AnyPS5: Port PS5 binaries to PC without emulation (87% system libraries mapped)

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. Eg. https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-wipes-out-400-switch-emula...

• orionblastar · 10 hours ago

  Keep them in a private GitHub repository so Nintendo can't see them. Slowly release it to different Githubs on a different account.

  • jojobas · 9 hours ago

    Self-host gitlab in darknet.

    • ThrowawayTestr · 9 hours ago

      Just download the zip file

    • radical_halogen · 7 hours ago

      Guide: http://opbible7nans45sg33cbyeiwqmlp5fu7lklu6jd6f3mivrjeqadco...

• augusto-moura · 9 hours ago

  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. Edit: wrong link [1]: https://git-scm.com/docs/git-maintenance

  • sunaookami · 2 hours ago

    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.

is this like the WINE approach?

• Xirdus · 10 hours ago

  Halfway between Wine and Rosetta. The binary itself gets modified, but both source and target are x86 so no transpilation.

  • isityettime · 9 hours ago

    That sounds like just Wine?

    • jpk · 9 hours ago

      WINE doesn't modify binaries, does it?

      • moreveal · 9 hours ago

        Yeah, that's the key difference. Wine leaves the binary intact, while AnyPS5 actually patches/relinks it.

        • isityettime · 8 hours ago

          Does Rosetta modify binaries in-place?

          • duskwuff · 5 hours ago

            No. It's effectively a JIT. (It saves copies of translated binaries behind the scenes, but it still behaves like a JIT overall.)

      • augusto-moura · 8 hours ago

        It doesn't, it is a runtime for running Portable Executables[1] on the fly while also mocking windows API libraries to Linux implementations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable

  • aussieguy1234 · 4 hours ago

    Could something like Rosetta be built out of this?

Are we gonna get a PC port of GTA 6 on day one?

• marak830 · 10 hours ago

  Wrong firmware is being worked on, you would need a version of the firmware that GTA6 is being targeted towards to have a vuln found.

• piskov · 9 hours ago

  Xbox cloud or whatever it is called will stream this without an actual xbox

  • quadsteel · 1 hour ago

    No way Rockstar is doing this.

  • looperhacks · 59 minutes ago

    It was speculated that xbox streaming of GTA6 will be available on PC, but it was already denied.

• pitched · 9 hours ago

  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!

• sankhao · 9 hours ago

  This hopefully pushes Rockstar to accelerate the official PC release.

• kristofferR · 7 hours ago

  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.

  • heavensteeth · 7 hours ago

    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? It seems to me that the cat's out the bag now.

    • klausa · 6 hours ago

      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.)

      • krackers · 4 hours ago

        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.

  • tetrisgm · 4 hours ago

    False information. There are several examples of games that are patched to run on lower firmware.

    • MYEUHD · 34 minutes ago

      You need a firmware version that can run the game in order to dump it in the first place. Then you can backport it to older firmwares. (Also a reminder that GTA 6 won't have a physical release. And downloding from the store requires the latest firmware)

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.

• saejox · 4 hours ago

  No human knows the answer to that question or to any any other technical question. that will be the world we live in i asked copilot it says runtime interception and translation

  • smargopulos · 2 hours ago

    Just because you're unable to figure that out doesn't mean everybody is? The code might be AI assisted/generated but it's still fairly readable.

    • 0points · 1 minute ago

      Good old confirmation bias.

• the_voice · 2 hours ago

  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.

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.

• dghlsakjg · 9 hours ago

  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.

• xyst · 9 hours ago

  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.

  • MYEUHD · 18 minutes ago

    > 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. Surely, if there's enough motivation, hacking any console is possible.

• bananaboy · 8 hours ago

  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.

• Stevvo · 7 hours ago

  This one is made by Russians. Their government has bigger problems to deal with. They turn a blind eye as long as Russian companies are not targeted.

• NitpickLawyer · 3 hours ago

  This generation's "geohot" and friends, most likely. Curiosity, youth and a much lower entry barrier will always win.

