It's always nice to have local git clone backups/mirrors of these projects because they may eventually be taken down through legal threats eg, Yuzu and Ryujinx.
Nice moment to hook the git-maintenance[1] command, which setups automatic pre-fetching of a repository in a scheduled manner. That way you don't need to remember to manually update your mirrors. Since the repo is public, cloning with https is a simpler setup for prefetching, but ssh is also supported with some configuring.
I can also recommend hosting your own Gitea/Forgejo instance, it has an automatic repository mirroring feature that fetches the repo regularly. I use it to mirror some "high-risk" repos.
From the amount of activity and how much this all smells like heavy AI usage, I have zero doubt that something will be working shortly after launch. The agents won’t sleep until it boots.
This project is the first hint I’ve seen of the complete destruction of all copy protection schemes. Scary times for any industry that relies on those!
You are less likely to double dip as a PC player if it’s available in a timely manner. However right now there is a lot of PC players that will buy the console version just because it’s available and there is no announcement for the PC version. And then buy again in a year or so when the PC version comes out with the ability to crank the graphics settings up.
No, to decrypt the game and make it possible to rip you need a current firmware exploit/jailbreak. Until the firmware that GTA 6 requires is jailbroken it won't even be possible to rip it, nevermind emulate it.
This was my initial thought and a sentiment I've seen expressed elsewhere, but I think I'm missing something about how they'd implement this.
Sure, Rockstar can enforce a minimum software revision to launch the game, but couldn't some homebrew software just (a) lie about the software revision to any running game, or (b) apply any relevant software updates minus patching the kernel vuln?
You need to get the game in the first place, which requires a console that’s authorized to download games from PSN.
I don’t know how Sonys attestation works, and how resistant it is; but presumably it’s a bit harder than “lie to the game about what firmware you’re running”.
(GTA VI will famously not have a physical release, so you can’t rip data off the disk.)
A trivial scheme would be to distribute some shared secret key in a new update, and require it to be supplied back on connections to Sony's servers. In order to extract that key in order to replay it from an older firmware, you'd need to have root on the new firmware.
That's not how attestation infrastructures work. Obviously they thought of all that.
Modern hardware attestation is - if implemented correctly - not beatable unless you decap chips and start trying to extract hardware keys. But the silicon itself is often heavily obfuscated and such a feat has not been demonstrated for modern hardware.
All breaks of modern console security rely on finding bugs or mistakes in the implementation. If the PS5 has got serious exploits then either:
1. They will patch it and revoke old firmwares, as the infrastructure lets them do. Then you have to try and find a new exploit in the firmware that GTA6 was released for.
2. It won't be released for PS5 until later. Xbox security has been undefeated for a long time now, so Microsoft might have an advantage there.
So it's not feasible to fiddle with incoming firmware
updates, even with the level of access Relapse gives? I couldn't imagine how such a thing would be implemented. A hypervisor?
Yes all modern console RA systems have a verified boot rooted in hardware that chains to a hypervisor. They also encrypt all code and network traffic, use revokable per-CPU hardware keys, and can tie game releases or updates to revokable firmware versions.
The underlying architectures are quite complex but there are some good tech talks about them online. One of the best is by Tony Chen, which covers Xbox One security. It's many years obsolete now, but even that security system wasn't cracked until long after obsolescence. Microsoft have proven you can build an effectively unbeatable security system for general computing devices even though they only use it for games and multiplayer anti-cheat. It seems Sony might have not reached Microsoft's level.
Maybe AI will speed things up by making it easier to find obscure bugs, but design wise the architectures are sound and can work well.
The way downloading games works on PS5 is your console asks PSN for a ticket using hardware attestation and account tokens, PSN checks if you own the game and gives you the keys. It's not doing attestation on every game start because that would make offline play impossible, and it wouldn't be effective against jailbreaks anyway.
If someone manages to download and decrypt the game on 1 single hacked console then it's out forever. Even if Sony decides to only allow unhacked firmware it's only a matter of time (months not years) before that version gets a jailbreak too because no complex system can be totally secure.
The only way to prevent this is making the game online only. That would be an extreme sales and reputation hit because it's the type of thing people expect from EA games where single player is a side mode. Not Rockstar famous for their incredible story modes that have always been offline.
Then you can see from projects like ReSkate that to successfully pull it off you would need to make the game effectively a thin client, because if you leave any logic on the console it will get reversed even if parts of it are server only.
And running a full game engine millions of times on your servers gets expensive real fast. Take Two can't afford it, and even if they could, the hit to their profits would be way more than what they can lose from the game getting cracked day 1.
Since the PS5 is already x86-64, the main friction point here is likely the proprietary graphics API rather than CPU instruction translation. I wonder if they handle GNM command buffers by pre-compiling them into Vulkan during that static relinking phase or if there is still some runtime interception happening when the game tries to queue those draw calls.
The PS5's 3D audio chip might also present some difficulty to work around, since it's proprietary. I wonder if the 1st party games that feature it have any issues.
AGC (the PS5 version of GNM) is around 80% complete on CPU side and 98% on shader side. Of course this says nothing about bugs or missing edge case behavior but it's still impressive.
I checked the code and it rewrites shaders from RDNA to SPIR-V at runtime. There is a disk cache and it's a binary format so it shouldn't be much slower than vkd3d translating from DXIL.
I always wonder who the folks who build these things are. If they become too popular, it seems like a good way to have the government pay you a visit you will not enjoy. But they also seem like technically interesting problems to solve. Glad someone is out there preserving these games in any case.
A lot of people live in places where the government does not really care to use police to enforce copyright, or where this just isn’t really considered illegal.
The PlayStation platform in general is the easiest console to reverse engineer. There’s a lack of security in depth that makes it easy to reverse engineer.
It’s only recently (earlier this year) that the _last gen_ of xbox was cracked.
They might be technically interesting problems to solve but these days they're just using AI to solve them so they aren't really learning anything about those interesting problems.
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.
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
Perhaps, but I doubt it. The immersiveness and suspention 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.
These two concerns weren't really noticeable when I played games on Stadia. That isn't to say you wouldn't notice them, but I certainly didn't.
I'd guess maybe 90% of gamers probably wouldn't either. And those negatives are somewhat balanced by the positives that cloud-streamed games enables: no disk space management (minor) and no cheaters (huge!).
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
funny, the thing that stands out to me is how some open source voice models are farrr better than anything I’ve seen on ChatGPT or Elevenlabs or videos or spam calls, but everyone seems to just plug into those services
the voice models are small too so it’s just a matter of time until someone is intentional enough sending that payload down in a download
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
GTA 6 is releasing on PS5 right?
Who is going to pay a single cent for software if everything can be ripped day 1?
Countries with a huge stake in the software industry are going to get crushed?
False, myth. This is a common claim pushed by MPAA/RIAA (the copyright police for music and film industry).
Consumers want _access_ to their games/content. For example, netflix made it easy to "rent" or stream content. But as they slowly clawback those features (multi-streaming, password sharing, incorporate ads, increase prices beyond inflation). Then access to content decreases, visibility decreases.
Piracy is a service problem! If they release a good PC port, I will buy it, as I have done for nearly every other Rockstar game. Hell, if they were to even just automate the port using a similar tool, I wouldn't really mind if the end result were indistinguishable from a decent PC port. I just really don't want to buy a PS5 for a couple exclusives.
To decrypt the game and make it possible to rip you need a current firmware exploit/jailbreak. Until the firmware that GTA 6 requires is jailbroken it won't be possible to rip it
> Who is going to pay a single cent for software if everything can be ripped day 1?
Billions of people pay dozen if not hundreds of dollars per months for movies, tv shows, etc. that are available for free via torrent on day 1, or even earlier sometimes.
