Cross out “of PC gaming” and you got it.
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
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could see the PC gaming market come to resemble that of eastern Europe in the past, where everybody has very minimal or outdated hardware and the indie scene builds games with this in mind.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.
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.
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.
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
OOP is wrong about one thing: They’re not happy.
At least we’ll always have the classics. Download, play, and seed emulated games folks.
At least an age verification law didn’t turn valid just yesterday for OP.
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.
Seeing shit get worse and worse every year has thr goblinest mask of all callin’ like:
They will exploit you right up until the point where you commit crime. So steal and pirate your way to liberation.
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.
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!
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.
SO RIGHt
Also with microtransactions
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.
I wish I had more than one upvote for this.
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.
It is the grim dark far future of all gaming. Forget the promise of freedom to upgrade and superior graphical fidelity. There is no peace among the Discord servers, only an eternity of monetization, and micro transactions.
