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.
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.
I don’t think that really matters in this context. If the local models can do these things already, the fact that frontier models can do even more does not change that fact or eliminate that problem. Add on to that the fact that the local models are improving at a faster rate than the frontier models and they’re really going to have a hard time making money renting this technology in the long run. Like with cars: my car has nowhere near the capabilities of the best or most powerful car, but it still does literally everything I could ever want, and I never ever find myself wishing my car could drag more or move faster. That same sort of thing applies to AI capabilities: It makes no functional difference to me that my local model can’t, just for example, resequence DNA in real-time, because I have no need for that and never will.