Unfortunately, this is only going to push Sony/Nintendo/MS more towards cloud gaming. AI enabling these amazing reverse engineering efforts and democratizing access to gaming is amazing, and preventing vendor lock in is always something I'll support. However it's hard not to see them pushing gamers towards needing to play games on cloud only, preventing these kind of things happening.
Is there any analysis of the profitability on this? They made such a drastic cut to availability it seems like: Microsoft wants out of the cloud streaming entirely, they are burning money, or they are so hardware strapped they would steal form the gaming division to feed the Copilot usage.
Well Microsoft always seems to be making the wrong decision at the wrong time and this is probably yet another one. Probably due to competing factions hat don't really have a unifying vision for the company. It provides enormous amounts of comedy and I guess we will find out if this was another instance of "whoops we closed down that thing we could really use right now"! :)
This continues to be an absolute no-go for competitive real-time games due to input latency. I honestly think there's a chance that game clients might go the way of the recording industry, and they just might not be worth that much.
As doubtful as I am about the viability of cloud streaming, this IS going to cause a bigger push into live service functionality where maybe you have a light client but the server is authoritative over more and more aspects of the game. Even then, AI can write its own server, so it needs to be full of FOMO if you're not on the official server.
Cloud game streaming has gotten to be extremely impressive, at least on a wired connection, to the point where it’s almost hard to tell you’re streaming. It’s been hard for me to consider upgrading my old gaming PC considering how good GeForce Now is for the $20 a month that I spend.
I didn’t say only on a wired connection. All of my experiences streaming wirelessly have also been great. I’m just not willing to make the same level of claim when I’ve probably spent less than ten hours streaming on WiFi and hundreds on a wired connection.
I can't tell if this is what they're talking about, but I frequently stream from my desktop to a SteamOS handheld on my home network, and on pretty much any game that I can max out on my desktop's specs (Radeon 6900 XT, so not exactly the newest GPU, but it's able to do quite a bit), I can get 120 FPS on the handheld without much noticeable input lag.
I don't have any reason to believe this would translate into a good cloud gaming experience though, because it mostly seems to have become viable from local wifi just getting a lot better in recent years. I would expect the latency to still be pretty high for a remote server, and it's possible that the streaming server I use is just able to "correct" things more easily for a local connection in a way that a fully remote connection might not be able to.
I’m talking about cloud streaming though I used to do local streaming through steam and remote streaming through parsec. GeForce now in my experience has worked better than either of those options running on my own hardware regardless of the hardware being local occasionally.
As someone who used to upgrade their GPU every year to the newest top card I find it to be indistinguishable from local hardware 95%+ of the time. It’s fairly mind blowing how well it works. Also just to clarify again I pay for the ultimate or whatever the highest tier of GeForce now is for like $20/month and use it primarily on a wired connection so that’s where my experience comes from. With their service you still need to pay for and own the games (though it also connects to Xbox game pass) so you’re only paying for the streaming. It’s also not something that depends on developers allowing it to be on the service so not every game is on there but the catalogue is quite large. I play on a 3440x1440p ultrawide at 100hz and I believe the ultimate sub supports up to 4k@120hz
I subscribe to XBox Game Pass and used to subscribe to Geforce Now too. They're both really great for me as more of a casual gamer, but at the competitive level in the fighting game genre, it's totally insane and people will notice a sub-100ms lag in their inputs because they're sort of pushing the limits of human reaction time.
I don't even know if a smaller company like Nintendo can pull something like that off. They have been behind so much in the tech space because their primary differentiating factor is their IP. Their lawyers are going to be working non stop until they figure something out. I guess have a strategic partner?
I'm not sure I'd totally agree with this characterization. They've certainly been behind in tech that's like "stuff the most FPS and fanciest graphics into this small box as possible", but I'd argue they've been pretty much the only one playing in the "make a good experience for most users without configuration with relatively cheap local hardware" up until relatively recently (SteamOS certainly has made some inroads, but I've yet to see anything particularly impressive in terms of an Xbox handheld, and Sony has basically given up it since the Vita). I don't think either of these broad technical areas are particularly aligned with making cloud streaming viable for gaming, but if I had to pick one side, I'm not sure I'd pick the side that's invested way more into expensive hardware on the local side rather than figuring out how to make the constraints of lower power go further.
You make a very valid point but it really sounds like you are describing whether a company provides immense value to their customers whereas I am describing: are they up to date technically?
Nintendo is excellent at providing that value using low tech. They managed to make a compelling product using cardboard and sell it for 80$. They are the masters at providing good experiences with relatively cheap local hardware.
I think this is only true if you assume the classic server model where the remote rendering streaming is overhead and not colocated with the game server itself.
It'll happen regardless, as of now the public internet infrastructure still isn't fast enough to be comparable to local rendering, cloud gaming needs to deliver >50mbps bandwidth at sub 16ms latency.
Unfortunately, I don't know if you've tried cloud gaming. It's just not very good now. Also to force people to use it given the current cost climate for components, it would be extremely expensive.
Steam is larger than any single console now a days, has a DRM which can be trivially bypassed, and still does excellently. The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.
In general dubious binaries aren't really a problem, because releases tend to be done by people or groups with reputations. Lots of people are ideologically or technologically motivated to release stuff and have been doing so for many years.
And now a days in the age of Denuvo and things like this, cracked binaries are sometimes even 'cleaner' than the official releases.
I don't think most of the Denuvo cracks actually remove the virtualized code from the executable. Not feasible without extensive binary rewriter tooling (that, while being sloppable, still takes a lot of time to slop).
Interesting yeah you're right. Looking it up it seems that only 2 of the Denuvo cracks have completely removed Denuvo - oddly enough Assassin's Creed games both times. Usually they just use various tricks to fool the authentication, but leave the performance degradation and other issues of Denuvo.
It'll be interesting to see if LLMs do increase the rate of completely cleans.
I can't edit this post anymore but if you wanna read a bunch of stuff on the topic https://k0mkc.hatenablog.com/ is a nice blog. All in Japanese, but it should be perfectly translatable.
> the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer
Is that antiquated? PC gaming requires either (1) some technical knowledge to assemble a computer on par with modern consoles without breaking the bank, (2) spending more than $1000 to buy a complete computer on par with modern consoles, or (3) settling for worse performance to buy a system that costs the same as a console.
Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses, and they have much better economies of scale than most PC builders. See: Steam Machine.
Console hardware has not been significantly subsidized since the PS3 era. From the PS4 on they all swapped to lightly modified retail hardware that's sold for profit. PS4 and PS5 both ended up profitable on the hardware alone less than a year after launch.
Power-wise Steam Deck isn't on par with current gen consoles nor even last gen consoles. It can play plenty of games, but we've reached a point that it can't run most new AAA games at an acceptable level of performance regardless of settings. With a console you can buy pretty much any game and assume that it will run at a playable frame rate (though there are of course exceptions).
Doesn't "last gen consoles" include the original Nintendo Switch? That thing was underpowered when it came out, let alone compared to a Steam Deck. Also, PS4/5 and friends are not handhelds.
I was specifically referring to PS4 and Xbox One. Power-wise Nintendo platforms since Wii are essentially (at least) one generation behind the other consoles, and generally speaking Nintendo platforms have their own games rather than relying on big multiplats, outside of indie games.
And it doesn't have to be on-par. Show me a gameplay enhancement that the current gen hardware has enabled - something that just wasn't possible on previous gen hardware.
Well, PS5 has an incredible audio processing chip that can actually use GPU geometry directly - and it does its own equivalent of audio raytracing to model accurate behaviour of audio inside whatever room you're in, based on geometry and material properties. It's extremely cool and works pretty well, but unless you're an audio geek you won't notice.
