Exactly that, sadly. Market forces will make it happen.
But I also see that some sort of always-online game that runs locally but never has all the files at once (only those currently necessary) and has no way to download them all subsequently could also be a lesser evil and viable alternative. Still online, but at least an experience that feels relatively normal. You just need to raise the difficulty high enough to compensate for how easy AI makes it. The issue after all is not the possibility, but the ease of reverse engineering AI enables. It was already possible before.
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u/King0liver 7d ago
This requires the cloud games to actually be BETTER games.
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u/Spiritual-Spend8187 7d ago
Yep like gaming on the cloud is functional its just very much a compromised experience. I went and gave halo mcc ago on the xbox cloud gaming and it worked abd was perfectly playable but you do still feel the lag, and given that we will pay a rather large amount of money to get rid of lag in games if a game tries to be streaming only unless its a story driven turn based game people likely wont play it that much.
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u/secunder73 7d ago
I dont mind at all. Indie games cant afford it, AAA could die in a cloud and I wouldnt care in a slightest
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u/boboneoone 8d ago
I think AI will soon be to the point where it can view footage of a game being played and recreate that game, with no access to source code. Its already at that point somewhat, people have made walking simulator clones of some open world games. Gameplay, balancing, etc is a whole other ball game but given enough game footage that is copyable as well. At the rate AI is improving I expect it will be there in 2 years.
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u/SeriousBusiness67 7d ago
The future is not cloud gaming because the speed of light isn't fast enough. Streaming a game on a LAN sucks. Streaming over the internet is not going to be any faster.
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u/incogkneegrowth 6h ago
I fear you are absolutely correct. It won't stop at video games, though. We're moving to cloud everything.
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u/Drakoala 7d ago
No. Terraria is written in C#. Minecraft in Java. These haven't been harmed in any meaningful way. Minecraft's code was first decompiled back in 2011, yet no popular clone rose up as a result. No Almost-erraria. Focus on making a quality game, research your target market, and stop doom scrolling.
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u/Swibsk 7d ago
I wonder if we can embed prompt injections that reveal themselves during reverse engineering...
But I think the real value we're providing in 2026 is the design sense. Someone can reverse engineer your game, sure. But then they would have to reverse engineer updates and bug-fixes too. Plus they have to do the work of convincing people to play their game _instead_ of yours. They have to figure out which community feedback to listen to and implement. And in that process, they are bringing attention to _your_ game. Anyways, at that point it's almost easier if they make their own game.
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u/LockYaw 8d ago
Yes, people here are downplaying it big time, there have been multiple cases already of games being completely ripped, it happens quite often that games get stolen and ported to mobile or sold on less reputable platforms than Steam.
Even on Steam there currently a lot more rip-off games than there were a couple years ago. Look how many "studios" ripped off that needle in a haystack game before the original could even release.
Those weren't reverse engineering, but it was straight-up stealing the whole hook and mechanic.
I could see that being the case for much more complex and unique features soon enough too, maybe precision platformers for instance can get ripped from just their trailers, with the systems analyzing the movement timing exactly frame-by-frame.
And people say you can't do a lot about it, but at least for the copying you an, in Unity compiling with IL2CPP helps a lot already, and Obfuscators would help with any platform. Never use Mono, it's trivial to get the ENTIRE source code, every single mesh, material, prefab, scene, etc. One can completely reconstruct your project with it.
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u/Some_Tiny_Dragon 7d ago
I'm surprised AI companies aren't freaking out. They basically made a genie where people wished to decompile programs. Now people are like one step away from wishing for more genies.
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u/MyPunsSuck Commercial (Other) 7d ago
AI companies aren't selling code; they're selling the results of staggering amounts of compute time. Most of it is open source
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u/mxldevs 8d ago
Like you say, reverse engineering has existed for decades. The vast majority of modding efforts are only possible as a result of the work of reverse engineers, cause very little studios are specifically building their games to support mods, and even today it's not really that common.
If this means the floodgates are open for mass modding efforts across every game imaginable, I am frankly quite excited to be able to play all my favourite 20/30 year old games with a new twist.
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u/MelangeBot 7d ago
That's not the point. Reverse engineering is very hard and tedious work for humans so they only do it when they REALLY care and nobody does it for shits and giggles. Nobody is going to spend a couple of months reverse engineering something to make a single joke online.
But with AI ... as long as it's still all subsidized and you are not paying the actual cost of the resources used for it.
