The future of PC gaming is the community support of vintage games that you loved.
The future of consoles is amatuer AI taxidermy remakes of your childhood memories. A distorted uncanny-valley resemblence of a game you once held dear, stuffed to the brim with synthetic fluff and hung on a generic skeleton twisted and bent to roughly resemble a once vibrant and living thing.
The console wars are over. Xbox is being spun down.
Xbox is going to be a subscription game console service, like stadia was.
Microsoft is going to use the “free” compute cycles when their AI slopcenters aren’t at full utilization to run Xbox games.
SO RIGHt
Also with microtransactions
I wish I had more than one upvote for this.
I think the “patient gamer” model could be the way through don’t buy new shit and encourage your friends to play older games too. Hardware can be not great and the games are cheap.
How long is that going to work though? Today’s slop is not going to unslop in 5 years, and it seems like every big name game publisher is exclusively doing slop now. Especially the optimization issue won’t go away, and it looks like the times where you could just wait for a generation or two of more powerful hardware are over, too - hardware might be getting more powerful, but the performance per dollar isn’t improving because the performance is only improving incrementally and I don’t see hardware prices going down to what was normal pre-Covid.
Still plenty of indie devs making good games. Really, you could just work through all the good games made up to this point and be fine for the rest of your life.
Otoh, if what you really care about is the social connection you get from playing games and talking about them with other people, you can just take up gardening or community service or pole dancing to get that.
it seems like every big name game publisher is exclusively doing slop now.
You have to understand the capitalism, it is doing slop because slop is what sells to people
You will need to shift your monies away from big name game publishers to smaller ones that make content that you prefer thereby encouraging them to make more non-slop
But I’ve been saying it for years even before AI, call of duty 29 and fifa 56 etc are all cash cows
There is no incentive to improve if what you’re doing works
I have enough unplayed games for years. And I haven’t even bought all games that interest me on my wishlist.
So to answer your question: I think it will work long enough till AI either implodes or is big enough that the state forces you to connect your brain implant to it.
Theoretically, we could see the PC gaming market come to resemble that of eastern Europe in the past, where everybody has very minimal or outdated hardware and the indie scene builds games with this in mind.
That’s pretty dire, but I prefer it over cloud subscriptions becoming the norm for gaming and other compute heavy tasks.
We’ll just mod the old games.
There are options that don’t involve buying. Open source games exist.
I’m talking about the hardware. “not buying” that and getting away with it is quite a bit harder than for software.
Cheaper hardware also exists, raspberry pi can run loads of games. Could even run old flash games on it.
Pis (Pi’s? Pi-s?) are cool, but it seems like overkill in this case. A second-hand thinkpad should be accessible enough, both cost-wise and difficulty-wise.
Yeah that also works. Still want to make a briefcase pi some day. Power everything by USB and stick a few powerbanks in there so it would run for days. It’s also easier to fix any broken part compared to a laptop. Made with some padding and it should be reasonably impact resistant too.
Oh yeah, that sounds awesome. Kinda like something out of a spy movie or something.
Which games are slop nowadays?
That only works if you already own the hardware and/or the majority does NOT do that model. The moment most people jump on board, the cost of old hardware will skyrocket too.
Except even if the majority DOES adopt this model:
- that will make repairing old hardware more profitable, so supply will rise to meet demand at least a bit (and is also objectively a good thing)
- a lot of old hardware isn’t compatible with Win11+ and unless Microsoft is visited by the Three Ghosts of Software or the long-anticipated Year Of The Linux Desktop arrives, so that’s one moat you can take advantage of (I assume you, a Lemmy user, are more likely to try Linux than an average person would, or are using it already)
- if the price still goes up, manufacturers will step in to take advantage
- at some point, the new slop business model won’t have enough customers to sustain itself
Cross out “of PC gaming” and you got it.
They will exploit you right up until the point where you commit crime. So steal and pirate your way to liberation.
In my mind, the current timeline always starts with 2013 and the death of Aaron Swartz. You could argue it was his prosecution that started it, but his death was the moment it began to become clear. Maybe he saw where we were heading. He was being over-prosecuted. Almost everyone who wasn’t part of the establishment came to that conclusion.