And actually, the "what has this hardware enabled" works kinda backwards. I work in video games and every single design that we come up with usually hits the wall of "oh that's cool on PS5/XSX, but how will we make this run on the Switch" - and the answer is we won't, so the feature gets scrapped. Increases NPC counts, better AI, multiplayer sessions with hundreds of people on the screen - these are arguably gameplay features that the current gen enables but because games are always made for the lowest common denominator they rarely get implemented. And yes, of course there are always tricks to do these things regardless, switch has some impressive games despite being positively ancient now. But I've been part of the discussion about so many gameplay systems that got scrapped not because they couldn't run on the PS5 but because they also had to perform well on lesser hardware.
AMD TrueAudio was doing the audio raycasting thing many years before the PS5 released [1]
> The TrueAudio Next SDK was released as open source through AMD's GPUOpen suite in August 2016...TrueAudio Next uses the GPU's ray-casting technology to do the audio computation
It's a rather niche feature, don't think too many games ever used it.
The scale of things has somewhat improved, but the gameplay improvements in GTA V over IV are hardly there due to hardware capabilities. Gran Turismo still, afaict, does not have a visual damage model, but of course the simulation has improved somewhat. I do not believe Fortnite would have captured a bigger market had it leaned harder into cool graphics.
Honestly, I think Civ games benefit the most from hardware advancement- the end game become more playable due to shorter wait times.
I own a Steam Deck and its one of my favorite devices but its specs are now not really at par with standard (given its age it makes sense). They need to release a newer version but I doubt they can keep the same price value as they did with the original given the market conditions
Sony Is also Making 59% More Revenue Per PlayStation User since Lockdown, with $230 more spent by the average active PlayStation user now than in 2018.
I dunno, 2 feels pretty on point. Unless you're trying to match an Xbox Series S, I guess. The components in my aging midrange desktop are worth ~$600 more than than I paid for them in 2022.
I really have mixed feelings about this. Sure, emulation existed for a while but it always lagged enough or had small bugs to rarely match the spirit of the original (in rare cases it improved things with better framerates, resolution boosts and loading time cuts).
I guess this is somewhat late in the lifecycle of the PS5 but it feels different, like a death blow. Now that this is possible, it would most likely be easy to replicate when the PS6 comes out, or for any other console. Whatever competitive advantage with exclusives consoles have, goes away. And these deals cost a lot of money and take years to plan and execute.
I guess companies then transition to being software only, like Sega did? (though they never recaptured the charm they had when they were making their own hardware). Are we slowly witnessing consoles go the way of the cd player?
Even in an online FPS all your inputs need to be sent to a server running the game logic so what you're seeing is not an actual state of the game but rather the predicted one. I think it would make sense to have a competetive game run all it's logic and rendering on a single machine for all the players in a given match so that it works a bit like a split-screen - the only difference being that instead of showing it on a single combined screen it would send those screens to remote players. This way a lot of problems with latency and movement prediction would be gone. Also cheating would be impossible which is a good enough reason to do it on it's own.
For things you can't control, like other players, prediction works fine and can be almost entirely invisible when well done. But prediction doesn't work fine with things you control, like your own character/weapon, because it feels very wrong when you send input and don't get an immediate response.
So for instance imagine you're playing an FPS and if you pressed the fire button, the weapon didn't fire until that packet traveled to the server, was processed, scene rendered, and finally returned. An extra 100ms or whatever might not seem like much, but it nonetheless feels very wrong, and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate. And 100ms is more of an aspirational goal than a typical norm. Stadia, for instance, had latency that could reach upwards of 250ms.
> like your own character/weapon, because it feels very wrong when you send input and don't get an immediate response.
Nothing says you can’t do some amount of local rendering to help with that feeling of prediction.
> and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate.
Professional twitch FPS gamers aren’t the target market. The target market is casuals who just want to pick up and not fight with installs, disk space, updates, etc etc.
The problem is that things are dynamic. Pressing fire does rather different things if the gun is loaded or empty. You might argue then you could just start doing some small amount of local computation, but then this small amount rapidly grows to a not so small amount because you bump into these issues endlessly and you end up learning why so much is done locally on most games to the point that cheating becomes possible.
It's also not just 'professional twitch FPS gamers' that this is an issue for. If you get anywhere near the latency that the Stadia had in certain games (280ms in that article) then that is going to be very jarring even to the most casual gamer. That's less than 4 frames a second! It's going to feel like your character controls like a tugboat. Even at more reasonable latencies you still end up with some significant frustration in games where time matters.
And now a days there's basically zero friction in gaming even on PC. You buy a game with one click, you install with one click, you're playing, often in a matter of seconds.
What if you render a spherical view from player's standpoint on a server and then merge it with locally rendered hud + weapon? The biggest source of cheating is that your pc knows the position of other players, only rendering your local state locally would make this kind of cheats impossible while maintaining ms-level response to actions like shooting and looking around (moving has a lot of inertia anyway).
Imagine you're at the corner just before a hallway and you want to quickly peak around the corner where you think an enemy might be. If you didn't have local copies of player locations, then when you look around that corner you might not see anything even if there's a guy right there. At best he'd do this weird pop-in thing which would look awful.
Maybe but VR FPS isn’t such a huge category. The biggest problem there I suspect is almost certainly variable lag (particularly random spikes) as that’s harder to compensate.
I love being downvoted for this statement by people who don’t know what I had worked on in the past.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer. Both were, more or less, true 20 years ago, but haven't been true for many years.
Counterpoint: The benefit of consoles is that they're locked down hard. A lot of PC games are either unplayable in online mode due to rampant cheating or require a level of system access for their anticheat solutions that rivals antivirus software but without the scrutiny.
With consoles, the best cheat can only ever be as good as a human with zero latency - you need to parse the video signal and feed it into some kind of ML model. With PCs, these FPGA based hardware cheat cards can do much, much more.
And frankly, I'm not sure how to solve this dilemma. I do not want to spend north of a thousand of euros for a console I don't own and, most importantly, can and will get my account locked when I attempt to own it. But on the other side I have zero desire to waste the precious free time I have dealing with cheaters. The usual trolls and sex pests are bad enough - but there I can just mute the chat and go on with my life. With cheaters, there is no escape.
Just run a private server and kick/ban them? That's how things worked in the 00's and there is no reason why it wouldn't work now. You can even whitelist your vetted friends.
consoles and thus games are hacked just as thoroughly and completely as PC, for quite a few years. i cannot think of a single console ive played MP and not seen the same blatant cheating since xb360 days
This certainly doesn’t mirror my experience of cloud gaming (gfn) which is indistinguishable from local gaming to me, incl 4k. By and large it’s a significantly better experience than local gaming: silent, cheap, non configuration/setup, works almost everywhere for me etc .
Your article is 6 years old(!) , cloud gaming has gone a long way. If anything , try it first.
It matters for anything multiplayer shooter and even single player games with quicktime events. Using WiFi, wireless controllers, TVs with frame pacing and bluetooth headsets adds latency already in your own house of around 10-50ms (although it is a combined latency, not network).
I know and I can't use cloud gaming myself in part because of the games I play and because I'm used to 240fps PC latency so no game can feel good, I can barely stand using steam link for couch gaming. But there are loads of people that wouldn't notice the difference if they're used to 30fps consoles and loads of games where the latency doesn't matter.
It matters in almost every game I play as well, but for some it doesn't really matter like Baldurs Gate 3, Blue Prince, etc. And I think if you're used to 30fps on console you might not notice a difference in most games, but if you're used to 240hz/fps on a PC any game will feel atrocious until you get used to it.
Cloud gaming has a latency problem that cannot be fixed because the speed of light being a thing. I play many titles that require fast reflexes and any latency is unacceptable.
