Software engineers are devoid of copyright and trademark laws and want everything to $0 and will become the new starving artists without knowing it.
Don't be surprised to see far more mass layoffs in the games industry.
Maybe putting some pressure on making games that are actually new and different isn't a bad thing.
I don't think you do. But please continue.
> Maybe putting some pressure on making games that are actually new and different isn't a bad thing.
That's not the point. It is what comes afterwards and software engineers cannot have it both ways.
This will make game studios move to world models with the real game being never released, but only simulated and streamed to you.
So let's see what happens.
Also, video game programmers are already starving artists comparatively. To many people want to make video games to exploitation is rife. Only publishers benefit from your rhetoric. At least artists get royalties
In this case, the user is distributing the ROM which is illegal. But the method to make it work on the web is fair use. The legal way to do it would be a website where users “insert” their own rom and the website simply lets you play that ROM on the web.
How? The ISOs/ROMs were already preserved and playable on emulators on newer platforms
So this is just an emulator with extra steps. The kind of bad emulator that requires game-specific patches instead of getting the emulation correct to begin with, and is embedding the emulator into a binary together with the game. Absolute slop.
There's kind of a bitter lesson variant with AI coding where the work to make a simple, consistent, flexible, DRY platform or library isn't really worth it when anyone can press a button and get a variant customized to their needs in minutes.
People playing the game don't care about the elegance of the emulator, and if there is a bug in the slop, they can just have their AI fix it immediately and keep playing.
You would at least have a point if people were slopping out emulators for things that didn't exist but, surprise surprise, we still don't have a Switch 2 emulator. Almost like this entire notion is a complete fraud and all it can do is regurgitate existing code poorly.
Feels slightly pedantic to point this out, but this describes an emulation stack. A lot of emulators are already doing some kind of lift+JIT on the target's machine code (just not through WASM)
doublerabbit•1h ago