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.

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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.

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

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

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.