Also I muck around with mods, emulators etc. PC Gaming isn't just whatever is on the Steam Store.
I used Nvidia GeForce now for some months and must admit that I can't feel a difference most of the time.
I tried call of duty warzone and even this was great multiplayer experience. (Game is a mess with GeForce now, can't remember shader cache and must recreate it every GeForce now session)
You don't feel the difference until you play without the lag.
I've got something like 1400 hours in HellDivers 2, playing Level 10 I don't want to experience any lag. I recently changed the configuration of my machine and I've able improve framerates/frame pacing and it make a lot of difference when playing the game i.e. some melee counters I can much more easily perform.
I used GeForce now for the summer as I wanted to avoid a hot pc in my room.
Any game I played with GeForce now I also played local, yes there is a minimal difference, but sometimes I got better feeling with multiplayer as the cloud service had better connection to the game servers than my local provider.
And I will prefer most multiplayer games with my local machine, but it impressed me very much (more than stadia and Xbox cloud)
If my provider has a bad peering to the gameservers, but a good peering to the cloud gaming servers, you get a better gaming experience with cloud gaming.
No it isn't. You would have bad peering between you and the game server. It doesn't make much sense however you try to explain it away.
You are adding an extra latency between you, the game server and the other players. Playing mental gymnastics about how it could be better when it can't isn't going to convince me or anyone else.
Conversations like these feel like the sort of conversations people were having at the end of days of the Amiga where they were talking about the custom chips and all that jazz being better ignoring the fact that people were buying Voodoos and Soundblasters.
If i get 150-200 ping direct connected to the gameserver, vs 20ping on the cloud gaming vm + 60ms from connection to the cloud gaming, you get a better multiplayer experience.
Never said its the default or that i want convince someone, but it happens to me at least with two games at the evening.
I think gp was providing numbers just to give an example of why it might work, not actual numbers. Their point was mostly that internet routes are noisy and not guaranteed in performance ie you might not go through the best possible path.
While the numbers might differ , I know this is technically possible from my experience in corporate environments buying links to minimize latency. Basically your isp might optimize for a different function ( cost, etc ) than Nvidia ( who wants to make make players happy and subscribe ).
My isp used to throttle Netflix or YouTube ( I don’t remember ), and gfn users occasionally report better performance when using a vpn ( it’s usually throughput not latency though ).
Even if I pretended what you said might be true, the ISP would still be noisy between you and Nvidia. So you would still have the latency between you, Nvidia and the game server.
It still doesn't make sense, however you try to create imaginary scenarios where it might make sense. A lot of people in tech seem to do this, where they will try to invent fantasy scenarios to prove people wrong. It is extremely tiresome.
This ignores all the obvious other problems with game streaming, e.g., what happens when their servers have an outage? What happens when they decide they aren't going to support a title anymore?
20 years ago a $400 laptop could emulate most major psx games, and anything from n64 and prior.
A $1k laptop could dualbox WoW.. depending on the type of game you were playing consoles were not that much cheaper. Hardware prices in the mid oughts were getting very good.
Did we live in two different “2006s”? I remember 2000s laptops to be near-unusable for anything 3D, let alone a 400 dollar one. My mid-2000s gaming PC could do it at 60-ish FPS, but the graphics in that alone were like 300 dollars :D
You are way off with your recollection of 20 years old hardware (and its prices)
My $400 used Dell laptop from eBay is able to emulate PSX games and most PS2 games (albeit dipping in < 100% emulation speed at times) with its integrated Intel card.
20 years ago a $400 (i.e. used with 10+ years already) laptop had a 486 CPU barely able to run Windows 95.
Dell was selling new Intel core laptops at the $450-$550 range in 2006. Budget brands were offering similar deals/rebate sales pushing just below these. (Acer) I had purchased one of these.
> The problem with consoles is that they're not economically competitive and rely instead on user lock-in paired with marketing and the antiquated belief that PC gaming is complex or requires a $1000 computer.
Console are also single (or lately dual) target so it's theorically easier to debug and optimize compared to PC.
On a tangential note, I tested Pyrowave last night streaming from my CachyOS gaming PC to my ROG Ally (running CachyOS) connected to the TV; there's 2 network switches and about 50m of ethernet between them.
Lowering the stream resolution to 1440p (from 4k) I was able to get 1440p@120Hz flawlessly playing DOOM TDA, <1ms input latency according to the overlay and display latency in the ~17ms range.
It took 900Mb/s of network bandwidth to stream that, so very close to the limit of my 1Gb LAN and still not at the quality and frame rate I'd normally play.
Add WiFi or internet streaming into the mix, and we're going to have to take a significant hit in visual fidelity and frame rates on top of all of the other issues you mention with cloud gaming.
Myself I am very sensitive to latency, which is a bit more evidence that I have a somewhat unusual nervous system. People who are much better at other game genres are amazed that I can usually beat levels from any rhythm game the first time unseen but...
When I had 30 ms of display lag (a frame) I could not accomplish anything for my team in League Of Legends. With my old Samsung TV I would just get hit playing Titanfall and never be able to hit anybody (except with a falling Titan) until I turned on "game mode". I even had the same problem with certain single player games like SAO: Fatal Bullet. (Although there are some games, say DW 9 [fast action but not time sensitive] or Orcs Must Die [not twitchy at all] that I can play just fine with the wired LAN in my house in the first case and over the microwave link to my rental property in the second case)
And of course the lag is unreasonably distributed. The developers and executives might have offices across the street from a cloud gaming data center and of course it is OK. For the "rest of us" behind congested or underinvested networks not so much.
What I found the most disappointing about cloud gaming was despite it being all the rage for "Big Tech" for a year or so they never made an attempt to build a game that really took advantage of it. I mean, you can get machines in the cloud with an absurd amount of RAM, CPUs and GPUs. Such a machine could put 20-30 players in a shared world with 20-30 the complexity of a conventional game and stream out video to all of them... Google has fantastic resources and could have made a game which would have had gamers demanding cloud gaming but no, they didn't.
How would cloud-only prevent this? Do you think LLMs can't exfil the game from the server? They're incredibly persistent and are willing to try many things. Random credentials, vulnerabilities in the game servers / dev machines, or even social engineering the devs/the deployment.
Also a use case for world models to hide the actual source of the game and have it stream a simulation of the real game; never to be exposed or downloaded.
Sony will happily shoot themselves in the face rather than give in to their customer's desires.
Microsoft will try and force their customers into something they don't want, because it's obviously better for Microsoft than their customers. They may succeed - success being "not completely losing all of their market share".
Nintendo will figure it out somehow, even if it means pivoting out of gaming altogether. Chances are - they will choose to make their customers happy instead of shooting themselves in the face. But they will try to shoot in the face youtubers and modders who make their customers happy.
On balance, Sony will most likely shoot themselves in the face, and survive to take whatever market share Microsoft gives up. Somehow.
People forget the social aspects of console gaming and underestimate the ”it just works” factor. Nintendo in particular has a rather unique hardware platform with their controllers. Sure, you _can_ somewhat replicate it on PC, but the portability and OOTB experience is pretty good. Of course the switch is underpowered as hell, but you don’t need PC perf for the games you want to play in the social console form factor. You pay for the complete experience.
Needless to say though, vendor lock-in still sucks, and the switch store is pretty terrible.
This is unfortunate that it would push them in that direction, but not for the reasons you speak of.
Before the PS4/WiiU era (I'm not including XBox for reasons that will be obvious), they actually tried to create hardware that was "ground breaking" and/or "revolutionary" (to some extent of those words).
The PS3 had the "Cell Processor" and the Wii was loosely based on a PPC architecture.
The PS4 and WiiU were essentially x86 AMD CPU's.
