This has nothing to do with piracy. Rewind the clock 20 years and doom's source code release meant even more than AI code de-obfuscation. The art and assets are still copyrighted. The ability for people to port doom to everything under the sun has meant more sales of the game, not less.

If every gamedev in the world released their source code tomorrow, no one would lose out on any sales, but the public sure would benefit from ports and mods etc.

The only thing that might get lost is microtransaction locked cosmetic bullshit, which frankly needs to die anyway. But even that wouldn't get lost necessarily because of authoritative servers and terms of service.

It means one of two likely pivots if you ask me: the resurgence of highly locked down consoles with hardware protecting the data, or - and this is the most likely path - devs will just resort to making online only games, where lots of the content is streamed in while playing (I mean assets, not the display output - though don't doubt the latter, if it ever becomes feasible enough I'd posit that devs would migrate to that as well).

Think a "live-events" driven game where every pre-determined period of time you download the assets for that period.

Fortnite-ification of gaming, basically. :(

Cracks have always existed? You could torrent GTA 5 on release day, or at least the single player part of it.

If they can clone games with AI so readily (actually it takes a lot of tokens but still less than it was to develop) then I'd think they could put that into developing their own.

Of course, like you said, if someone could just copy it and put it out there as soon as you release it then there is no motivation to make anything if you need to at least recoup your costs.

then there is no more AAA games industry

Oh no

Next do Hollywood and the music industry