You will own everything and be happy.

• Retr0id · 9 hours ago

  For now. In the next few years I bet we'll see AAA games releasing streaming-only. 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

  • lisplist · 9 hours ago

    True, but if we (eventually) have models which can produce high quality games, who cares?

    • Retr0id · 9 hours ago

      Games are shared cultural artefacts

      • DaSHacka · 4 hours ago

        All entertainment is, to some extent. There are many titles of a certain genre I keep meaning to sit down and play through someday, but keep pushing them out because I realized I have no one to talk about it with, just archived threads from 10+ years ago on various boards and forums of a discussion that once was.

    • vuurmot · 9 hours ago

      You think people play Dark Souls because it is "hard" and "dark fantasy" Or do people play it because the gaming community at large plays it, and people want to join in the conversation and have fun with the community? High quality games were never the point, look at Roblox

      • lisplist · 9 hours ago

        I just mean if AAA games become inaccessible, I imagine there will be large community efforts on creating alternatives to that.

      • nottorp · 3 hours ago

        There are two kinds of gamers actually. Those who play for the social aspect and those who play for the ... let's call it experience. If you're not in the latter category you'll probably assume a game's quality is proportional to the # of tiktok videos about it of course. You'll also think all games are multiplayer live service :)

        • vuurmot · 1 hour ago

          Then surely you should discuss your ideas with ChatGPT instead? Why do you bother soliciting opinions on a forum? Why do you insult others by saying that if they are interested in community, these people believe the quality of a game to be proportional to the amount of TikTok they watch?

          • nottorp · 27 minutes ago

            > to join in the conversation and have fun with the community So what does this mean then, for a single player game, if not discussion outside the game? Btw at a quick search 80% of Elden Ring players have not used the multiplayer component at all .

  • popalchemist · 9 hours ago

    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.

    • Marsymars · 5 hours ago

      That could also just be that they're all competing for a slice of the attention pie that's getting gobbled up by tiktok reels and sports gambling.

      • popalchemist · 5 hours ago

        It's a response to the loss of ancilliary income that used to be derived from "home video" (which used to make up about 50% of a movie's total income). So it's directly analogous. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6n0rinKTFY

  • sigmar · 9 hours ago

    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

  • lewelove · 9 hours ago

    Perhaps, but I doubt it. The immersiveness and suspension 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.

  • yieldcrv · 9 hours ago

    I think AAA games as we know it will go away 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

    • asdff · 5 hours ago

      Funny to think about how the first fully ai generated dialog character is inevitably going to be a skyrim gf mod if its not already on nexus

  • Synthetic7346 · 9 hours ago

    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

  • typ · 7 hours ago

    Or they will just stop releasing certain genres. 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.

  • asdff · 5 hours ago

    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.

  • dawnerd · 4 hours ago

    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.

  • hypfer · 1 hour ago

    RE: Your blog post ending 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. __ The only things that will be troublesome are heavily regulated things like cars or heavily monopolized things like mobile phone OS'. The latter currently demonstrating how little interest Google has in there being something like Graphene and holding everything built on the idea of mobile phones hostage. Both of these are mere legislative issues though and could be resolved with a majority of normal people. But one dollar one vote kinda interferes there.

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?

• Retr0id · 9 hours ago

  Music and movies can be ripped day 1, and it hasn't done a whole lot.

  • dmicah · 7 hours ago

    The music and movie streaming paradigm was developed partly to combat piracy, by making it more convenient to stream legally.

    • asdff · 5 hours ago

      Movie situation is terrible these days. You need to maintain $100/mo of services to cover your bases and you are still told its only available for a $3.99 4 day digital "rent" which feels like worse terms than what blockbuster was offering.