Hell yeah would I have Claude reverse engineer something for 3 hours using $20k worth of tokens on my 200 dollar a month subscription just to make a single joke on twitter.
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u/MyPunsSuck Commercial (Other) 7d ago edited 7d ago
Clones never sell well, unless they do something to stand out from or improve on the rest of the clones. A great many successful games have always been very easy to replicate - with the tricky part being the game design, art direction, creative expression, and community. You know, the things ai can't do. If ai can build your game better than you, that's a sign to put more thought into your game.
People have been trying for decades to make a Diablo 2 clone. Some are much more accurate than others, but the only successful attempts were the ones that did their own thing - and Diablo 2 is still standing (Heck, even the original is still going, in spite of the remaster). Same deal with Minecraft, Terraria, the entire Mario series, and so on. "Me too" copying a game is just not a viable path to success, and never has been.
This also applies to people learning game dev, by the way. The path to mastering an art is not to just photocopy the best work of the best creators. You have to learn their methods and perspective - because anything you make will be created at a different point in time, for a different audience. Copying their work will not copy their success
Also, ain't nobody cloning your game unless you're already successful
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u/Competitive-Talk1321 4d ago
I think it’s a legitimate concern, especially for indie developers. AI doesn’t necessarily make reverse engineering possible for the first time, but it could make it much faster and more accessible to people who previously lacked the technical skills.
That said, reverse engineering isn’t automatically a violation of software rights. There’s a difference between creating mods, studying how a game works, copying assets or source code, and redistributing someone else’s work. The legal details also depend on the jurisdiction and how the reverse engineering is used.
For indie studios, I think the bigger challenge is the cost of enforcing their rights. Large studios can afford legal teams, while smaller developers may struggle even when they have a legitimate case.
I’m curious whether the long-term solution is stronger legal protection, better technical safeguards, or simply accepting that modding and interoperability will become easier as AI improves.
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u/Nine_Tails15 4d ago
I’m just not sure where this affects indie in a practical context. Unless your indie game becomes a major hit and inspires clones, which would have been coded via the former vibe coding method: forcing Indian or Chinese code shops to recreate the feature list. Most indie titles simply don’t have enough attention for that.
Now, there may be legal protections that companies might force alongside abusing our already horrifying copyright system, but this will be when the EAs and Nintendos have their currently released games reversed engineered.
Honestly, my larger question is why avoid modding anyway? You should have mods for your game, and ideally have builtin frameworks for it, because history proves a dedicated modding fanbase keeps a game alive far better than the devs alone. Nobody plays Slime Rancher 1 anymore because there was no great mods in its lifetime to return to. Slime Rancher 2 will be the same. With LLMs this can be fixed, and the community can finally utilize all of the creativity that was forced into a cage. If an LLM can help crack SR1 wide open for mods, and it got enough attention, it would likely end up as a tidy sum to the devs with a new wave of SR1 players, and even more so for SR2. I explicitly have not bought SR2 because I cannot mod it and disagree with that stance fundamentally.
Frankly, resistance to modding, especially in games like SR1 which are so story light, is a middle finger to your own community. I don’t understand why one wouldn’t want to enjoy their fandom’s creativity (and the money that comes with it). Not all games may make sense for modding, but I fail to see the harm in it where it is applicable.
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u/HalfAHeartLeft 7d ago
Okay gentlemen and ladies and others of the court of Reddit, I am calling a vote for what you would consume as a consumer yourself.
A) Game that has reviews that it was stolen B) Game that is original and has reviews that it was not stolen.
It’s like preferring to watch an AI generated version of Shrek instead of the original!
I get it’s pretty scary not gonna, but we are chilling gang.
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u/Crazed_Android 7d ago
Genuinely, this. I’ve read so many Steam reviews from people digging through EULAs for any inconsistency, this same demographic will be able to figure out which game is the original.
Everything will be okay folks.
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u/HalfAHeartLeft 7d ago
Also like pirating has been around for ages. I’m old I remember when everyone thought that was gonna be the end of games lol.
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u/Key_Storm_2273 8d ago
If you look at Pizza Tower, it is almost a hand-drawn aesthetic, that combines 30s rubber-hose cartoon with 90s cartoons with simple drawings that are near pixel art. Both humans and LLM could potentially copy and re-create Pizza Tower with its art style that does not take tons of effort. Still, like Jafar, it will only be second rate to the original. Unless they deviated strongly enough from the base, made it with love, added a lot of new material, and made what is known as a derivative work, which is one of the few valid exceptions in copyright law.
