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.
And more to the point, the cleanroom scenario were some people producing an ‘interface specification’ working backwards from the binary, not decompiling it. If they had decompiled the source code and passed that on, that would not be cleanroom.
This also hinges upon the ‘cloned’ bit being an ABI/API, which by itself is not considered substantial enough for copyright protection.
So the concept of an AI decompilation of a whole application being considered cleanroom and safe is a bizarre concept that seems to spring from wishful thinking rather than anything vaguely realistic.