      • derekdahmer · 4 hours ago

        That’s pretty cheap, a new release blockbuster movie cost $3.79 - in 1999! And you had to drive there, and drive back to return it, and could only borrow what they had in stock, and they charged you fees if you forgot. Basic cable (with 3 minutes of commercials every 10 minutes) plus HBO was like $80-100 adjusted for inflation. Now you can get a HBO/Disney/Hulu bundle, with no ads, for $35/month and watch anything in their entire catalogue instantly. Truly amazing times

  • RachelF · 5 hours ago

    There is not much goodwill in the world left towards Sony. They have screwed their customers over repeatedly (removal of PS3 Linux, PC spyware, removal of physical disks, banning arbitrary users online etc.), which makes the moral case for Sony piracy more ambiguous.

• dghlsakjg · 9 hours ago

  Most software and games is available pirated already and has been for decades. You could get pirate games on the original PlayStation two decades ago. Cracking the most recent PlayStation is not going to change things

• tripleee · 9 hours ago

  Most games today can be ripped day 1 and they're doing fine. Pirates are a tiny minority

• OptionX · 9 hours ago

  If you think this project, not even month old, can recompile gta6 to pc and it be in anyway playable on release have I got a bridge to sell you.

  • bathtub365 · 9 hours ago

    Yes, not exactly a compelling compatibility matrix so far: https://github.com/boykopovar/AnyPS5/blob/main/docs/user/COM... There’s also a big factual error in the submission title because the project readme has this caveat > System libraries: percentage of the functions known to the project so far (declared in core/libs/prx), not of every PS5 system function. The total grows as more functions are declared.

• vuurmot · 9 hours ago

  I think the replies to my comment are not realistic. The Goldilocks zone for earning revenue for movies & games were always: Day 1 earnings = Week 1 earnings = Year 1 earnings The revenue in this case is heavily protected by your IP NOT being copied in a single day, and that people want to experience the product together with their friends. When people talk about convenience, is there really any inconvenience in downloading a pirated game/movie on release day?

  • uurrnn · 9 hours ago

    Especially for GTA6. The most amount of money is riding on this. It's still going to be a lot if it's copied on day1, but there is no way it is near their projections.

• gchamonlive · 9 hours ago

  Do people pay only because there's no pirate alternative? Valve showed this with Steam, people pay for convenience and for good service quality. Piracy is an answer to lack of corporate respect about culture and art that's used to create a commercial product, which manifests in enshitification.

• para_parolu · 9 hours ago

  Check steam game sales

• singpolyma3 · 9 hours ago

  Everything has always been able to be ripped day 1. People pay for convenience or because it's expected, not because there's no other option

• xyst · 9 hours ago

  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.

• pitched · 9 hours ago

  Ads can still be served to pirates, especially if they’re product placements baked into the assets shipped.

• dgunay · 8 hours ago

  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.

• kristofferR · 7 hours ago

  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

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.

• gchamonlive · 9 hours ago

  It's already happening, every effort into preservation of what already exists is important

• vuurmot · 9 hours ago

  I honestly welcome cloud gaming. Action RPGs might be dead in the water, But there were many games suffering from data mining, and having their secrets revealed day 1. Bringing games to cloud gaming could restore the mystery in games

  • isatty · 9 hours ago

    Meh, overblown. Very easy to not go looking for that and just enjoy your games.

    • vuurmot · 9 hours ago

      "Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."

      • flaunf221 · 9 hours ago

        This relates to game design, not outside actions. Also if that's what you believe, players who start after day 1 will not have mystery. Even players who start day 1 but can't dedicate all of their time to the game will inevitably spoil themselves when they have to do anything else, meaning someone will progress farther than they and will share that info.

  • f3408fh · 9 hours ago

    This is saying you'd be ok with books being only permitted to be read at the library, behind a sealed kiosk screen, because otherwise people might post spoilers online.

    • vuurmot · 8 hours ago

      If the library is completely AI generated, and only the sealed kiosk screen contains (possibly) human-authored content, How does the equation change? I am saying I'd rather enjoy POSSIBLY human content, than AI generated ones. And if cloud gaming cannot deliver on this, I'd rather stop gaming altogether. The idea of consuming AI generated content is completely disgusting to me.

      • mrheosuper · 7 hours ago

        You should stop using internet. High chance that the code run the infrastructure you use is partly modified by LLM.