He represented everything that the new digital age could be: self-educated, a lover of learning, a humanist, an activist. A common man fighting for the common people. Everything he did was to spread information and protect our ability to learn, grow, and fight against injustice.
Maybe he had a Howard Beale moment with someone when his plea deal was rejected. Maybe he saw where we were heading and knew that he would never be able to fight it again. They had done everything to make an example of him…to make it impossible for him to enact change. All he really did was find ways to use the system to share information and help people.
I know, this was about PC gaming, but everything in this current dystopia ties back to this loss for me.
Such a tragic story.
Mines more like 15 years or more lol
For Americans the answer to ‘where did we go wrong’ is normally Reagan.
More in general, our biggest problem is that we let billionaires buy our politicians and didn’t riot. (Eat the rich, when?)
same people that got reagan elected got nixon elected
Regan was so bad John Carpenter made a movie about it
Where did it all go wrong?
When we stopped publicly executing politicians and millionaires (there were no billionaires yet at the time).
Elon Musk is on the path to become a trillionaire.
And there’s a talk going around about single-player campaigns won’t come to PC, they’ll be PlayStation only.
single-player campaigns won’t come to PC
glances at the Steam catalog
glances at my unplayed Steam library
laughs
To answer OP’s question, I think the place “we went wrong” was allowing ourselves to be driven by the industry hype cycle rather than enjoying the genuine quality games in the orgy of content available on every platform.
There are more high quality games released in any given five year span than you could play in the next ten. If 90% of AAA publishers released nothing but slop for the next 20 years, you would never miss a day of gaming if you just stuck to the existing stock of bangers.
You don’t even need a particularly good computer to play the classics - your Starcrafts and emulated Super Marios and Forza racing sims. Nevermind the privately hosted MMOs that can eat up thousands of hours of playtime. Go check out FF14 or Guild Wars 2. I’ve got a friend who has been doing WoW for 20 years.
If new games are slop, who cares? We are at the tale end of a Golden Age of game development. You’re sitting on a treasure trove. Just don’t buy the next Call of Duty game and you’ll be fine.
Well, that’s not how gaming works. Those 5.7 million games installed in your laptop mean nothing. Gaming is a passion for a specific game and its further additions. For example, if I love a game called “Test Game”, and then they released “Test Game 2”, then “Test Game 3”, I am gonna play all of them. And when “Test Game 4” comes out and I find out that I cannot play it because SONY wanted to be an @$$, all those other games installed in my computer are just useless .exe files because SONY broke my chain of story progressions and experience with a game. We don’t play games to increase the count of games installed in our computer, we play games for the love of gaming and certain games feel like home for that love. Just installing any random .exe file without a meaning to increase the count of games installed and laughing at a steam library makes no sense for a gamer. Digital hording and gaming are different things.
Well hold on there, son. You just need to take up a hobby. Have you ever considered working with your hands, sawing up wood, drilling screw holes, learning to balance chains and then build a guillotine? Work proactively - damnit.
At least we’ll always have the classics. Download, play, and seed emulated games folks.
not when your computer goes to the cloud.
When’s the last time you tried to emulate something? The Wii and PSP can handle up to N64 decently, and that hardware is going on 20 years old.
Depending on your phone you can emulate PS2 and even Switch games.
Just hold on to whatever you have, even phones, and emulator devs will figure out the rest. Accuracy has been king for a long time while we’ve had strong hardware availability, but there’s no reason we can’t do per game speed hacks again like old SNES emulators when hardware gets scarce.
my main worry is that these things aren’t built to last. especially phones.
yeah if they switched everyone to the cloud right now, i’d have a decade of computer at this point, maybe a bit more if i can fix it, and then what?
consoles tend to last longer but they don’t do general computing, which is an important thing we’d be losing in the process.
A decade from now, either we’ll be subjugated by AI drones and gaming is the least of our concerns, or the AI bubble and/or capitalism will have collapsed and the market will be flooded with data center hardware that can be adapted into PCs at scale.