The PS5, Switch 1/2 and every XBox are basically just desktop COTS hardware slightly modified for power consumption to be "consoles".
Are you surprised that 10,000,000 machine hours compressed into a quantized token can "reverse" a very well known and documented architecture?
I'm not.
And that, in my humble opinion, is the unfortunate part.
Wii U and Switch aren't x86 at all. All of GameCube, Wii and Wii U used a PowerPC CPU and an ArtX/ATI/AMD GPU. And Switch has moved to Nvidia ARM chips; they had been using ARM for portables since GBA.
> Unfortunately, this is only going to push Sony/Nintendo/MS more towards cloud gaming. AI enabling these amazing reverse engineering efforts and democratizing access to gaming is amazing
Within 5-10 years, kids will just be asking AI to generate customized games for them on the spot.
Maybe some official games will be delivered as prompts too, and the current download/installation times will be replaced by generation times :)
(not saying this is the future I want very much, but it's not unlikely)
Cloud gaming is nice, I use GeforceNow regularly to play on my mac. However, there are several games that I couldn't complete/play due to the latency (around 60ms). Claire Obscures quicktime events were a pain (plus I used a PS5 controller which adds some latency), also Indiana Jones and the Great Circle had a bossfight mid-game with quicktime events that became so frustrating that I couldn't complete the game - halfway through. Same is true for Battlefield 6 - impossible to play, you just get continuesly fragged from player you didn't even see (remember the netcode does not consider you cloud gaming latency).
We're not far away from playing a screen grab and prompting "Hey $HOTTEST_LLM, make a clone of this game". There really isn't anything new under the sun with gaming. The assets can be easily reverse engineered, reconstruct the 3D world, and work out the inner logic (damage, etc).
Even if it starts out really crappy, people will iterate and contribute until it's virtually identical to the real thing.
Daaaang you're gonna be pleasantly surprised if you haven't seen it already; look up what's happening with decompilations and recompilations now with AI :)
I just had Claude get me a 1997 game up and running on modern Windows in 30 minutes, and few days of off-hours prompting later, I'm part-way into upscaling/remastering graphics, have a browser 3D level preview, asset viewer, headless rendering pipeline, and entire internal game logic VM reversed and scripts decompiled to Lisp code.
Getting the game to work and upgrading some graphics was something I dreamed of since childhood (and attempted myself several times). I casually threw Opus 5.5 at it and was surprised at the result.
Didn't know until now that everyone else is doing the same with their favorite old games now.
Huh - I played ‘A Final Unity’ but had no idea they’d turned Generations into a sequel. MicroProse probably made way too many of my fond childhood memories.
I never thought of "Generations" as a sequel, I didn't even know for a long time they were related. As far as I can tell, the main relationship between the two games is that "Generations" uses the same engine and assets in space combat as "A Final Unity".
FWIW, AFU is next on my list, I just need to... dig up an old copy of that too.
Shame GoG never got around to remastering either of them, but thankfully Claude has no problems helping here.
Asmongold also did a stream recently where he showed a bunch of insane mashups of AAA games that people are doing, like Mario in Elden Ring or Spiderman in the Arkum Asylum Batman map. You can find it on Youtube.
If this trajectory continues, the AAA games industry will be in trouble. It will be a golden age for game restoration and game modding.
> cash-in twice by delaying the PC release by a year.
You have the same game on PC and console but you have to pay twice to play it on both, despite the engineering effort to adapt the game between them being minimal relative to the whole development effort. But they charge full price for each version as if they go through the entire development effort for each individually. The players will be just as honest about saving money as the devs or publishers are about making money.
Sony have already introduced a change via a March 2026 firmware update to combat refund exploits and digital piracy (specifically targeting web-store refund loopholes on jailbroken or manipulated consoles) - but this again is firmware and in-memory address storage which is easily parsed and manipulated by Agentic AI.
Simply put, GTA V thinks its running on real hardware. Any sort of hardware based validation check (e.g. hitting hardware specific functions that are HLE in the emulator as more general API calls) will be patched nightly if the likes of the dolphin devlog in recent times is anything to go by. Online checks are even more easily bypassed, unless there's some sort of esoteric quantum or one-time pad style implementation which I can't foresee.
Normal people aren’t downloading a 100GB torrent to get this working. Nor would they setup an emulator.
At most less than half a percent of the target market would actually do this.
Still, I’d imagine Rockstar easily being able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play this illegally. It’ll probably just stick to Russia where buying a PS5 is basically impossible anyway.,
You underestimate the will to play gta 6 by people. Necessity is the mother of invention. GTA 6 on pc as a possibility is literally why this project gained attention.
Also underestimate that AI can be used to build a one click type installer (improve massively the install experience). The TitanFall 2 VR mod is an example of such a thing, the install experience is great, the mod is exceptional, it’s a great showcase of what AI coding will bring to the modding scene.
You don't need any llm to have that, its called FitGirl release and its standard on scene for at least a decade. Compressed aggressively to make much smaller packages, as bonus ripped away useless annoying things like long videos with companies logos or choking/seizures warnings playing every launch. Dodi repacks are cca same but usually bigger.
Not 1 click, its few on Next -> Next but thats really it. Checksums, full mod support, optional Direct X or .NET runtime installs bundled within.
Why half percent? Why not 10? Not suiting your narrative or something else?
If it comes out usable, I will try it at least. I don't own consoles nor planning to buy any, no reason I can't run this on much more powerful hardware and enjoy power of modding scene or ie ReShade filters on top of basic game.
I think that there would be a swarm of step-by-step guides on every social media platform under the sun.
I don’t imagine Rockstar would easily be able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play. We haven’t seen that scenario play out with any other emulation or de/re-compilation situation.
How would they know who you are? The RIAA was only able to sue students on college campuses because they were able to get institutional help to match a human with an IP address.
An average Joe with a non-logging VPN defeats that effort immediately.
Someone downloading with Usenet is never at significant risk since they never upload and redistribute data, so they can’t really be sued for copyright infringement.
I’m not a lawyer but that’s my layperson’s understanding.
Ha you are completely wrong here all over your comment, that I can guarantee. If they get this working with at least 30 fps, expect millions of people will play this on PC. If they figure our performance parity, expect modding scene will go nuclear since it allows you to tinker with game in ways playstation will never ever allow.
I've never really dived into GTA series, but oh boy does GTA 6 has a massive momentum and it overshadows every single game release in second half of 2026, distributors moved many titles away from this period.
> Normal people aren’t downloading a 100GB torrent to get this working. Nor would they setup an emulator.
You do realize that by Sony going 100% digital, ALL games will have to be downloaded? I don't have a PS5 but many of my Xbox Series X games are ~100GB or more.
Soon most publishers will start going even before the official January 2028 deadline - as it helps them cut costs, simplify distribution, cuts PIRACY, leads to more sales/revenue (people cannot borrow - not even from the library, are forced to buy).
So if someone offers them a chance to break free, I think they'll take it.
Also if SO MANY people can try something like OpenClaw (which took a seasoned professional like me a day to set up) then we're underestimating 'normal' people!
// Normal people aren’t downloading a 100GB torrent to get this working. Nor would they setup an emulator.
"CoPilot, download that PS5 emulator everyone is talking about and then set it up for me."
// Still, I’d imagine Rockstar easily being able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play this illegally
How on earth would they know? At the very least the gold master will be playable in perpetuity. If their netcode is anywhere near as bad as GTA V as well, every piece of DLC or online-service will be replicated on Private servers.
We already have a full eco-system and community-driven multiplayer modification framework for GTA V on PC in the form of FiveM. I'd imagine many talented people (and/or those with token capital) are chomping at the bit to replicate the same with GTA 6.