        • vuurmot · 7 hours ago

          A braindead comment, that can only be attributed to malice

          • kkarakk · 3 hours ago

            and saying ai generated content is all "worthless" and "disgusting" is not malicious? both are just signaling imo

• rhipitr · 9 hours ago

  Feel like eventually ai will get so good people will just autogenerate games just for themselves. Same for movies/shows/etc.

  • asdaqopqkq · 9 hours ago

    Already happening on insta and tiktok with genAI stuff, people are creating a lot of funny stuff

  • Forgeties79 · 9 hours ago

    Why on earth would anyone watch that nonsense? Who cares if it’s even cohesive. It’s the bedrock of “derivative.” Ugh I know the answer but it’s just sad. I don’t want all media to become cotton candy.

    • john01dav · 9 hours ago

      I could in principal see something that isn't clearly entirely derivative, like if a person takes their own original thought and uses generative AI to make it into a video instead of, for example, learning animation and animating it or finding (probably amateur) actors to film it with. This of course still has some derivative aspects that may be easier to avoid than in the non-generative-ai case, but it is also clearly distinct from a 100% generative AI case. For example, ever since roughly the mid 2010s when I finished Star Trek: Enterprise, I've been thinking about someone using some sort of generative AI to complete this series, once its good enough to be entirely convincing.

      • bevr1337 · 8 hours ago

        AI generated Star Trek is an oxymoron. Gene Roddenberry's ghost stirs the longer we even consider the idea. Two quotes from Star Trek "The Ultimate Computer" - a very prescient episode. KIRK There are certain things men must do to remain men. Your computer would take that away. --- BONES Compassion. That's the one thing no machine ever had. Maybe it's the one thing that keeps men ahead of them. Care to debate that, Spock? SPOCK No, Doctor. I simply maintain that computers are more efficient than human beings, not better.

        • ButlerianJihad · 8 hours ago

          There is an AI-generated YouTube series/channel called "TK-42 Greg" that follows the life of a hapless Star Wars stormtrooper as he pursues a career of menial jobs, unemployment and drifting about a galaxy far, far away. It's dumb and derivative and isn't getting a lot of laughs from me, but at the same time, it is freakishly realistic, and absolutely ripping off every character and scene and locale of the Lucas series. I don't know how long it will last against Disney's DMCA juggernaut, but the "Imperial HR Lady" is way funnier and she just has to throw on a turquoise necklace and grating accent. Speaking of self-vibe-coding games, I wouldn't see the point. When I was a younger boy, I did write games for myself, and it was an arduous project that was mostly aimed at teaching myself programming rather than gaming per se . And eventually the big didactic moments were hacking someone else's game code in terms of debugging and extending it, and that was more exciting than building my own from scratch. Also, copyright is an issue! If consumer AI could ignore copyright and just code me, say, "Freecell but it's Harry Potter" or "Put me in the cockpit of a Y-Wing video game!" then it'd be exciting. People pay big bucks and invest big bucks for in-universe games of certain franchises like that. But AI won't provide for the consumer in this way, ever. Much of the joy of gaming for me, is seeing a polished product that is well-balanced in terms of rules and fairness, and has good sound/graphic assets, and challenges or surprises me in novel ways as I go along. I don't think I would mind if someone else vibe-codes a game for me to play, if it's good enough and engaging, but it seems that designing/coding one for myself would feel empty and unfulfilling. And I wouldn't apply the same principle to utility software, but really I'd rather not invest a lot of time in building an office suite for myself, rather than just grabbing it off the shelf.

          • ndriscoll · 8 hours ago

            I've had AI make little learning games, coloring stories, etc for my kid. I and it absolutely will ignore copyright. So far it's never objected. It'll also happily reverse engineer binaries, extract art assets, whatever.

            • xyzsparetimexyz · 5 hours ago

              Why feed your child slop?