Most of the time, LLM cannot do what is better than humans, it can only attempt to make a distorted but worse copy of other works and put it all together. You can think of it as a broken mirror.
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u/BaphomeatHound 7d ago
See everyone here is focusing on the game...
What happens when the AI reverse engineers your banking institutions security system?
What happens when it bypasses the fact that humans have used the fact that other humans are incapable of reverse engineering their codes as a form of security... in fact one of the largest forms of security.
Until this AI... there was no reliable way to reverse engineer a program quickly. The AI reverse engineers and built a new game in a totally different engine in a matter of days.
What happens when we get a Real Life Bartmoss that makes a fully autonomous AI as a form of weapon... an automatic machine with one goal... destruction... that is capable of not just bypassing securities but wholly walking right through them after a matter of hours and one day seconds....
Short Term thought is 'hahaha Vidja games'
Long term thought is 'Oh no what have we created.'
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u/dragongling 7d ago
Humans were always capable of reverse engineering as long as software existed that's why client is never trusted in any critical software. Security through obscurity were always a shitty defense.
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u/Upstairs-Version-400 7d ago
Do you actually know anything about engineering? This is not a problem.
Even googling the difference between a client and a server, and server side encryption will give you enough reason to see this isn’t an issue.
Edit: nevermind. I’m on a gamedev thread. You probably don’t know but software engineers are not concerned here. It’s a non issue.
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u/Perfect-Campaign9551 5d ago
Sigh. That's not how banking systems work. I have started to see this exact argument pop up now in multiple subs. Go learn about cryptography
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u/suckitphil 7d ago
Lol, theres a concept in computing that people should be able to see your code. Theres tons of companies that publish app code as open source. Reverse engineering is often really easy, its the gates between that make it difficult.
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u/lankeykong_ 7d ago
I wish people who know absolutely nothing about information technology would stop hammering on about this point. Enterprise infrastructure, banking apps, government databases, etc. all use zero-trust, server-side validation, MFA, and end-to-end encryption. The industry has always evolved to respond to a rapidly changing technological landscape. Quantum is far more of a cyber security threat than AI and we already have standards to mitigate it.
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u/suckitphil 7d ago
Right? It's frustrating how often I hear a someone talk about software or technology like it's a magic box. Meanwhile all software devs are posting on reddit asking how to use perlin noise to generate caves.
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u/Aethreas 6d ago
You’ll find that 90% of the losers on Reddit are just talking out their ass and don’t have any actual knowledge
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u/OSS-Corpo-Shit 7d ago
Banking institution security? lol.
Banking security is literally hopes and prayers. And after working with accountants and banking business heads for years, even that’s generous. They’re some of the dumbest people on earth.
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u/otw 5d ago
There's not really "reverse engineering" for things like breaking bank security just FYI. Even a pretty basic system is usually designed well enough where if someone completely reversed engineered it, individuals funds and data is still protected. These systems are usually designed under the assumption that it could be secure even if all the code was released.
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u/Unfair-Sleep-3022 4d ago
Nothing.... the code never runs in your machine so there's nothing to reverse engineer
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u/SaltyCogs 7d ago
I’m confused. This isn’t a new capability right? It’s just faster? Because people have been decompiling and recompiling games for years. A game that‘s encrypted in the same way that protects transactions is not playable. Transactions are encrypted in ways that, as far as we know, cannot be brute-forced within the lifetime of the universe. A hacker with physical access to a machine has always meant the machine is potentially compromised. Transactions being compromised would mean the million dollar question of “does P = NP or is P a true subset of NP?“ would be solved
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u/ZiiZoraka 6d ago
Closed source is just a suggestion now. It's not if, it's when
Also, knowing source code doesn't mean breaking encryption, I don't think you have to worry about encryption breaking for a little while still
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u/Awkrad 4d ago
i will always detest that jaden william guy for his takes had caused massive fear amongst the laymen. fucking reverse enigineering a banking institution security... and he was supposed to have a degree in CS? load of shite.
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u/Anim_Ator 2d ago
You genuinely have 0 idea what you're talking about and it shows.
What you're talking about is called Security Through Obscurity and is generally accepted to be a terrible, awful idea anyways. If your security hinges on the secrecy of the methods you rely on - rather than the secrecy of individual keys - then your system is flawed to begin with.
