One of the biggest game decompilation sites is closing because AI has ‘broken the community aspect’
“Bad actors” are abusing open source decomps in “increasingly troublesome ways”, it says
One of the biggest sites dedicated to video game decompilations is sunsetting due to the growth of AI.
In recent years, fan developers have been taking on a number of ‘decompilation’ projects, in which they take an existing game and reverse-engineer it into readable code.
These decompilations – which are technically legal because the developers do not use any leaked content or copyrighted assets, and require players to provide their own legally-sourced ROMs – open up the ability to improve games further with support for higher frame rates, widescreen and ultrawide aspect ratios, dual-stick controls and other user-made mods.
The growth of AI has led to issues, however, with the community divided on whether using AI for these projects is a positive step (because it makes it much quicker) or a negative one.
Now the website Decomp.dev, which indexes decompilations and tracks those projects currently in progress, will be ‘sunsetting’, as announced by its creator @encounter.
In a statement posted on the site’s homepage, @encounter notes that while they don’t believe AI is the main issue in itself, because when used properly and ethically it “can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way”, the “community aspect of decompilation has been broken” by people using AI in more questionable ways.
“Our projects have always been open source to encourage contributions and to benefit the community as a whole,” they wrote. “Bad actors have been abusing this in increasingly troublesome ways.”
@example explained that some people have been taking existing decompilation projects which are currently in progress, forking them and “finishing” them with AI.
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“Every project works differently,” they wrote. “Some may not want to use AI for legal or ethical reasons, and others may be okay with AI, or use AI themselves, but do not want drive-by contributions from folks who have put no effort into making sure the contributions are good.
“The bottom line is that these kinds of hostile forks put little to no effort into meaningfully contributing to existing projects, tearing apart our community fabric.”
They also noted that anyone with a subscription to an AI service can now make a basic port or ‘static recompilation’ which functions at a basic level, but doesn’t make it possible to add any new features.
“Compared to the decompilation process itself, porting is relatively easy, especially with the established tools written by talented humans,” they wrote. “While community members put in the effort to decompile a game, opportunists have frequently raced to release a half-baked, barely-functional port from it.”
Finally, they stated that one of the main reasons for decompiling games was to learn and research how they were put together, and that too many people using AI to create instant PC ports are calling them decompilations when in reality they have no understanding of how the code works.
“For years, decompilation communities attempted to establish that decompilation is primarily for research,” they wrote. “We love these games and want to understand how they work, and to uncover the mysteries that the original developers left behind.
“That’s not to say that ports aren’t fun too, they’re just not the sole reason a decompilation exists. Sloptubers and subreddits like /r/decomps have done immense damage here, freely using ‘decomp’ to mean ‘PC port’.”
The race to churn out decomps “is now causing more harm than good”
@example noted that the site – which lists numerous in-progress decompilation projects and includes progress bars showing how far along they are – was originally designed as a motivational tool for developers, but has now turned into a high score table by people rushing out AI-assisted ports.
“Decomp.dev was originally designed to gamify decompilation – watching the progress go up was a fun way to stay motivated when every fraction of a percent took real human effort,” they explained.
“Today, that same idea has warped decompilation into a hollow numbers game, exacerbated by folks who just want to burn tokens to make number go up or ‘port game to PC’, all else be damned.
“While the increased attention has brought in genuine folks who want to learn and contribute meaningfully, I believe that decomp.dev serving as a public index and leaderboard is now causing more harm than good.”
The site will continue to track existing projects and will “serve individual project pages and historical data”, but the main index of decompilations and the ability to add new projects have now been disabled.
@example stressed again that while AI “can help tremendously when used correctly”, too many people are using it for “slop”, which “comes in many forms, is hard to define and even harder to moderate”.
“As a sole hobbyist, I don’t have the energy (or desire) to define what makes a ‘good’ decompilation and enforce that consistently across the hundreds of projects on the site,” they concluded.
