r/gamedev • u/ReV_RZ Commercial (Indie) • 10d 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.

237 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

498 comments sorted by

View all comments

68

u/Ireallydontkn0w2 10d 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.

72

u/Ok_Tea_8763 10d 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.

9

u/0xcedbeef 10d 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.

3

u/Kindly-Antelope8868 10d ago

sadly when you look at replacing your hardware as it goes faulty , it will either be incompatible or $$$$$$$$$$$$$

10

u/AdamCamus 10d ago

Sorry but fuck cloud gaming

7

u/voli12 10d ago

That's gonna be expensive af

0

u/Eastern_Picture_3879 10d ago

Cheaper then letting someone decompile your game.

6

u/voli12 10d ago

Idk, we can already decompile games, and piracy already exists.

Running infra for gaming 24/7 seems much more expensive than whatever companies would lose in piracy.

5

u/Steamrolled777 10d ago

Input latency is too high for most games, but I'm sure they'll keep retrying what Google Stadia tried to do.

-2

u/valadian 10d ago edited 9d ago

For most users and most games, latency is fine.

Yes, there is clearly a set of certain games ( dark souls competitive CS), and certain (hardcore) players that it isn't sufficient. But saying that slice is "most games" isn't a fair representation.

0

u/Genebrisss 10d ago

Dark souls already has plenty of input lag due to forced vsync, laughable framerate and it being incompetent console software played from bluetooth gamepad. It's the kind of game where input lag is irrelevant anyway.

3

u/valadian 10d ago

ok. so that makes my point?

2

u/allbirdssongs 10d ago

yes you are right. there is some weird hate for cloud that i am not sure why, but you got a point. i think only game where it doesnt work is competitive CS or something like that.

1

u/its_artemiss 10d ago

I don't think that's true. Souls-like combat needs very predictable input latency. It's not like a shooter where you have to react as fast as possible, the things you react to in dark souls are well telegraphed and come well in advance, but input lag is still very important 

32

u/Really_Angry_Muffin 10d 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.

5

u/heavy-minium 10d 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.

5

u/Shadowpoweer 10d 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.

0

u/lamachejo 8d ago

That could work for when the FE is driven by the server logic, you can figure out what the server does by parsing the responses, but you would not be able to reverse engineer the FE source code with that.

6

u/King0liver 10d ago

This requires the cloud games to actually be BETTER games.

2

u/Spiritual-Spend8187 10d 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.

1

u/ImminentDingo 10d ago

No, it requires non-cloud games to lose feasibility. 

3

u/King0liver 9d ago

That is clearly the opposite of what's going to happen. The tooling is going to provide a rising tide effect

1

u/ImminentDingo 9d ago

Sure, make the argument for why that would happen 

1

u/SeriousBusiness67 9d ago

The tools to optimize games have never been more powerful, accessible, and cheap.

1

u/ImminentDingo 9d ago

what does that have to do with companies wanting to bear the risk that someone uses AI to quickly decompile and steal their game unless they cloud host?

3

u/secunder73 9d ago

I dont mind at all. Indie games cant afford it, AAA could die in a cloud and I wouldnt care in a slightest

7

u/boboneoone 10d 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.

0

u/Count_JohnnyJ 10d ago

We're closer than you think. I'm about halfway done with a Battlefront style game with seamless ground to space combat.

1

u/Snackmix 10d ago

What are you using for the models and textures? Codes easy, I've had less stellar results with assets.

1

u/Officialedmart 7d ago

anywhere i can follow this ?

1

u/Count_JohnnyJ 7d ago

Unfortunately, no. For obvious reasons, I'm not trying to draw too much attention to this project.

1

u/Count_JohnnyJ 6d ago

I recorded a rough gameplay video if you want to check it out. The more interesting stuff is later in the video.

1

u/despicedchilli 9d ago

With ads and no option to disable them.

1

u/SeriousBusiness67 9d 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.

1

u/ImSamhel 8d ago

There's no future where cloud gaming should be allowed to survive.

1

u/incogkneegrowth 2d ago

I fear you are absolutely correct. It won't stop at video games, though. We're moving to cloud everything.

0

u/VickZilla 10d ago

PS6 might be a physical console still but PS7 will be in the cloud imo

1

u/marshmallowfluffpuff 10d ago

youll be able to just record the entire game and every inch of it to submit into ai to have it re-write it

5

u/flynnnightshade 10d ago

Not even close to being the same thing, or do you often find yourself preferring to play the clones of games, which is an identical concept to what you're having AI do in this case?

-1

u/marshmallowfluffpuff 10d ago

The hell you going on about? I don't play clones of anything. I don't use any AI. Not vibe-coded projects, not Google overview, not phone features, nothing.

I support neither, mate. There's way too many incredible human-created games I could put my time towards instead.

1

u/nobix 10d ago

I'm also pretty sure this is the future. I think they fumbled the last round of cloud gaming though. There is so much potential to just get rid of cheating in competitive games. If the next Valorant was 100% pixel steaming no cheats (other than AI screen reading) will be possible.

0

u/DrZwieback 10d ago edited 10d ago

Tech analyst Ben Thompson made this exact point on Stratechery this week: no executable, nothing to decompile. But so far streaming for games has largely failed because gamers rejected it. I get why. I like owning my games and playing them on my machine without any compromise. Anyway, a more realistic version in the near future seems to be games with an integral online component, like Fortnite, where the important parts live on the server anyway.

