Experts Believe GTA 6 Is Safe From AI Cloning, but Vibe-Coding Is Still a Big Deal for Games

Something new is happening in the world of video games. On that much at least, we can mostly agree.

A new generation of agentic AI coding tools has unleashed a tsunami of mash-ups and ports and reverse-engineered remakes that have been generating nonstop headlines over the past six weeks. You know the ones: Halo playable in a browser. Minecraft playable inside Twitter. Insomniac’s Spider-Man web-slinging through Rocksteady’s Arkham City.

What we seem much less able to agree on is what this all means, whether it’s good or bad, and what might come next. For some, this is a huge technological breakthrough, while for others it’s the dawn of a slop era for gaming.

This uncertainty is made more tense by the fact that these stories poke at some of the most raw and sensitive spots in gaming discourse: AI ethics, game preservation, the games industry labour market and its endless cycles of layoffs, and the end of disc-based game ownership. Depending on which lens you’re looking through, you might see a story about an AI port as part of a much larger narrative about environmentally ruinous datacenters, a new era of game preservation, or a welcome middle finger to a platform holder that wants to sell you a code in a box.

The result is that everyone’s wound up, but for very different reasons. So, to try to figure out what’s going on, where it might go from here, and whether the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6 is about to be torpedoed by it all, I spent hours talking with a host of smart and well-placed people representing a range of perspectives on this story.

“How many cease and desist letters do we need to send out?”

As the head of Nightdive Studios, Stephen Kick knows a thing or two about ports and reverse engineering. Since 2012, he and his colleagues have produced dozens of high-profile remasters, including System Shock 2, Star Wars: Dark Forces, and the upcoming Thief: The Dark Project Remastered. “Yeah, AI has definitely been the topic of conversation,” Kick explains.

For Nightdive, there’s clear utility in a tool that can take the opaque, machine-readable code of an existing game and reverse-engineer it into something you can edit and enhance and tinker with. This is exactly what models like Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 seem to be really quite good at, and it’s how vibe-coders have been creating eye-catching clips of Mario clobbering Margit The Fell Omen. While Kick stresses that “for the past year or so we’ve not been using it”, he does see the technology as a promising accelerant for the kind of work his teams do.

Kick suspects that those vibe-coded remakes, ports, and mash-ups, however, will be generating some serious anxiety for bigger players in the industry right now. “I can’t even imagine what the lawyers are going through right now with all the major publishers.” He imagines a flurry of panic: “What do we do? How many cease and desist letters do we need to send out? How can we capitalize on this? How can we integrate this into our own business model right now?”

And he suspects that the scope of the impending clampdown may be much more far-reaching than a few takedown notices – it could represent yet another attempt to redefine what game ownership looks like. “One of the things that I foresee is that game developers will no longer be actually giving you a copy of the game,” Kick says. “You’ll have to stream the game now because they don’t want any of those files out at all because anybody anywhere can take them and reverse engineer them in a matter of hours.”

“The bottom line for Grand Theft Auto 6”

So what does all this mean for the biggest game of the year, Grand Theft Auto 6? A succession of breathless commentators have predicted GTA 6 will be one of the biggest entertainment launches of all time, so it’s fair to say that Rockstar and parent company Take-Two Interactive have a lot at stake. You might imagine they’d be pretty concerned about launching a console exclusive during a period where that exclusivity now means nothing to those with access to AI. That’s certainly on the mind of Obbe Vermeij, former Rockstar North technical director.

“I think I would be concerned, if I was Rockstar, that somebody would just take the PS5 version and get AI to change it to PC, which won’t be won’t be as good as their effort, but it could still also hurt their sales,” he told Rock Paper Shotgun in a recent interview.

Vermeij’s concerns aren’t based on nothing. “People are playing Demon’s Souls on PC and it’s a PlayStation 5 exclusive,” explained Digital Foundry’s Richard Leadbetter during an interview with The Games Business. “It’s choppy, it looks horrible, but Marvel’s Wolverine is running on a PC. So there’s all of that to contend with.”

Leadbetter noted that Anthropic recently attempted to put a stop to vibe-coded clones through a server-side “block” update to its Claude AI agent, potentially after facing legal pressure.

“But let’s be clear here: the genie’s out of the bottle,” he said. “And Anthropic isn’t the only player in the game. They might have issues with all of this stuff, but let’s say the Chinese models are eight months away from doing the same thing. What’s going to stop them? OpenAI, what’s going on there? I’d say it’s problematic.”

All that considered, I chatted with James McWhirter and Liam Deane, a pair of senior analysts in the games division at market research and intelligence firm Omdia. They’ve both been tracking the development of these technologies, so I asked them directly: will vibe-coders ultimately bring GTA 6 to PC before the official port?

According to the analysts: nah, probably not. “The bottom line for Grand Theft Auto 6 is that it’s too early for this technology to seriously disrupt the game’s launch,” says Deane. “Even if someone does get the PS5 version running on PC, in the short term that’s not going to be a good experience. It’s going to be an interesting tech demo for some people if it does happen, but I think realistically it’s not going to be a way of playing a game that will be attractive to 99% of players.”

“If GTA 6 was launching a year from now, the picture might be quite different. But it’s just about getting out in time.”

If all that’s true, you might wonder why reports currently point to GTA 6 launching for PC as early as the first quarter of 2027. That would be a pretty speedy turnaround, given that GTA 5 took more than 18 months to launch on PC. Has Take-Two moved that date forward, as some have speculated, in a bid to beat AI ports to the punch?