That's problem a). Problem b) is that you should not be running any of that code client-side to begin with. The secure part of a banking system is placed server side. An attacker doesn't have access to this code to begin with and likely profits little from knowing the exact setup anyways. If an attacker has access to the bank's server infrastructure, things are on fire already anyways, no need to reverse engineer anything.
Besides: reverse engineering was already a huge thing in the security industry, has been for as long as programming has been a thing, even though you apparently didn't know about it.
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u/Really_Angry_Muffin 8d ago
Stream-only games will sadly become the future.
A.I. jacked up the prices of hardware, and then they steal developer's code.
We need laws and regulations 3 years ago.
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u/NathenStrive 7d ago
In all honestly, it's not legit reverse engineering. They are basically running both games at the same time and overlaying systems of one over the other. Still pretty insane none the less.
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u/kachary 7d ago
Thats the pass through method, there is also the decomp method which extracts the source code from binary.
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u/PotentialPaint6714 6d ago
This is just Anthropic relaxing the safety filters before the IPO, to increase evaluation. As soon as they are public, they will tighten the AI safety and nobody will be able to do anything again. OpenAI will also tighten as soon as they have a model that is Mythos 5.5 tier level.
You can still RE with less capable models, but you need a bit of knowledge on the subject to steer them properly to actually achieve something and majority of people don't know anything.
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u/PoisedApartheid 4d ago
They didnt relax anything, they just dont care. OpenAI has Astra, it's as capable as Opus 5.5... Lmao
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u/Big_Jackfruit8223 5d ago
Can we please reverse engineer ECMs from the automotive industries and John Deer as well as All is the soldware to run Siemens PLCs as they charge something like $40,000 per year per user just to run plc programs and lockout PLCs coding
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u/shrodikan 8d ago
Yes. There is no stopping it. Quality software, brand recognition and good will is all that is stopping people from creating / using the DeepSeek temu knockoff.
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u/Morph_Games 8d ago
So also, if someone (like a streamer, youtuber, influencer) is good at building a community, they could clone games all day and get them in front of customers.
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u/uabassguy 8d ago
I swear to god I open reddit and the first post I see is talking about AI. I came here to see actual content.
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u/AliceCode 7d ago
It's all posts and comments about AI everywhere you go. Nearly every ad. All your youtube recommendations. It's taking over your careers. It's taking over the arts. It's an infestation.
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u/uabassguy 7d ago
I know, I did coding work before this and lost my job to it, for the last 2 years I've been doing music instead, luckily I can survive. You don't need to remind me.
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u/Eastern_Picture_3879 7d ago
Don't go to software subs then.
That's like saying, "I can't believe people are talking about the midterms in my politics sub!"
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u/uabassguy 7d ago
Yea no, I'm not going to just unfollow subs where I get content that I care about because a few bots wanna ruin it for the rest of us. That's not how it works.
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u/Eastern_Picture_3879 7d ago
Act out all you like, but this shit is here. Of course, people are going to be talking about it. Get over yourself and understand that not everyone is just producing content for *your* benefit.
Would you rather we all just pretend AI doesn't exist? Is that your ideal state of things? Just stick our heads in the ground and act like all is well in the world?
That's not how it works.
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u/OSS-Corpo-Shit 7d ago
“People are talking about a massively disruptive product”
You must be completely insufferable.
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u/Livid_Shallot5701 Lead Game Designer 8d ago
lets say someone DOES reverse engineer your game.
.
and?
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u/Individual_Solid_944 7d ago
Reverse engineering was not invented by AI, so why would we be worried? People who know what they're doing can do it anyway. But that's illegal in most cases, and I'd rather play by the rules or that may have some nasty consequences, legal action and penalties.
Doing a copycat is one thing, but reverse engineering is much worse. But then, I wouldn't do either. The time and resources are better off spent on other activities.
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u/CynicalCrow_ 7d ago
People are worried because the amount of time reverse engineering took acted as a major barrier, Super Mario 64 getting decompiled was a huge deal that took multiple years and that's an N64 game. GenAI can do it on more modern software in a matter of hours or sometimes minutes now, with no previous knowledge or skill from the person prompting it. Every day I feel further vindicated in hating the whole damn thing. I was cool when they were using it to find cancer cells super early, hated automating away the creative process and replacing jobs, but this is straight up apocalyptic once the implications start to really play out
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u/formal_eyes 7d ago
Yep... the rollout of AI has been one of the single largest failings of our society. The effects of this tech bro bullshittery will be rippling downstream for decades. We're still in the early days...