        • iand675 · 4 hours ago

          Huh? Maybe this is a reasonable take if you only consider the original series, but TNG heavily used holodecks as a form of entertainment, with computer-run characters factoring in heavily to plot advancement in the episodes. Moreover, the exploration of Data’s personhood as an android is like… incredibly pervasive throughout all of the seasons of the show.

    • FrinkleFrankle · 5 hours ago

      It really depends his good it is. There are so many shows where stories just don't pay off well. I could see an AI developing a show with a complex web of throughlines kept logically consistent and fleshed out.

    • alex43578 · 4 hours ago

      The most popular human-made media is all derivative. Look at a list of the top games and movies for the last 10 years: sequels, spinoffs, and adaptations. Call of Duty 27, the myriad sports franchises, Halo 8, Fast and Furious 11, a remake of some Disney movie, the latest Marvel-slop...

  • hebetude · 8 hours ago

    I know 10 year olds already doing this. It’s great. Remove the barrier to imagining your own games !

  • saturn8601 · 8 hours ago

    Well isn't Roblox kinda this? I play it all the time with my niece and nephew...it sucks, its enshittification to the max. Part of an entertainment property is you are devoting time to enjoying the creative process of someone who put in the effort to produce something polished and with effort. The end result is the culmination of all the work done (possibly years/decades) to get to that point and you are paying for the result of all that effort. Could a Roblox game be like that? Possibly but the incentives dont seem to be as aligned despite the democratizing force it has had. I am reminded of a scene from the Jobs movie where they were arguing Open vs Closed systems. This feels similar... [1]: https://youtu.be/TYvXOHAJTiU?t=81

  • unfitted2545 · 2 hours ago

    It's basically a drug at that point, you'll be hooked up to the pleasure machine

  • postexitus · 1 hour ago

    No, I will pirate autogenerated movies/shows/games. Not paying for that sht.

• xyst · 9 hours ago

  Have you even tried "cloud gaming"? It’s useless for any game that is latency sensitive (fps, moba, …). I have only had success with single player games.

  • vuurmot · 9 hours ago

    If revenues are going to suffer because of this, that is the way the industry will move towards

    • wincy · 9 hours ago

      But nobody will play it? Steam exists and all those games get pirated. You can’t force gamers to buy duds. I have a gigabit connection wired and found a cloud version of Control to be totally unplayable.

      • vuurmot · 9 hours ago

        It is in the realm of design to make games playable within the context of their technological limits. In this case, I could see games moving towards being turn-based i.e. online chess.

        • Rohansi · 6 hours ago

          Turn based games are relatively niche. Players would rather play an unresponsive FPS than switch to turn based games.

          • vuurmot · 5 hours ago

            I could imagine a Counter Strike RTS, Also one of the best selling games, Pokemon, is a turn-based game. Genres are design problems rather than descriptions No one thinks RuneScape is a "topdown RPG", rather than a "fantasy game with a lot of freedom and many things to do" The genre can be made secondary to the design, so I don't doubt game designers can make turn-based games widely appealing

      • greenavocado · 9 hours ago

        The gaming industry as you know it is dead. The only survivors will be the prolific sloppers who can outslop the hoi polloi.

    • xyst · 9 hours ago

      Revenues suffer because game studios and publishers make awful decisions. See the botched releases of Marathon (Bungie) and the more infamous examples — concord and split gate.

• wzdd · 9 hours ago

  Microsoft just cut their cloud gaming offering significantly ( https://kotaku.com/xbox-cloud-gaming-controller-microsoft-as... and https://kotaku.com/game-pass-will-start-capping-the-number-o... ) so that's not happening any time soon.

  • hmm37 · 8 hours ago

    Microsoft also made it significantly easier to put play their xbox games on the PC, even their xbox 360 games.

  • saturn8601 · 8 hours ago

    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"! :)

  • tomstockmail · 7 hours ago

    But they've just announced exclusive GTA VI streaming rights: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49987245

• nperez · 9 hours ago

  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.

  • abrookewood · 9 hours ago

    Surely no one playing competitive real-time games are doing it on a PS5?

