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.
This is why they want the “AI revolution” to make computing too expensive for anyone but them. It’s about way more than control of copyright, more than seizing the means of production for themselves: they want to be able to control narratives, censor the press (established journalism and independent blog/forum posting and socials), and monitor individuals and groups that may oppose them or present dissenting viewpoints. They want summaries they can control, they want one click censorship, and they want us to rent the privilege from them, creating a permanent information-peasant class. They want insider information on markets, they want to know voter sentiment, they want to sway investors and politics to their whims via system prompts.
We already saw Elon try it (with hillariously bad results) when Grok wouldn’t shut up about “white genocide” in South Africa. Elon is just such a spectacular failson grifter that his plan had no nuance and was plainly obvious.
But now we know for sure.
they want an economic moat. otherwise there’s very little additional value over the open weight models which are catching up fast.