The past four weeks have been something of a wake-up call for the video game industry. You’ve read the headlines, so you know the deal by now: AI advancements spearheaded by Claude Opus 5.5 have turned the world of coding on its axis. Decompilations that used to take months, or even years, are now being pumped out on a daily basis, and publishers can’t keep up with the deluge of vibe-coded browser ports and “native” PC recompilations.
I’ve been covering and researching this over the past month, and there’s one recurring topic that keeps popping up in every comment section I read: karma. For many, this is the video game industry’s “you reap what you sow” moment, proof that the AI tools many publishers have brazenly admitted to using are a double-edged sword.
A good reason to run local.
Not letting people do things is a great way to dissuade customers from using your hyperscaler service. Except we don’t want anyone using AI to make slop that denigrates others or involves information hazards.
That might be why Musk and Zuckerberg say don’t in their ToS but yhen let you do it anyway; tokens are tokens are profit.
But local brew will even do those things anyway.
Unfortunately I don’t think we can put this genie back in the bottle. These billionaires can afford to out AI us. Running local is great for not giving them money, but you’ll never have even nearly the most capable models.