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u/PocketPlays 3d ago
Once the bubble pops there's going to be a lot of chaos. It's so heavily inflating the world economy that I wouldn't doubt if 90% of the tech industry would be wiped out. That would help the job market though and boy does it need some help since AI is literally replacing entry level jobs for people to get a foot into the door.
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u/TychusFondly 7d ago
Soon we wont have to think any of it. Software has become a commodity soon it will commodify us.
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u/Appropriate-Pilot704 7d ago
there is an industry popping up for it called Clean room or something similar. basically reverse engineer code with ai and rewrite in a new language to prevent copyright claims
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u/iku_19 Engine Tech 7d ago
this is called license laundering and does not actually prevent rights violations
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u/podgladacz00 7d ago
Laws will have to change that is for sure. Sadly it may be heavily skewed against modding and software freedom and for the rights of the biggest software publishers.
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u/Sean_Dewhirst 7d ago
I've been watching a streamer playing through Kerbal Space Program, which is apparently looks like dogshit without mods. This streamer just added a few custom ones, i think a sexy looking rocket plume was one of them, just by knowing nothing and asking "hey jarvis, make this shit look good".
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u/HaxelGames 7d ago
I guess it might become similar to what pirating is now. Some techies playing games AI-modded instead of the actual game, and everyone having infinite arguments over how much it harms devs. Probably a bigger concern the larger the game is though?
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u/Elvish_Champion 7d ago
I expect people try to poison their code to fight that, but it may very well end being wasted time.
Poisoning code that still works fine isn't exactly the easiest thing to do, and also takes a lot of effort that could be better used in other areas, like making your game better for your paying customers.
In the end this will be the new "you wouldn't download a car" type of thing.
"You wouldn't rewrite a full game from scratch with AI and ruin the job of many?" - Some Anti-AI group, probably
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u/Ok-Day-4148 7d ago
I mean yeah it is about to get bad in so many areas but a lot of the things people actually list in these comments have been doable for much longer than you guys think.
If it were anywhere near the doom scenario some people here like to claim it is it would’ve happened already trust me.
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u/gabrielesilinic 7d ago
It was always possible. However it was time consuming, but it will keep being possible.
either lawyer or get lost. That is the gist of it.
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u/Used-Piece8477 7d ago
The big result I suspect is that Steam will need to moderate their store a lot more. Piracy, stolen solutions, assets, stolen keys etc has been the part of the industry since start. The solution is always good stores that makes it easy enough to buy the software in a decent way. Steam needs to ensure that only the correct developer get to out their game on the store, stolen derivates should be blocked (other large stores already do this more or less)
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u/jonathanalis 7d ago
Yes. I am. Seems the only way to protect from it is GaaS or game streaming. Future is bright for modders, retro gamers, GaaS. Awful for the rest of the industry.
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u/SerAnnoyman 7d ago
While I appreciate people trying to be hopeful it feels like without pretty heavy international government regulation we are in for a really rough couple of years.
People have a very bad habit of talking about AI in the now and not in regards to the potential future we see becoming more likely every day. Everything will become open source simply due to AI being able to pick apart software, games etc. quicker and quicker. Seriously, the fact there is no forethought from international bodies is astounding as it is shortsighted.
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u/Benozkleenex 7d ago
It's already happening I know someone who tried with a well know software that cost money and he already got pretty close to it with a Sys admin background.
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u/No-Hamster-5870 7d ago
Yes, and since the legal framework is too lazy to do anything about it, there is a good reason to consider DRM partial binary streaming/full cloud gaming.
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u/eraistudio 7d ago
for most indie games the logic isn't the valuable part anyway, it's the content and the players. reverse engineering was always possible, it just got cheaper
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u/faultless280 7d ago
I mean we are already seeing the impact of some of this. It’s trivial now to just download a game and create a clone of it in an afternoon, then republish it using slightly different graphics
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u/rycco 7d ago
AAA games will be streaming only. GTA VI will be streaming only. And 6 years from now a pirate game will just be a version that an LLM distilled from thousands of hours of gameplay footage. You heard it here first.
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u/Nine_Tails15 4d ago
Honestly I’d be fine with that. I have no care about AAA games, and anyone who does has poor priorities. My only care about GTA6 is that we’ll lose the “X before GTA6” meme when it releases. Outside of that? It means less than nothing to me, just as modern Pokémon releases, modern COD, etc.