GTA 6 will probably be software as a service to some extend, namely the code will change all the time at somewhat high frequency for any port. If I am not too mistaken a big chunk of the GTA community does play online.
"AI porting" able to follow? (If that AI thing is actually true)
Unless GTA 6 is not hardwired to AMDGPU hardware at release, if they have a cross-platform engine, for PC, it is to click the right export button... and do the QA and debug to please the various 3D drivers out there.
If there is one game dev studio which can do big cross-platform QA (console,"linux" PC,macos,mobile?,etc) is them... so... it looks like lazyness, or they are sleeping with microslope in the backroom, since they would be the only beneficiary. We all know that with current modern 3D engines, serious and honest work, the only thing which can be tricky: conservative 3D programming which does include the shaders (lower the level the better).
People talking about GTA6 being playable after launch is possible but I doubt it will impact their sales much as somebody will first have to rip this from the console then it has to work (I suspect the hardware requirements will make it harder to run than we think, limiting the mass appeal). Finally the money for blizzard is in the GTA Online its way more important for them long term than the single player campaign. And I do not see how AnyPS5 can help anyone there.
In general though bad news for all the small games out there more than the blockbusters.
Don't be fooled by this percentage. A 2 minute look at the code and what they called mapped is simply a lot of functions returning ok.
As in:
if (vvgvg) {
return ok
}
247 comments
[ 0.47 ms ] story [ 33.0 ms ] threadEg. https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-wipes-out-400-switch-emula...
http://opbible7nans45sg33cbyeiwqmlp5fu7lklu6jd6f3mivrjeqadco...
Edit: wrong link
[1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-maintenance
This project is the first hint I’ve seen of the complete destruction of all copy protection schemes. Scary times for any industry that relies on those!
Sure, Rockstar can enforce a minimum software revision to launch the game, but couldn't some homebrew software just (a) lie about the software revision to any running game, or (b) apply any relevant software updates minus patching the kernel vuln?
It seems to me that the cat's out the bag now.
I don’t know how Sonys attestation works, and how resistant it is; but presumably it’s a bit harder than “lie to the game about what firmware you’re running”.
(GTA VI will famously not have a physical release, so you can’t rip data off the disk.)
Modern hardware attestation is - if implemented correctly - not beatable unless you decap chips and start trying to extract hardware keys. But the silicon itself is often heavily obfuscated and such a feat has not been demonstrated for modern hardware.
All breaks of modern console security rely on finding bugs or mistakes in the implementation. If the PS5 has got serious exploits then either:
1. They will patch it and revoke old firmwares, as the infrastructure lets them do. Then you have to try and find a new exploit in the firmware that GTA6 was released for.
2. It won't be released for PS5 until later. Xbox security has been undefeated for a long time now, so Microsoft might have an advantage there.
The underlying architectures are quite complex but there are some good tech talks about them online. One of the best is by Tony Chen, which covers Xbox One security. It's many years obsolete now, but even that security system wasn't cracked until long after obsolescence. Microsoft have proven you can build an effectively unbeatable security system for general computing devices even though they only use it for games and multiplayer anti-cheat. It seems Sony might have not reached Microsoft's level.
Maybe AI will speed things up by making it easier to find obscure bugs, but design wise the architectures are sound and can work well.
If someone manages to download and decrypt the game on 1 single hacked console then it's out forever. Even if Sony decides to only allow unhacked firmware it's only a matter of time (months not years) before that version gets a jailbreak too because no complex system can be totally secure.
The only way to prevent this is making the game online only. That would be an extreme sales and reputation hit because it's the type of thing people expect from EA games where single player is a side mode. Not Rockstar famous for their incredible story modes that have always been offline.
Then you can see from projects like ReSkate that to successfully pull it off you would need to make the game effectively a thin client, because if you leave any logic on the console it will get reversed even if parts of it are server only.
And running a full game engine millions of times on your servers gets expensive real fast. Take Two can't afford it, and even if they could, the hit to their profits would be way more than what they can lose from the game getting cracked day 1.
(Also a reminder that GTA 6 won't have a physical release. And downloding from the store requires the latest firmware)
i asked copilot it says runtime interception and translation
source?
I checked the code and it rewrites shaders from RDNA to SPIR-V at runtime. There is a disk cache and it's a binary format so it shouldn't be much slower than vkd3d translating from DXIL.
It’s only recently (earlier this year) that the _last gen_ of xbox was cracked.
Maybe that's due to lack of interest?
The Xbox is flopping commercially, and doesn't have any exclusives that are not on PC.
On the other hand, The Nintendo Switch got a jailbreak fairly early in its lifecycle.
Funnily enough I ended a recent blog post on this topic with "You will own nothing and you will be kinda pissed off about it."
https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/reversing.html
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'd guess maybe 90% of gamers probably wouldn't either. And those negatives are somewhat balanced by the positives that cloud-streamed games enables: no disk space management (minor) and no cheaters (huge!).
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 voice models are small too so it’s just a matter of time until someone is intentional enough sending that payload down in a download
I think the self hosting moment will gather steam and maybe prove itself superior for certain cases
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.
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.
Consumers want _access_ to their games/content. For example, netflix made it easy to "rent" or stream content. But as they slowly clawback those features (multi-streaming, password sharing, incorporate ads, increase prices beyond inflation). Then access to content decreases, visibility decreases.
Billions of people pay dozen if not hundreds of dollars per months for movies, tv shows, etc. that are available for free via torrent on day 1, or even earlier sometimes.
I have only had success with single player games.
As doubtful as I am about the viability of cloud streaming, this IS going to cause a bigger push into live service functionality where maybe you have a light client but the server is authoritative over more and more aspects of the game. Even then, AI can write its own server, so it needs to be full of FOMO if you're not on the official server.
There goes 95% of your market. If not more.
Or is it something you get used to like playing at 60hz, then going back to a PS2/etc at 30hz for awhile?
I don't have any reason to believe this would translate into a good cloud gaming experience though, because it mostly seems to have become viable from local wifi just getting a lot better in recent years. I would expect the latency to still be pretty high for a remote server, and it's possible that the streaming server I use is just able to "correct" things more easily for a local connection in a way that a fully remote connection might not be able to.
Nintendo is excellent at providing that value using low tech. They managed to make a compelling product using cardboard and sell it for 80$. They are the masters at providing good experiences with relatively cheap local hardware.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Labo
Sony's greed has been incredible, let's just accelerate tbh
It's never wise to say never, but I think cloud gaming will never go far with gaming. Physics means there's going to be input latency. So it simply won't work for VR where you really need at least 90FPS with no input latency. Of course the year of VR seems to be coming just about after the year of Linux, so maybe that doesn't matter. But even for normal games, the input latency is major. This [1] article shows input latency of more than 1/4th a second on one game ran at 4k. Then there's reduced visuals and of course recent times have also demonstrated beyond any doubt that the whole argument that the cloud won't go down, or won't lose your data, are both marketing fictions.
[1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...
And now a days in the age of Denuvo and things like this, cracked binaries are sometimes even 'cleaner' than the official releases.
It'll be interesting to see if LLMs do increase the rate of completely cleans.
Is that antiquated? PC gaming requires either (1) some technical knowledge to assemble a computer on par with modern consoles without breaking the bank, (2) spending more than $1000 to buy a complete computer on par with modern consoles, or (3) settling for worse performance to buy a system that costs the same as a console.
Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses, and they have much better economies of scale than most PC builders. See: Steam Machine.
