AI Is Rewriting Games While Ownership Quietly Disappears

AI is flattening game preservation from both ends. It is speeding up reverse engineering while making the communities behind that work harder to sustain, just as digital licenses make access to finished games easier to revoke.

One of the largest video game decompilation communities, decomp.dev, has begun sunsetting its website. Administrator @encounter said the community aspect of reverse engineering games has been “broken” by reliance on AI models and their speed, turning a process built around discovery into what he called a “hollow numbers game.”

Decompilation takes a game’s executable code and changes it back into its original form. An operating system reads compiled code to run the game, while the original code is normally written in a language such as C++; recovering it requires trial and error, coding knowledge, and plenty of patience — qualities that do not fit neatly into a race for completion percentages.

Decomp.dev was created as a fun way to gamify that work, letting users watch their progress through a game’s code tick upward over time. The rise of AI-driven vibe coding has created decompilers that can finish projects in a fraction of the time required manually, but speed has changed what the projects are for.

Decompilation is more complex than emulation. An emulator recreates the original environment needed to execute a ROM, while decompiled code rebuilds the game from the ground up and lets it use modern hardware, including changes such as higher frame rates, altered controls, and other modifications.

That work also supports research and preservation. Complete code can reveal mechanics, hit boxes, and RNG — random number generation — giving speedrunners and curious players a view behind the curtain. With physical media giving way to digital access, decompilation can preserve games when original source code is gone; a GameCube decompilation of Animal Crossing, for example, lets its calendar move past 2030.

@encounter said AI can help when used with “the right guidance, human input, and code reviews.” The problem, he argued, is a group of “bad actors” abusing open-source projects in “increasingly troublesome ways” by forking unfinished work, using AI to complete it, and releasing ports without helping discover the code.

The result is an influx of “drive-by contributions from folks who have put no effort into making sure the contributions are good,” alongside “half-baked” and “barely-functional” ports. As @encounter put it, decompilation is primarily about understanding how games work; ports are fun, but they are not the sole reason a decompilation exists.

AI can port games, but ownership remains fragile

Recent experiments show what AI-assisted porting can achieve when paired with human testing. Redditor u/FloatingFalafel released TVPort, an open-source fork of the nxnative toolkit that recompiles Switch and Switch 2 games for Apple TV 4K using a Mac, with Claude Opus 5.5 used for the project.

TVPort reportedly backs up save files to Mac or iCloud and lets users choose 30 fps or 60 fps. Super Mario Odyssey is said to run at 60 fps with “very slight stutters on occasion and some audio issues around waterfalls specifically,” while Animal Crossing: New Horizons appears limited to 30 fps.

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom needs more work because testing triggered thermal throttling on Apple TV. “In order to get games like TOTK running, there are serious diagnostics and even partial rewrites of the game’s engine as a patch in the program,” u/FloatingFalafel stated, adding that heavier games like TOTK might never run on the Apple TV 4K 3rd-gen.

TVPort contains no game files, so users must provide their own legally obtained files from their own Switch cartridges. Anthropic has since instructed Claude Code not to recreate existing games, but the wider question remains: who gets credit when a tool accelerates work that began inside a community?

The question matters because buying a game no longer guarantees lasting access. Every major storefront sells revocable licenses, and the disc that once served as a fallback is disappearing — a tidy arrangement for platforms, less so for anyone who assumed “buy” meant “keep.”

Anyone who paid $99.99 for the NBA 2K25 All-Star Edition at launch in September 2024 gets a little over two years of MyCareer before 2K shuts down its servers on December 31. The game left digital storefronts on October 30, 2026; owners can still redownload it and play offline modes, but MyCareer and MyTeam will disappear while Play Now, MyNBA, The W, and MyWNBA remain.

The Crew shows the harsher outcome. Ubisoft shut down its servers in March 2024, and player reports said the game was moved into an “inactive games” section in Ubisoft Connect that no longer allowed downloads, even though the racer had also been sold on disc.

Sony’s license agreement says software is “licensed to you, not sold,” and an August 2026 court filing argued that “reasonable consumers” would not be misled into thinking otherwise. Sony will stop making disc-based PlayStation games in January 2028, while the boxed version of Grand Theft Auto VI contains a download code instead of a disc — a box with no game inside, just plastic waiting for its moment.

Policy offers disclosures, not permanence

California’s AB 2426 took effect in January 2025 and bars digital storefronts from using “buy” or “purchase” without telling customers they receive a license. The rule does not stop publishers from shutting down games, and a proposed class action filed against Sony in June argues that PlayStation Store purchase buttons violate it.

Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY) announced a bill in October that would have the FTC treat purchased games as owned and require an offline mode before servers close. “If you pay for it, you own it,” Torres told Kotaku; in Europe, the Stop Killing Games campaign collected more than 1.29 million valid signatures, but the European Commission chose talks with publishers and consumer groups over a new law.

There are working alternatives. GOG told customers in July that every purchased game would come with an offline installer that could be kept without the store’s permission, unlike Nintendo’s Switch 2 game-key cards, which require downloads, online checks, and the card remaining inserted.

Itch.io has added a “No AI” browsing filter, cutting displayed projects from more than 1.77 million to less than 425,000, and says excessive automatically generated content counts as spam. Steam has disclosure rules but no store filter, leaving players with faster AI tools, weaker community trust, and licenses that can vanish when the servers do.

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