    • ThatPlayer · 9 hours ago

      Basically all fighting game competitions are done on consoles

      • abrookewood · 8 hours ago

        Ahh .. yep. Completely forgot about that genre!

  • Foxhuls · 9 hours ago

    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.

    • throwaway314155 · 8 hours ago

      > at least on a wired connection There goes 95% of your market. If not more.

      • Foxhuls · 7 hours ago

        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.

        • ChoGGi · 7 hours ago

          If I as a person who only plays on local hardware; went to streaming tomorrow, do you think I would notice the difference? Or is it something you get used to like playing at 60hz, then going back to a PS2/etc at 30hz for awhile?

          • saghm · 7 hours ago

            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.

            • Foxhuls · 6 hours ago

              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.

              • saghm · 6 hours ago

                I did preface my comment with "I'm not sure if this is what they're talking about", because I didn't know if it was what you were talking about. I guess it's not.

                • Foxhuls · 6 hours ago

                  I know that you did and didn’t mean anything by my comment if it came across a certain way. I just thought it would be worth clarifying and sharing my experience with having done local and self hosted streaming previously versus the cloud streaming I’ve been doing in place of it.

          • Foxhuls · 6 hours ago

            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

    • nperez · 6 hours ago

      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.

  • saturn8601 · 8 hours ago

    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 they spend modestly and 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?

    • saghm · 7 hours ago

      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.

  • jogu · 1 hour ago

    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.

• lunar_rover · 9 hours ago

  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.

  • SchemaLoad · 9 hours ago

    I wonder if there is some hybrid where the graphics rendering and input processing happens on device but the brains of the game live on the server.

    • tapland · 9 hours ago

      Any MMORPG?

    • vuurmot · 8 hours ago

      At this point, code might be less valuable than art assets. Considering the economics, the graphics rendering would have to be shifted to the server too and output as video

      • dwood_dev · 2 hours ago

        The clock is ticking even for that. We're not far off from anything being able to be copied, including streaming only games. If it can be observed, a reasonable facsimile can be created. The reasonableness will increase over time.

    • sunaookami · 2 hours ago

      Gacha games do this, e.g. Genshin Impact. When you turn off your internet while playing a lot of game logic fails (e.g. damage calculation) before it tries to reconnect.

• killingtime74 · 9 hours ago

  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.

• sergiotapia · 8 hours ago

  It's already over. At the very least this will push for more internet connectivity and be good for PC gaming. Sony's greed has been incredible, let's just accelerate tbh

• creata · 8 hours ago

  Maybe they'll go streaming-only, but I'd at least wait until the Switch 2 is hacked before making that prediction.

• somenameforme · 8 hours ago

  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. [1] - https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-how-stadias-input-lag-compares...

  • ronsor · 7 hours ago

    Steam DRM is easy to bypass, but the convenience of one-click purchasing cannot be bypassed.

    • pigeons · 7 hours ago

      It could be, remember "Popcorn time" ?

      • fsloth · 5 hours ago

        Getting a dubious stream is far less risky than running a dubious binary. But maybe people would not care supporting bot networks and other maladies.

  • panopticon · 7 hours ago

    > 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.

    • lmz · 7 hours ago

      On the other hand one of the main advantages of console gaming was that you could resell the games after you are done. Now with the move to digital games, what is the advantage of buying a console when Steam has regular discounts and a massive catalog?

      • tommica · 6 hours ago

        And the fact that you put in a disk and got to play, instead of waiting for an update the next 2 hours.

        • bspinner · 4 hours ago

          Oh boy, that time is long gone. Today you wait an hour for the game to be installed from disk and then for the day 1 patch to be downloaded and installed.

      • wongarsu · 2 hours ago

        Lower up-front cost because of the subsidized hardware. Also games exclusive to your favorite console I don't own a console, but the offer of saving money now at the expense of spending more over time is still a solid business model

        • swiftcoder · 1 hour ago

          > Lower up-front cost because of the subsidized hardware I do not believe any current-gen console is subsidised? Though old stock thereof is probably cheaper because they locked the component prices in before RAM prices started going crazy

    • somenameforme · 6 hours ago

      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.