Phones degrade through daily use as the charging port wears out or it gets dropped and damaged. Beyond that, software update assume more resources because they’re tuned to new models that have that. If new models don’t, we’ll see that change.
The only part with a real use before date in it is batteries, but you can use them plugged in. Capacitors too, technically, but we’re long past the days of the capacitor plague. Most should hold up for decades, as far as I’m aware.
As far as what we do a decade down the line?
I’d be shocked if business trends don’t shift back to owned hardware which will in turn revitalize the consumer market. They’ll take the functional parts that don’t pass QC for business use and rebrand them for comsumers. They’ve been doing that with tons of hardware for ages now. The ram chips don’t hit the right clock speed for the premium product so they’ll bin those ones together into a lower grade cheaper product instead of trashing them entirely.
In a lot of ways this is just another go around of mainframe and terminals vs personal computers again. So we had the mainframe in the cloud vs on-prem setup, and various companies fell on either side based on their needs by now. Cloud is fairly stable, and we’re at the point that most companies are able to evaluate pros and cons in a more clear headed manner. Most are discoverign that it makes sense to keep some things on-prem.
So now we get another go-around due to hardware scarcity because of AI hype. We’re already seeing news stories talking about the importance of having actual metrics to judge success of “AI-enhanced” 🤮 workflows. Companies can stay irrational longer than we’d like, but they can’t do it indefinitely.
Enough companies have enough legitimate use cases (and cash to burn) that on-premises hardware isn’t going to just die. Eventually that will trickle back down to consumers.
And if it somehow doesn’t, people will continue to figure out how to keep older stuff running. There has always been specialists doing it, now there will be more due to more demand.
I’m not really seeing where there’s a lack of compute power in citizen hands that can’t be overcome with more resource aware programming techniques, which will also start coming back into vogue if it has to.
There’s no point (financially or open-source wise) making software no one can run. People will adapt.
I’m not trying to say that it won’t suck, and that we aren’t likely to see some big changes coming. I just can’t imagine a future in which we all don’t adapt and keep moving forward.
The only way everything goes into unsalvagable shit is if people just wholesale stop trying, and that’s not something I’ve seen people just give up and do as some mass homogenous group in my life.
i like the optimism and really hope you are right, but there has been a very deliberate trend to strip us of ownership, and the powers that be seem very serious about it (think uber instead of car ownership, netflix and game streaming instead of media ownership, renting instead of home ownership) as capitalism concentrates wealth.
and with the ubiquitous internet infrastructure we have now, centralizing computing is easier than ever when all they really care about is that we are able to do our button pressing work.
i really do hope they come up with a way to fix silicon. because stuff like motherboards can already be easily repaired with mostly off the shelf components, but silicon gets… complicated to say the least, and it’s at the center of our current bottleneck. or that used server hardware isn’t somehow efused, encrypted or otherwise made nonviable or too hard for consumers to reuse.
there is some hope for some other potentially capable player like china and their shiny new semiconductor industry or russia can step in and offer alternatives to enshitified us tech as they wedge themselves into the global market, but that gets difficult with import controls that would certainly be put in place to stop them from taking hold.
but yeah, the next decade or two will see some muddying of these waters as the war season picks up, cooperation shuts down and resources get scarce as they are redirected to murder.
i will go as far as to say the big changes you allude to are already in the pipeline and IDing everyone on the internet and pushing cloud is just the beginning.
Steam Deck runs everything up to a PS3 and Xbox 360, and the Switch.
Almost everything a generation prior to ran runs with 0 problems, PS3/360/Switch can be hit or miss somewhat, depending on the game.
A Steam Deck will also run MGS5 and Titanfall 2.
Its entirely possible to make new games that look that good and will run on comparable hardware, just gotta, you know, have an optimized engine, render pipeline, game.
Hell you can get a solid, never dips below 45 FPS on CyberPunk 77 with a Deck, with med/high settings, then sync the VRR to a 45/90 split.