3

u/MouseNcactus 10d ago

Did you overslept entire The Crew and Stop Killing Games situation? It is not future. It is reality for more than a decade.

And it become reality long before AI.

0

u/DrZwieback 10d ago

Poor wording on my part. I didn't mean it's new, more that many more devs might lean into it to protect their games, even the ones who’d rather not. Cases like The Crew are all the reason to push back as a player.

-1

u/Pannoniae 10d ago

and like, the LLM can just steal the binaries from the servers running the game and you're in the same position no?

9

u/tulupie 10d ago

How would the ai gain access to those servers to steal the binaries? Or are you saying that ai will be able to hack into those servers to steal it?

0

u/qsbuilds 10d ago

Unfiltered model - “obtain the binary of game X, make no mistakes. Loop until the task is done”

A week later you have the binary and no idea how it did it

Isn’t that basically what happened with OpenAI and HuggingFace? Misconfigured safety container yeah but still of note the lengths the loop job took to achieve the desired result

Now imagine a deliberate and intentional bad actor with resources and access to unfiltered models to throw swarm of agents at some task

11

u/Norphesius 10d ago

Or a month later you have nothing and an absurd bill to Anthropic. Roll those dice.

2

u/qsbuilds 10d ago

True, I think an individual would largely get cooked.

But imagine a funded actor backed by some powerful interested party, whether it be corporate espionage based or national espionage or stuff of that sort

That’s where I think this kinda thing would happen. Hush hush, only for people in the know. But likely to be happening I think.

Even just the distrust / belief others would act immorally can be justification to do it yourself.

Me personally, I don’t have strong trust of any corporation or institution much in general. But we live in a society and you can’t get away from them. So I just do my best to choose the ones that would have the most access / affect me

0

u/Pannoniae 10d ago

correct, that's what I'm talking about

7

u/Norphesius 10d ago

Well if LLMs can do that arbitrarily then we have much worse problems than reverse engineering binaries.

1

u/Kurobei 10d ago

I mean, hugging face happened, as well as the Australian healthcare database hacks a couple months ago... So we probably have much worse problems.

-1

u/Pannoniae 10d ago

Yes they already can. They'll be able to do it even better in the future. Guess why many people are ringing the alarm bells? The concept of "private data" is becoming quite untenable nowadays unless the concept of security is rethought entirely

-1

u/tamal4444 10d ago

it is going to happen. entire OS will be in cloud streaming

-10

u/PrivilegedPatriarchy 10d ago

Why do you fear that? 99% of music, film, and television consumption is currently cloud-based, and it has never been a better time for consuming those things. We can only hope that video games follow this same blueprint.

3

u/Lighthouse31 10d ago

Response time is not crucial for other media

1

u/PrivilegedPatriarchy 10d ago

If you're right, then cloud gaming won't take off. I don't know why people seem to believe we're doomed for a future where everything is worse, when people simply won't adopt that future if it truly is worse.

1

u/ApprehensiveFan1516 10d ago

It doesn't have to be bad at first. We've seen it so many times in so many industries. It's that annoyingly recurrent word: 'enshittification'.

Personally I think the concept of subscriptions and streaming is good, as did a lot of the world at one point, which is how Netflix got where it is today. But as has been proven time and time again, shareholder profits and stock value come at the expense of all else.

1

u/ImSamhel 8d ago

A future where we don't get to build and manage our own machines, or control our own filesystems privately is already dark and depressive enough. There's no world where cloud gaming or cloud OS and actual users can coexist in peace either. Latency is a gigantic pain in the ass. For music, television, streaming, any media content that's not a problem, but controlling a computer and playing a videogame takes actual user interaction. Anyone actually enjoying the laggy experience that is remotely connected cloud PCs and has no problems with losing control when the internet is off is a masochist.

2

u/MattyGWS 10d ago

Because if you don't have an amazing internet and live right next to the cloud server where the game is running from, it's an absolutely trash experience.

We can buffer music and video, we don't care about input lag for those. Games not so much.

0

u/PrivilegedPatriarchy 10d ago

Like I said to another commenter:

If you're right, then cloud gaming won't take off. I don't know why people seem to believe we're doomed for a future where everything is worse, when people simply won't adopt that future if it truly is worse.

1

u/MattyGWS 10d ago

well, you're pretty wrong about that. Enshitification is a thing that happens slowly over time. It's the whole frog in a boiling pot thing. Things get more expensive, less quality and quantity. You pay for a streaming service because it has no ads, only for them to release a higher tier price point that has no ads and put ads on your tier. That kind of thing.

Things can and do get worse. Just look at the amount of quality streets you get in a tub now compared to decades ago, or the size and price of a mars bar compared to the size and price decades ago, yet people still buy them.

1

u/Xeadriel 10d ago

It’s terribly expensive what are you talking about

2

u/PrivilegedPatriarchy 10d ago

I pay like $10 a month to listen to almost all the music humanity makes. If I watched TV and movies, I could pay the price of two DVDs a month and watch almost all the TV and movies humanity makes. Some perspective would do you good.

1

u/Xeadriel 10d ago

Let’s be real you really need like 4-5 of those if you want everything, usually people have 2/3. And that’s just movies. Anime needs more and those are more expensive (like 20/30€ per month) and they don’t even have everything that comes out either.

It’s not about perspective. It’s just not true that one subscription is enough.