And actually, the "what has this hardware enabled" works kinda backwards. I work in video games and every single design that we come up with usually hits the wall of "oh that's cool on PS5/XSX, but how will we make this run on the Switch" - and the answer is we won't, so the feature gets scrapped. Increases NPC counts, better AI, multiplayer sessions with hundreds of people on the screen - these are arguably gameplay features that the current gen enables but because games are always made for the lowest common denominator they rarely get implemented. And yes, of course there are always tricks to do these things regardless, switch has some impressive games despite being positively ancient now. But I've been part of the discussion about so many gameplay systems that got scrapped not because they couldn't run on the PS5 but because they also had to perform well on lesser hardware.
> The TrueAudio Next SDK was released as open source through AMD's GPUOpen suite in August 2016...TrueAudio Next uses the GPU's ray-casting technology to do the audio computation
It's a rather niche feature, don't think too many games ever used it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_TrueAudio
Honestly, I think Civ games benefit the most from hardware advancement- the end game become more playable due to shorter wait times.
//Consoles subsidize hardware on the bet that they'll make more in the long run on game licenses,
The PlayStation 5 @ $499 became profitable to manufacture within its first year on the market.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/sony-says-499-ps5-no-longer-sells...
Sony Is also Making 59% More Revenue Per PlayStation User since Lockdown, with $230 more spent by the average active PlayStation user now than in 2018.
https://www.ign.com/articles/sony-is-making-59-more-revenue-...
* Yes they’ve started making their own but it’s hardly a primary business.
I guess this is somewhat late in the lifecycle of the PS5 but it feels different, like a death blow. Now that this is possible, it would most likely be easy to replicate when the PS6 comes out, or for any other console. Whatever competitive advantage with exclusives consoles have, goes away. And these deals cost a lot of money and take years to plan and execute.
I guess companies then transition to being software only, like Sega did? (though they never recaptured the charm they had when they were making their own hardware). Are we slowly witnessing consoles go the way of the cd player?
So for instance imagine you're playing an FPS and if you pressed the fire button, the weapon didn't fire until that packet traveled to the server, was processed, scene rendered, and finally returned. An extra 100ms or whatever might not seem like much, but it nonetheless feels very wrong, and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate. And 100ms is more of an aspirational goal than a typical norm. Stadia, for instance, had latency that could reach upwards of 250ms.
Nothing says you can’t do some amount of local rendering to help with that feeling of prediction.
> and also can have a majorly detrimental effect on skilled players' ability to play the game because you're basically adding that time to their reflex rate.
Professional twitch FPS gamers aren’t the target market. The target market is casuals who just want to pick up and not fight with installs, disk space, updates, etc etc.
It's also not just 'professional twitch FPS gamers' that this is an issue for. If you get anywhere near the latency that the Stadia had in certain games (280ms in that article) then that is going to be very jarring even to the most casual gamer. That's less than 4 frames a second! It's going to feel like your character controls like a tugboat. Even at more reasonable latencies you still end up with some significant frustration in games where time matters.
And now a days there's basically zero friction in gaming even on PC. You buy a game with one click, you install with one click, you're playing, often in a matter of seconds.
I love being downvoted for this statement by people who don’t know what I had worked on in the past.
Counterpoint: The benefit of consoles is that they're locked down hard. A lot of PC games are either unplayable in online mode due to rampant cheating or require a level of system access for their anticheat solutions that rivals antivirus software but without the scrutiny.
With consoles, the best cheat can only ever be as good as a human with zero latency - you need to parse the video signal and feed it into some kind of ML model. With PCs, these FPGA based hardware cheat cards can do much, much more.
And frankly, I'm not sure how to solve this dilemma. I do not want to spend north of a thousand of euros for a console I don't own and, most importantly, can and will get my account locked when I attempt to own it. But on the other side I have zero desire to waste the precious free time I have dealing with cheaters. The usual trolls and sex pests are bad enough - but there I can just mute the chat and go on with my life. With cheaters, there is no escape.
Enshittification galore.
Your article is 6 years old(!) , cloud gaming has gone a long way. If anything , try it first.
Also I muck around with mods, emulators etc. PC Gaming isn't just whatever is on the Steam Store.
I've got something like 1400 hours in HellDivers 2, playing Level 10 I don't want to experience any lag. I recently changed the configuration of my machine and I've able improve framerates/frame pacing and it make a lot of difference when playing the game i.e. some melee counters I can much more easily perform.
Any game I played with GeForce now I also played local, yes there is a minimal difference, but sometimes I got better feeling with multiplayer as the cloud service had better connection to the game servers than my local provider.
And I will prefer most multiplayer games with my local machine, but it impressed me very much (more than stadia and Xbox cloud)
If my provider has a bad peering to the gameservers, but a good peering to the cloud gaming servers, you get a better gaming experience with cloud gaming.
Its possible.
You are adding an extra latency between you, the game server and the other players. Playing mental gymnastics about how it could be better when it can't isn't going to convince me or anyone else.
Conversations like these feel like the sort of conversations people were having at the end of days of the Amiga where they were talking about the custom chips and all that jazz being better ignoring the fact that people were buying Voodoos and Soundblasters.
Never said its the default or that i want convince someone, but it happens to me at least with two games at the evening.
You aren't going to magically get a better ping because the VM is somewhere else. So I find this hard to believe.
While the numbers might differ , I know this is technically possible from my experience in corporate environments buying links to minimize latency. Basically your isp might optimize for a different function ( cost, etc ) than Nvidia ( who wants to make make players happy and subscribe ).
My isp used to throttle Netflix or YouTube ( I don’t remember ), and gfn users occasionally report better performance when using a vpn ( it’s usually throughput not latency though ).
It still doesn't make sense, however you try to create imaginary scenarios where it might make sense. A lot of people in tech seem to do this, where they will try to invent fantasy scenarios to prove people wrong. It is extremely tiresome.
This ignores all the obvious other problems with game streaming, e.g., what happens when their servers have an outage? What happens when they decide they aren't going to support a title anymore?
A $1k laptop could dualbox WoW.. depending on the type of game you were playing consoles were not that much cheaper. Hardware prices in the mid oughts were getting very good.
My $400 used Dell laptop from eBay is able to emulate PSX games and most PS2 games (albeit dipping in < 100% emulation speed at times) with its integrated Intel card.
20 years ago a $400 (i.e. used with 10+ years already) laptop had a 486 CPU barely able to run Windows 95.
Console are also single (or lately dual) target so it's theorically easier to debug and optimize compared to PC.
Lowering the stream resolution to 1440p (from 4k) I was able to get 1440p@120Hz flawlessly playing DOOM TDA, <1ms input latency according to the overlay and display latency in the ~17ms range.
It took 900Mb/s of network bandwidth to stream that, so very close to the limit of my 1Gb LAN and still not at the quality and frame rate I'd normally play.
Add WiFi or internet streaming into the mix, and we're going to have to take a significant hit in visual fidelity and frame rates on top of all of the other issues you mention with cloud gaming.
When I had 30 ms of display lag (a frame) I could not accomplish anything for my team in League Of Legends. With my old Samsung TV I would just get hit playing Titanfall and never be able to hit anybody (except with a falling Titan) until I turned on "game mode". I even had the same problem with certain single player games like SAO: Fatal Bullet. (Although there are some games, say DW 9 [fast action but not time sensitive] or Orcs Must Die [not twitchy at all] that I can play just fine with the wired LAN in my house in the first case and over the microwave link to my rental property in the second case)
And of course the lag is unreasonably distributed. The developers and executives might have offices across the street from a cloud gaming data center and of course it is OK. For the "rest of us" behind congested or underinvested networks not so much.
What I found the most disappointing about cloud gaming was despite it being all the rage for "Big Tech" for a year or so they never made an attempt to build a game that really took advantage of it. I mean, you can get machines in the cloud with an absurd amount of RAM, CPUs and GPUs. Such a machine could put 20-30 players in a shared world with 20-30 the complexity of a conventional game and stream out video to all of them... Google has fantastic resources and could have made a game which would have had gamers demanding cloud gaming but no, they didn't.
