Weapons Of Mass Disruption
In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing business models. To explore these possibilities, I've asked Scott to stand-up XBOX LABS, a small group of game makers, engineers and scientists whose job is to turn emerging ideas into things our players and developers can experience. We'll build in the open, learn from what people do, and measure success by whether more people are playing and creating.
Credit to Xbox for a) paying attention to emerging trends and b) being prepared to disrupt their own platform.
But where does it leave developers?
All barriers to entry (console access, distribution access, engine access, asset access, time/cost to make) are gone.The result is many games are now commoditized.
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The market is flooded with copies of your game that swamp the algorithm with lookalike thumbnails and gameplay. Your competitors just have to price at or below you to earn a customer because they have zero marginal cost.
You have no defense, it's the equivalent of having a business making screws. We don't make screws in America anymore because Chinese factories can make them for a fraction of the price, and they're generic with no particular defense or reason to buy one brand over another.
We don't want to think of games like screws, but now they are.
When the levees broke...
Navok continues:
An additional lesson from Clayton [Christensen] for game developers is that the market doesn't necessarily reward the effort required to produce something. It rewards the value customers perceive relative to the alternatives available to them.Competitive advantages in games increasingly have to come from things harder to replicate: community, distribution, brand/known IP, network effects, game complexity and innovation that outpaces the commoditization of your moat.
GTA6, for example, has many of those advantages (notably the game is so big that AI cannot easily reproduce it).
For many game developers, the basis of competition will shift away from any form of creative work that anyone can instantly copy. You will need to find a new moat.
That doesn't mean you shouldn't make games. Now is the best time to do so with AI making it so cheap and affordable. But think about how you can develop a moat for your game that isn't based on assets or design that cannot quickly/easily be copied.
This could be, for example, forming a copyright around unique IP that you can use to do takedowns. Generic fish and visuals do not work. Unique fish and visuals do. Even the influencer who first generated Tung Tung Tung Sahur, the AI-made Brainrot, gets his pound of flesh from Roblox games trying to use the character.
Dylan Collins on the moment that game developers became game creators:
Easy (ish) game decompiling is basically allowing me to remix games. I'm finally at the point where I can take my favourite games of all time and just make them Batman versions. Wild.
Collins goes on to identify the winners: UGC platforms with scale, gaming multi-channel networks, and next gen community intelligence layers that make it easier for brands, creators and publishers to capture signal.
Worth noticing what he reaches for first. Not Brainrot but Batman.
Cosmic Book News reporting on X:
Skydance plans on licensing its IPs so fans can create their own AI projects. Then Skydance will let those fans/creators use their platforms to promote and release them. Easy money. Creators/fans will be able to do their own Batman, Superman etc, then Skydance will get the licensing fees and help make it go viral, release etc.
Yours truly in After the Games Industry: 15 theses on post-industrial playful media: 11. Your IP is now an API.
The world is the durable asset; the experience is a pop-up inside it. In an age of game decompilation, everything is a remix: source code and assets are raw material for fans. Worldbuilding isn't just lore - it's the aesthetics, status signals and social codes that turn fandoms into living spaces. Give players, partners and AI agents the code, tools and permissions to play in your sandbox, or they'll build their own.