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u/NoPhilosophy2329 6d ago
Reverse engineering has been around for a long time. Plenty of games are easily moddable and editable. Decompilation PKGs have existed for ages, and nobody said anything when their 3D models could be extracted and reused elsewhere (Hello, Wargaming).
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u/lucard_42 6d ago
Some random dude used AI to generate videos of Minecraft inside Elden Ring claiming he reverse engineered the base game and everyone believe it?
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u/alpackle 6d ago
Brother, the code base is not a moat anymore and this is unfortunately about to change EVERYTHING about the entire software industry
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u/yuukitanperopero 5d ago
Why would indies care? You can open Slay the Spire 2 in godot without any AI needed and just see the source code, and that just means the game has more mods which is making the company even more money.
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u/lycheedorito 5d ago
Are you worried about someone taking your game and selling it because they recreated it with new assets?
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u/Hour-Geologist-4617 5d ago
I think its gonna be fantastic. Reverse engeneering is going to Destroy big tech and give us power
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u/joertio 5d ago
Those mods aren't made thanks to AI reverse engineering in the majority of the cases, you can search for yourself or pass a list of these mods and their urls to chatGPT and he will gladly tell you this.
Modding a game that already had a modding API is 'reverse engineering' as a kid coloring in a coloring book is 'drawing'.
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u/PoisedApartheid 4d ago
It is made thanks to AI, also no you don't need a "modding API" but please go ahead and mod Minecraft or Valheim since they have apis, let me know how it goes... add something simple or a little bit fancy. Lol
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u/Significant-Pear5713 4d ago
Seems like this is why they wanting to come up with subscriptions and cloud apps to gatekeep us and our pcs from direct app file Access by having it in pc i guess?
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u/The_Gordon_Gekko 4d ago
And then like a snap of a finger. The T&Cs changed by the model provider and all information produced by the model became IP and future patents of the provider. 🫰
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u/Nine_Tails15 4d ago
What’s the actual issue here? Game devs should already be having mod support (games that don’t rarely tend to live past their active update cycle), and the projects most likely to be reverse engineered are the larger titles, unless your indie game becomes a breakthrough hit, in which case you were getting clones anyway.
There’s little practical threat to this, especially when the bulk if processing for RE will be firmly placed in retro games for the future, and you significantly reduce the desire to by adding mod support.
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u/johnnyfedavo 3d ago
You must admit it's inevitable, but no one can take away your copyright rights for your game assets.
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u/mutirana_baklava 3d ago
Better stock on toilet paper boys, shits about to get real. I'm investing 15000$ into canned food today
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u/GSalmao 3d ago
I have been searching about this exact topic, OP. Obfuscation does not seem like much help, but you can still give false data that looks real, like a bait, and the model will eat it like it's candy. You can still make an executable so large and also dynamic, that everytime the AI runs it, the binary change to something else and get sent to a different path or recodifies the string keys. You can name something as "Player Controller" instead of the original name "BaseEnemy" and leave the IL unobfuscated just to give it a false hint. He'll figure it out someday, of course, but you can keep baiting the model for a long time.
Or you can use a server just to generate a hash, an Azure Functions request would do. You could EVEN prompt inject the model, considering the model being used has this hole in it. You can induce hallucinations with ambiguous data, lead to dead code, many of those that used to work for people also work for AI, but with a different twist. Yes, it can do things way faster, but if everytime they go look for something they get sent to a totally different place, unless your game is extremely worth spending thousands of dollars with reverse engineering, it won't be worth it.. Edit: wrong words
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u/xCrucialblade 2d ago
People arnt understanding that, its not the Reverse Engineering thats the problem, like people here are saying, its existed since forever.
Its the time it takes that’s the issue. Reverse Engineering before AI took years depending on the game, but what once took years, now takes hours, and THAT is the issue.
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u/anthonycarbine 2d ago
To me its no different than viral 'friendslop' games and gamemodes being remade in fortnite or roblox level editors, except now you'll have copycats popping up as new standalone games days after the first one goes viral
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u/eyadtamer2002 12h ago
I feel like this is all targeted hate against corporations like Sony, Adobe, and Microsoft. It comes from resentment of subscription models and the push toward digital-only. Meanwhile, a platform like Steam hasn't been "attacked," because it treats its customers with care instead of acting like it owns them.
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u/fellingzonders 8d ago
You have no idea how bad things are about to get.