    • pmarreck · 4 hours ago

      Steam Deck/Rog Ally/etc.?

      • paavohtl · 4 hours ago

        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).

        • avhception · 4 hours ago

          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.

          • paavohtl · 4 hours ago

            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.

        • eptcyka · 3 hours ago

          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.

          • gambiting · 1 hour ago

            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.

            • cherryteastain · 27 minutes ago

              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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_TrueAudio

              • gambiting · 21 minutes ago

                I am aware. But the question was what can the current generation do that the last one didn't - well, PS4 couldn't so that, PS5 can. And because it's built right into Wwise a lot of games support it(whether it's wired in correctly in them is a different question, but I know all games I've worked on had it)

      • altmanaltman · 4 hours ago

        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

        • piltdownman · 2 hours ago

          Steam Machine was supposed to be their next-gen, but it was dead on arrival price wise. 2TB w/Controller is about $1500 and should be closer to $850.

    • flohofwoe · 3 hours ago

      OTH: cheaper games, more aggressive sales, and modding(!).

    • piltdownman · 2 hours ago

      (1) - Youtube or AI (2) - Not remotely the case (3) - PS5 Pro @ 1k was easily matched by an equivalent BOM-cost PC until the GPU/RAM shortage //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-...

  • MBCook · 7 hours ago

    They’re not a hardware company*. Sony and Nintendo are. MS is kinda questionable. * Yes they’ve started making their own but it’s hardly a primary business.

    • notpushkin · 3 hours ago

      Console makers don’t make money on selling the consoles, they’re making money on selling games.

      • TeMPOraL · 55 minutes ago

        Just another example proving that "razor & blades" business model itself should've been banned the moment it was conceived.

  • vlovich123 · 6 hours ago

    You’d be surprised with how much lag is actually tolerable when you have good prediction.

    • asdff · 5 hours ago

      In an online FPS though?

      • kgabis · 1 hour ago

        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.

  • mschuster91 · 4 hours ago

    > 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.

    • lesspassiveobse · 2 hours ago

      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.

    • sitzkrieg · 2 hours ago

      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

  • Agingcoder · 4 hours ago

    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.

    • Capricorn2481 · 3 hours ago

      I'm on 1gb/s and it's still pretty terrible to me

      • sitzkrieg · 2 hours ago

        gb/s is a measure of bandwidth, not latency. but thats just the thing, the ping time is too high for any game of interest if its > 0.

    • Hikikomori · 3 hours ago

      Latency isn't great, but it doesn't matter for many games.

      • littlecranky67 · 2 hours ago

        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).

        • Hikikomori · 1 hour ago

          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.

      • sitzkrieg · 2 hours ago

        it matters in every single game i play.

        • Hikikomori · 1 hour ago

          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.

    • IslandRebel · 2 hours ago

      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.

      • 0x073 · 1 hour ago

        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)

        • IslandRebel · 1 hour ago

          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.

  • Sleaker · 3 hours ago

    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.

    • x3ro · 2 hours ago

      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

      • piltdownman · 2 hours ago

        You mean like the plethora of workstations from HP and Compaq with Nvidia Quadro FX 1500M or similar platforms?

  • PetitPrince · 3 hours ago

    > 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.

    • askonomm · 1 hour ago

      Yup I can see that. My PC games always have a lot more issues and glitches than any of my PS5 games have had.

  • alias_neo · 2 hours ago

    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.

• Pannoniae · 8 hours ago

  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.

• monocasa · 8 hours ago

  Then they'd have RAM as their own capex cost rather than pushing that on to the consumers.

• rvz · 8 hours ago

  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.

• RajT88 · 7 hours ago

  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.

  • nvme0n1p1 · 7 hours ago

    Don't forget PC gaming. Steam will keep growing, without even having to try that hard, simply because they: 1. already have their foot in the door 2. are not overwhelmingly hostile towards their customers