decomp.dev Is Sunsetting, Saying AI ‘Bad Actors’ Have Broken the Decompilation Community

decomp.dev, the website that tracks how far along the big game decompilation projects are, has announced it is sunsetting, effective immediately. Its maintainer says AI has broken the community side of the hobby, and that the site’s public index and leaderboard now do more harm than good.

If you have played a native PC port of an N64, GameCube or PS2 classic in the last few years, there is a good chance the project behind it showed up on decomp.dev, with a progress bar creeping towards 100%.

What happened

According to the statement, as reported by Time Extension, the problem is not AI tools as such. The maintainer accepts that, with the right human guidance and code review, AI can speed decompilation up a lot. The issue is what has come with that speed:

• People taking other teams’ open source work, running it through AI to “finish” it, and putting it out with no meaningful contribution back.
• A race to port as many games to PC as fast as possible, with little quality control.
• Projects being auto-made and dropped, with no research shared, nothing learned about how the games were built, and no history written down.

decomp.dev was built to make decompilation feel like a game, with a progress number that went up as volunteers matched each function by hand. The maintainer says that same idea has now been warped into what they call “a hollow numbers game”.

What stays

Time Extension notes that the sister sites decomp.me (the shared scratchpad many decompilers use) and ghidra.decomp.dev are still running. The individual projects carry on as well, since they live on their own repositories, not on decomp.dev. What goes is the shared public scoreboard. The statement also asks that any replacement site does not reuse decomp.dev’s code.

Why it matters

Matching decompilation is slow, careful work: rebuilding source code that compiles back to exactly the original game. It is the groundwork behind many of the native PC ports and enhanced versions fans love, as well as a lot of preservation and documentation. Those projects run on volunteers, and volunteers stay when the work feels shared and credited. That is the part decomp.dev says has been lost.

Our take

This is a sad one. Not every AI-assisted project is slop, and some genuinely good work has come out of the last year, like the MediEvil recomp that proudly says it was made by human hands. But when the people doing the hard groundwork feel their effort is being scraped and flipped, they walk, and everyone loses. Credit the decomp teams whose work you are playing. Where do you stand on AI in fan projects?