I’m making a lo-fi, offline, singleplayer card game designed to be completely moddable in every way so people can add custom characters, enemies, features just by putting JSON into the userdata folder.
Some of us are trying!
Magic the Fappering?
Well that’s the joy, I’ll build it so you can just draw tits and penises in.
Sounds interesting. Any way I can wishlist or sign up for a news letter to be notified about development and release date?
I’m a ways off from that I think. About 11 months in (mostly the odd day at weekends) and I have a working card system and the AI can play a card that beats you if it can but it’s very simplistic and all the art is either drawn in paint, a text or untextured placeholder, or royalty free avatars I downloaded from itchio
I’ll plug it in a few game-making communities when I have a demo It’s (very early) working title is “Cartoquaria” (as in a place where one stores cards, in Latin) and it uses a deck of tarot cards you imbue with mystical powers - but I’m easily a year or two out.
No, we are not.
We can go back to the basics, focus on not graphical realism, and/or, invent new rendering paradigms that lead to new art styles, and compute with less overhead, have modest system requirements.
It isn’t impossible.
Look at MGS5, Titanfall 2.
Shit looks pretty good, its a decade old, from before all this modern graphical absurdity.
There has literally never been a better time to become an indie dev, make a small team.
No publisher, no marketing.
Just don’t overpromise, and don’t take people’s money untill you actually have a minimum viable product.
Godot is completely open source, and completely free, and quite capable as an engine.
No one is coming to save us, but ourselves, if we choose to.
Unreal 5 alone is responsible for a lot of A-AA games looking like utter shit, both standing still (dithering every-fucking-where) and in motion (enough ghosting to fill a cemetery)
Godot is fairly unkind to old hardware, unfortunately. Much preferable for people to just use SDL or something.
I’m sorry, but I’ve never heard anyone say Godot is fairly unkind to older hardware before.
Sure, yeah, if somebody is futzing around in 3D, in the Forward+ renderer, and has no idea what they are doing, yeah.
But… broadly?
How… old of hardware are you talking about?
Like, 15+ years old?
Also, SDL isn’t … a game engine.
Its… a rendering/input/output layer/library.
Sure, if you want to write your own game engine, you could use SDL… but… that’s a bit much to ask of a novice indie dev, who wants to complete a 3D game that’s maybe roughly as or more graphically advanced than say, Fallout New Vegas, in under what, 3, 4, 5 years?
I did try to use SDL, while it’s like the only library that gets controller support remotely useful (still not ideal, but at least it doesn’t still use DirectInput for everything), it still uses a lot of ancient API, that is only applicable for XP machines.
Also any good modern engines come with well integrated editors, that are like 80% of the reason why they’re popular. I’m making my own engine, and the hardest part is the editor.
Ok, so you are building your own engine, that makes a lot more sense, and you do realize that… the editor itself is actually quite substantial a task, to get everything coherent and also functional.
Honestly, best of luck to you!
No clue if you’ve seen these before, but maybe they could be helpful?
https://david-delassus.medium.com/trying-out-sdl3-by-writing-a-c-game-engine-c9bb13156b74
https://github.com/linkdd/sdl-game-engine
https://blog.conan.io/2023/07/20/introduction-to-game-dev-with-sdl2.html
My main issue currently are:
- rewriting the editor to be more usable (embeddable into projects),
- using Linux API for my own direct media layer iota in ways many did not expect, to add support for things like HD rumble (regular rumble will also use HIDRAW, because of how overcomplicated the evdev rumble is).
BTW, I’m in the process of stripping the D runtime out of iota, so it could join the ranks of SDL, SFML, GLFW, etc.
When you blamed the SJWs and Anita Sarkeesian.
Did I miss the part where Anita demanded for Bezos to hang?
She did not say that, but I saw things being said like this during gamergate:
I’m bet microtransactions are due to Anita, she probably said something like “difficult games are sexist, unlocks should be paid”, then developers followed suit.
Others think horny gachaslop with decent-ish gameplay at first invalidates the argument, that microtransactions are bad.
Where did it all go wrong?
Enclosure after the Black Death.