Again, the analysts are dubious. “It was probably a reaction to the memory crisis more than anything,” explains McWhirter. “GTA 6 was meant to be the game that would help drive sales of PS5 and Xbox Series X and S, but instead those consoles have become supply constrained because of shortages of key components – namely memory and storage. That means that Rockstar needs to look at ways of expanding their audience, which means the PC release suddenly becomes a lot more important in terms of broadening the addressable market for the game.”

In other words, Rockstar already has a whole host of reasons to bring GTA 6 to PC pretty darn fast. If that does come to pass (and it’s worth remembering that a PC release hasn’t even been announced yet) it isn’t necessarily a symptom of AI heebie-jeebies.

“What can an indie developer do?”

So everything is actually fine and dandy and everybody is getting worked up over nothing? Not quite. Because while agentic AI might not be able to get GTA 6 running on PC right now, it can certainly clone an indie game in record time, and even beat a small studio to market based on their own prerelease demo. This issue has turned Steam Next Fest – which usually features thousands of playable demos from unreleased games – into a huge risk for independent developers.

To find out more about how AI is affecting small studios, I reached out to Rami Ismail. As well as working as a consultant and speaker, he’s perhaps best known as the co-founder of Vlambeer, the two-person studio that was responsible for Nuclear Throne, Ridiculous Fishing, and Luftrausers. I wondered whether the threat of cloning might be affecting how indies think about showcasing their games. His answer is a firm yes.

“Developers are arguing about whether we can still do the thing that players want us to do, which is to post about our games early,” Ismail tells me. “Because there are now companies that have AI agents that are scouring social media. These people aren’t even doing it themselves – their AI agents are scouring social media, searching for games that are gaining momentum. If they find one, the AI will ask itself whether it can clone it well, and if the answer is yes it will clone the game.”

“What are we supposed to do on our end? What can an indie developer do?”

You might argue that indie developers could make use of generative AI themselves to develop their own games more quickly and with less financial risk. It’s certainly true that it’s hard for tiny studios to turn down tools that might give them any kind of advantage. And as the use of gen-AI becomes more widespread, it will take more and more conviction to remain committed to AI-free workflows in an ultra-competitive (and increasingly clone-filled) market. But on the other hand, Ismail tells me, indies that make use of generative AI will be profoundly vulnerable to changes in the cost and availability of those tools.

He asks me to imagine an indie dev who uses an AI coding tool to build a feature for their game. The resulting code is hard to parse and extremely long, but it works. “That isn’t much of a problem because right now tokens are subsidized, and people can pay something like $99 for a Claude or OpenAI subscription,” Ismail explains. “But now, imagine there’s a bug, and you need to fix it. And imagine the AI company goes, okay, now the $99 subscription is no longer there. That’s now a $1,400 subscription, and you pay X amount of money per token.” Big studios with corporate backing might be able to soak up the cost or negotiate bespoke pricing, but indies would be in a much more precarious position.

And if your game’s codebase is sprawling and no longer especially human-readable, you’re left with little choice but to suck it up and pay the extra money. Or fold.

If you’ve read Cory Doctorow’s writing on the subject – or just used the internet at any point in the last decade – you might recognise the scenario Ismail’s describing as a textbook example of ‘enshittification’, the process by which a service goes from prioritising the needs of its users to ever more aggressively prioritising shareholder value at the expense of all else. “So this is all an incredible replication of the rideshare model, where you just undercut the taxis until the taxis are gone, and then you enshittify your product,” Ismail says. “But it’s being speedrun at a scale I’ve never seen before.”

“Do you want to sell your codebase?”

As for what comes next, there’s uncertainty and disagreement here, too.

At the start of this piece, I explained that Stephen Kick foresaw a future where cloud streaming is the only way to access your games. When I put this idea to Omdia, I find they’re sceptical. “Cloud may not necessarily be the end-goal for publishers as it remains unproven as a delivery vehicle for premium triple-A console and PC games,” says McWhirter. “But platform holders and publishers will take game security more seriously. For instance, it’s highly likely PlayStation is using cutting-edge frontier AI models to identify vulnerabilities in its console’s firmware and patch them before the modding community can exploit them.”

If one thing feels like a safe bet, it’s that these tools are only going to get more powerful. They’ve developed at a seemingly exponential rate in a short span of time, after all. Of the people I spoke to, Rami Ismail is the odd one out in expressing scepticism here. He believes there might actually be much less headroom for improvement than you might think. “We could arguably still make AI more efficient. That is the thing we can do, but we’ve already fed pretty much the entire corpus of human civilization into these devices, right? There’s nothing left.”

“The only thing that I’m seeing right now that could meaningfully increase the corpus of these datasets is if these AI companies start hiring – directly or indirectly via proxies or middlemen – the people that they’re displacing from the labor market to make stuff directly for AI,” Ismail tells me. “And we’re actually seeing this among indie developers. There’s a massive wave of emails that we’re all getting that say, ‘hey, do you want to sell your codebase?'”

So, if there’s one thing we can say with certainty about the intersection of AI and gaming, it’s that the future is probably going to be messy and weird. At the time of writing, Anthropic has just taken its first steps to restrict Claude’s ability to clone video games. Whether that dam will hold very much remains to be seen. My sense is that this change won’t do much to change the opinion of any of the interviewees I spoke with, whether they’re excited or depressed by the idea of an AI future.

“As a creator, I think for me it’s very clear,” Ismail tells me. “I really like my work. And so I like doing my work. I just like programming, and if that makes me slower, then I will be like the artisan table maker that sells slightly more expensive tables than everybody else, right?” In the months and years ahead, we’ll see what exactly kinds of projects, pricing models, and platform holder countermeasures players are willing to support or tolerate. And which they won’t.

James Nouch is a freelance writer who has written for Rock Paper Shotgun and GamesRadar+ among many other video game websites and magazines.