Microsoft will try and force their customers into something they don't want, because it's obviously better for Microsoft than their customers. They may succeed - success being "not completely losing all of their market share".
Nintendo will figure it out somehow, even if it means pivoting out of gaming altogether. Chances are - they will choose to make their customers happy instead of shooting themselves in the face. But they will try to shoot in the face youtubers and modders who make their customers happy.
On balance, Sony will most likely shoot themselves in the face, and survive to take whatever market share Microsoft gives up. Somehow.
1. already have their foot in the door
2. are not overwhelmingly hostile towards their customers
Needless to say though, vendor lock-in still sucks, and the switch store is pretty terrible.
Except the UX is horrid. If studios will certainly try it but there will be massive backlash.
Before the PS4/WiiU era (I'm not including XBox for reasons that will be obvious), they actually tried to create hardware that was "ground breaking" and/or "revolutionary" (to some extent of those words).
The PS3 had the "Cell Processor" and the Wii was loosely based on a PPC architecture.
The PS4 and WiiU were essentially x86 AMD CPU's.
The PS5, Switch 1/2 and every XBox are basically just desktop COTS hardware slightly modified for power consumption to be "consoles".
Are you surprised that 10,000,000 machine hours compressed into a quantized token can "reverse" a very well known and documented architecture?
I'm not.
And that, in my humble opinion, is the unfortunate part.
WiiU is the same architecture as the Wii and the Switch is the same platform as Nvidia Shield.
Within 5-10 years, kids will just be asking AI to generate customized games for them on the spot.
Maybe some official games will be delivered as prompts too, and the current download/installation times will be replaced by generation times :)
(not saying this is the future I want very much, but it's not unlikely)
Even if it starts out really crappy, people will iterate and contribute until it's virtually identical to the real thing.
- drag any single player game executable
- run a swarm of agents to decompile and build a networking layer
- turn it into a coop game
Despite using AI all the time for other engineering projects, I never considered the console scene as something to be explored.
If this ends up allowing me to play GTA 6 on my PC within a few months of release I will be euphoric.
https://github.com/SamidyFR/Game-Decompilations
Getting the game to work and upgrading some graphics was something I dreamed of since childhood (and attempted myself several times). I casually threw Opus 5.5 at it and was surprised at the result.
Didn't know until now that everyone else is doing the same with their favorite old games now.
(In my case, the game is Star Trek: Generations.)
FWIW, AFU is next on my list, I just need to... dig up an old copy of that too.
Shame GoG never got around to remastering either of them, but thankfully Claude has no problems helping here.
Asmongold also did a stream recently where he showed a bunch of insane mashups of AAA games that people are doing, like Mario in Elden Ring or Spiderman in the Arkum Asylum Batman map. You can find it on Youtube.
If this trajectory continues, the AAA games industry will be in trouble. It will be a golden age for game restoration and game modding.
I think it could even force rockstar to release PC version earlier than planned.
With GTA 6, I really would not worry about this, given just how much interest there is in it. Someone will crack whatever they come up with.
...and that could all be avoided by not trying to cash-in twice by delaying the PC release by a year.
(To be fair though, I kinda do not expect it to be worth all of this hype. It is just more of the same from what I have seen)
You have the same game on PC and console but you have to pay twice to play it on both, despite the engineering effort to adapt the game between them being minimal relative to the whole development effort. But they charge full price for each version as if they go through the entire development effort for each individually. The players will be just as honest about saving money as the devs or publishers are about making money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Sony have already introduced a change via a March 2026 firmware update to combat refund exploits and digital piracy (specifically targeting web-store refund loopholes on jailbroken or manipulated consoles) - but this again is firmware and in-memory address storage which is easily parsed and manipulated by Agentic AI.
Simply put, GTA V thinks its running on real hardware. Any sort of hardware based validation check (e.g. hitting hardware specific functions that are HLE in the emulator as more general API calls) will be patched nightly if the likes of the dolphin devlog in recent times is anything to go by. Online checks are even more easily bypassed, unless there's some sort of esoteric quantum or one-time pad style implementation which I can't foresee.
At most less than half a percent of the target market would actually do this.
Still, I’d imagine Rockstar easily being able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play this illegally. It’ll probably just stick to Russia where buying a PS5 is basically impossible anyway.,
Not 1 click, its few on Next -> Next but thats really it. Checksums, full mod support, optional Direct X or .NET runtime installs bundled within.
Most folks will just do something else.
If it comes out usable, I will try it at least. I don't own consoles nor planning to buy any, no reason I can't run this on much more powerful hardware and enjoy power of modding scene or ie ReShade filters on top of basic game.
ISPs can be obligated to suspend infringing customers.
Why not 99% ? Then Rockstar can go out of business, the entire game industry can collapse and I guess we can all play board games.
It’s not like they’re depriving you of water or something. You’ll be fine if you don’t play GTA6.
Or Rockstar does consider this to be a big deal and delays the release to incorporate Games as a Service style DRM which is much harder to beat.
I don’t imagine Rockstar would easily be able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play. We haven’t seen that scenario play out with any other emulation or de/re-compilation situation.
How would they know who you are? The RIAA was only able to sue students on college campuses because they were able to get institutional help to match a human with an IP address.
An average Joe with a non-logging VPN defeats that effort immediately.
Someone downloading with Usenet is never at significant risk since they never upload and redistribute data, so they can’t really be sued for copyright infringement.
I’m not a lawyer but that’s my layperson’s understanding.
I just talked to a colleague who’s trying to find an in stock PS5 for GTA6.
Going to sketchy torrents, and configuring it to run locally is beyond what most people really want to do.
I can imagine maybe a few hundred thousand people doing this. Even then it’s going to be like using a hackintosh, the experience will be full of bugs.
How hard is it really? Is he looking for them abandoned in the street?
Tte ps5 has been in the market for years, it is widely and easily available everywhere.
It was literally available from the first two places I checked.
They already have BOTW torrents that are pre-setup and as easy as it gets.
I've never really dived into GTA series, but oh boy does GTA 6 has a massive momentum and it overshadows every single game release in second half of 2026, distributors moved many titles away from this period.
You do realize that by Sony going 100% digital, ALL games will have to be downloaded? I don't have a PS5 but many of my Xbox Series X games are ~100GB or more.
Soon most publishers will start going even before the official January 2028 deadline - as it helps them cut costs, simplify distribution, cuts PIRACY, leads to more sales/revenue (people cannot borrow - not even from the library, are forced to buy).
So if someone offers them a chance to break free, I think they'll take it.
Also if SO MANY people can try something like OpenClaw (which took a seasoned professional like me a day to set up) then we're underestimating 'normal' people!
"CoPilot, download that PS5 emulator everyone is talking about and then set it up for me."
// Still, I’d imagine Rockstar easily being able to sue anyone in the US who tries to play this illegally
How on earth would they know? At the very least the gold master will be playable in perpetuity. If their netcode is anywhere near as bad as GTA V as well, every piece of DLC or online-service will be replicated on Private servers.
We already have a full eco-system and community-driven multiplayer modification framework for GTA V on PC in the form of FiveM. I'd imagine many talented people (and/or those with token capital) are chomping at the bit to replicate the same with GTA 6.
As soon as someone vibe-codes a one-click installer that does all the work for them, they will.
"AI porting" able to follow? (If that AI thing is actually true)
Unless GTA 6 is not hardwired to AMDGPU hardware at release, if they have a cross-platform engine, for PC, it is to click the right export button... and do the QA and debug to please the various 3D drivers out there.
In general though bad news for all the small games out there more than the blockbusters.
GTA is not made by Blizzard =)
Glad to see this type of hardware still included in the testing flows!