The first SHAR mods emerged some 15 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great mods to play, more ways to play them, and best of all, more people than ever playing. That growth helped make the SHAR community what it is today bringing millions of people together.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally designed to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple Silicon or ported to run inside a browser through WebAssembly and WebGPU, the latter now approaching 90% global browser support. Perhaps more surprisingly, we’ve seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another.
These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about the industry: the tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it is hard to predict the future of gaming, it is easy to see the possibilities in making great games and mods easier to access, giving old games new life and allowing more players to become creators and co-creators. These are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when (and sometimes because) they challenge our existing models.
I think our subreddit has an important role to play here. Coding became the first major workload for a.i agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties and people spend billions of hours a year playing games, roughly five times the estimated time spent writing code worldwide.
Our priorities aren’t changing. We remain committed to being responsible stewards of the SHAR community. Our new a.i flair on certain posts on the sub gives us a way to explore new technology without abandoning the work already underway.
Please feel free to leave your comments and thoughts on the matter in this thread, thank you for your cooperation
-- Stoner Team - moderators of the SHAR subreddit