AI-assisted development is bringing old games to platforms we'd never have thought possible. That's exciting, but the growing flood of unfinished ports is beginning to raise an uncomfortable question: how many of these games are actually worth playing?
I would rather read a human-translated book, than a machine-translated one
Yeah and that is important: You might prefere that. But there are also people who do not speak or read English or other foreign languages and whose mother tongue is kind of obscure with not that many native speakers. For them this book they want to read is not available in a human-translated version. Machine translation gives them the ability to access the book. Nothing to complain about here.
In this case: There seem to be not that many people around with the skills and the interest to do those ports manually. So the deal here is “AI version” vs. “Nothing”. You are free to chose “nothing”, but I really do not understand why you would complain here.
It’s not like there’s nobody around to decompile and subsequently port games. Up until a short while ago there was a community of decompilers that ultimately shut down because there were too many people forking ongoing projects just to shit out a slop port of the things they were working on. It’s not as simple as “AI porting games to obscure platforms”, it’s also a lot of “AI taking existing work, slopping it to the finish line and then flooding the market”. The market is flooded with machine translations of the same book.
Check out https://decomp.dev/
Machine translation gives them access to the book; does that mean we should create dozens of machine translations of every book out there, for every possible language?