indie games as a canary for ai software

whats happening

• llms have made reverse engineering way cheaper, so people are duping indie games almost as soon as they come out
  • devs have duped other devs games just from the trailer
  • if a playtest binary leaks, someone can reverse engineer it and ship a copy before you launch, so devs are avoiding playtesting
  • cloners dupe games onto roblox straight away and take that audience, so some devs release their own roblox clone on launch day
  • so devs are obfuscating their code with bioweapon and nuclear weapon terminology, so llms refuse to touch it

why are games a canary for software?

• there are so many game devs and so much tooling that games are one of the most competitive markets
  • so games hit this stuff before the rest of software does

what does this mean?

• anything deployed locally can be reverse engineered
  • so mobile and desktop apps are at risk
• code on a server cant be reverse engineered
  • so more software might move server side to stay safe
• devs cant playtest without risking a leak
  • so a service for safe playtesting would be good
  • a way to verify playtesters would have a good network effect
• protection against reverse engineering would be good too