alt Hacker NewsOther comments have mentioned it, even in this thread, but I am fairly certain the biggest change this will bring about (very, very sadly) is games and software from big companies being hosted server-side and streaming in content like some video games now do.
This is the future I always wanted, full control over the hardware and software I "bought" but I think we will end up lamenting our moment of empowerment in one way as the time we lost even more agency in the end.
Personal computing is increasingly under threat by government and big corporations, we all need to be vigilant and fight back.
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If AI progress continues on a similar trajectory for even just another six months, we will just be building the games and software ourselves.
When people with no prior experience, including teenagers, can produce a polished game by investing a few hundred hours of their free time to do the creative part, what do we need Ubisoft and co. for?
Games were getting cracked anyway, it doesn't make much difference financially. A lot of games have online content as well which you can't access through this.
I think the large studios who have the willingness and resources to do that are also willing to contribute to the ongoing enshittification of our digital experiences. I think small indie studios will continue to flourish.
The speed of light and the state of the internet doesn't permit many games to be effectively streamed; even great systems like Nvidia's, optimized to within an inch of their lives, feel laggy and weird for a large chunk of users.
It is more likely that we will see a cambrian explosion of games that obviates the need for big company games in the first place. Big gaming companies are big because they need lots of developers, producers, artists, QA, and management and executive suites to manage those. You can even today get code, assets and QA for a tiny fraction of the price you have to pay humans, and that will apparently only get 'worse' for humans over time. It's going to be a very intriguing next few decades.
> This is the future I always wanted
Why would this be the future you want?
If the progression of AI continues, we might actually have LLMs re-create games from scratch just through watching them. They can already createe pretty accurate games from memory, imagine what happens if they get 10x as intelligent and capable.
It's exciting and kind of scary.