One of the largest websites dedicated to video game decompilation, Decomp.dev, has announced the winding down of its core activities. According to the project's creator, the development of artificial intelligence and the misuse of AI tools have led to a community split and turned collaborative development into a race for quick results.
Decomp.dev was a catalog of game decompilation projects, allowing users to track their progress and find teams working on restoring source code. The site's creator, known by the nickname @encounter, reported that the main catalog and the ability to add new projects have already been disabled. However, existing project pages and historical data will remain accessible.
According to @encounter, artificial intelligence can significantly accelerate decompilation when used responsibly and ethically. The problem is that some developers take unfinished open-source projects, create forks, and try to complete the work with AI, investing little in quality control of the results.
Meanwhile, different teams hold different views on the use of neural networks. Some refuse them for legal or ethical reasons, while others use AI independently but are unwilling to accept unverified changes from third-party participants.
Such hostile forks contribute little meaningful to existing projects and destroy the fabric of our community.
Another problem has been the proliferation of so-called static recompilations and simplified PC ports. According to @encounter, modern AI services allow for relatively quick creation of basic game versions for running on computers, but such solutions do not necessarily imply a full restoration of the original program's logic and do not always allow for adding new features.
As a result, some developers who have spent significant time decompiling a game find that other participants release hasty and subpar ports, using the results of their work.
The creator of Decomp.dev also noted that the original goal of decompilation is gradually blurring. Historically, such projects were created not only to run old games on modern devices but also to study their internal structure, research the software solutions of original developers, and restore the principles of game code operation.
AI-generated ports are often called decompilations, although their authors may not understand how the program works. According to @encounter, such a misrepresentation harms the community and devalues the research component of its work.