Alternative outcomes:
Gaming bifurcates.
Indies and certain AAs aim for the ‘good ending’, realize fancy graphics are not only harder to produce, but you’re actually just shooting yourself in the foot in terms of potential customers.
AAA on the other hand continues to double down and enshittify, figure out new ways to turn gaming into leasing and renting.
… but, as always, mostly marketing, ad campaigns, paying off “journalists” and “influencers”.
3rd potential outcome:
Something akin to lan parties/netcafes/arcades recurs.
Rent out a space, run a local to global network solution and also a miniature rendering farm.
All the actual PCs (or maybe VR headsets) are connected to cheap, thin client local machines that are then networked to the mini rendering farm.
4th potential outcome:
… nobody can actually stop people from emulating or running old, good games. ‘Piracy’ becomes as normalized in many other parts of the world as it is in Russia currently.
I grew up in Russia and it’s sometimes so mindboggling that people don’t know their way around digital piracy. It may sound bad, but I actually think that it’s the only thing that can keep the market healthy. I pay for games, movies, books and whatever else there is purely because I like them. And if I don’t like the content you made, you are getting no money. If I have to pay for it before judging it’s value, what insentive does the producer of the content have to make it actually good?
See I just grew up as poor white trash in the US.
I guess just more technically inclined than much of my fellow white trash?
But yeah, exactly… why pay for something you can get for free, safely, if you know what you are doing?
You do it because you either really, really want to support a particular game or developer, or, as Steam/Valve has been saying for like 20 years now… because the version that you are paying for is actually substantially better, is substantially easier to access.
Basically, if official market prices are so high that the risk and hassle of using a gray or black market is less than the differential between gray/black market price snd official price… you use the gray/black market.
This is a pretty well understood concept in actual, academic economics, but in the US we have an insanely corpo/finance slanted public representstion of what ‘economics’ even is.
If the fundamental framework of IP laws and market practices is inherently biased against the consumer… obviously, people are going to broadly not like that, and other people are going to just skirt around them…
The main difference between the US and Russia in say, the 90s, is that everyone in the US knew they were destined to become a millionaire (economy doing quite well) where in Russia, things were just generally being gutted and sold for scrap, under the table (economy doing quite bad).
Its the Always Sunny in Philly scene, oh you’re new poor, its easy to tell… see, we’re old poor, we know how to do this.
I’d say there is a reasonable likelihood that the broad, ongoing economic collapse of living standards for 90% of Americans will lead to a cultural tone shift.
What is the Russian term, schmekalka, something like that?
Basically: Coming up with an improvised solution based on what you already have, as opposed to figuring out how to buy some new thing for the task?
A lot of the US is going to have to think a lot more like that, otherwise they’ll just become literal debt slaves.
Like, shit, I still refuse to pay for any fixed location internet plan that charges for datacap, data limits. This is now common and widespread in the US, but is completely bullshit and unjustifiable from an actual ‘what does this cost the ISP’ perspective.
We largely lost that fight over a decade ago, but I’m still pissed about it.
Will we really have more performant games? Are game companies going to invest in an opensource game engine to pool their talent and make the most performant game engine out their that makes the most performant games?
It’s way more likely they’ll try and sell us yet another SaaS product or even better, an AI product that guzzles a cubic metre per request.
Here’s my conspiracy theory; as local gen ai is closing in on cloudmodels even on modest gaming hardware they need to phase it out to make subscriptions pay. So they buy more hardware than they need to make local a nonviable way
I mean, if all new gaming becomes cloud based shit I’m just going to be playing old games on emulators forever, or at least as long as my computer functions. And then when that fails, I’ll go back to analog enjoyments.
I have a harddrive with about 2.7 TB of Ps2 isos. This should be enough for the next 10 years.
Just hope the cost of storage is reasonable when you need a replacement/backup
It’s saved in a RAID system so theoretically I can risk one failure and still have a backup. On the other hand, the collection is available as a torrent with an acceptable number of seeders so I should be fine.
Let’s hope! Who knows what catastrophic mess the world will be in by then.
When I think about it, between emulators and various icon collections I have enough games to last me for the rest of my life. And that’s a feeling of being free, not trapped.
I also have to do a shout-out for analog enjoyments. Interacting with the natural world and exercising all of your senses are just straight-up good for you.
My steam library alone is enough to last me a decade probably
Secret ending: you keep playing the huge selection of games we already have, endlessly, forgetting games you played a while ago as you restart one you already forgot.
Edit: currently playing Warhammer 40k: Space Marine. So far it’s really fun. It’s as if you’re playing Doom as a more normal guy.
Real ending: your gpu dies in a year or so and you can no longer play anything ever.
Well damn, I hope it doesn’t.
Though, if it does, it would be under warranty, and thankfully I’m not in america so my warranty has a chance to actually be useful
Good ending for the gamers, bad ending for the devs…
If a dev is good they can make games worth buying with current hardware
Maybe this is a good time to visit the hundreds of never-installed games we have in our steam libraries.
Nooo! I won’t ruin my pristine collection by playing the games!
Second secret ending: the games you have won’t run on your pc.
-someoone who waited 5 years to play fallout 76 after buying it 2 weeks after launch.
I mean, fallout 76 doesn’t really fall in the category of games I’d even consider
Already did this last year and according to Steam data many others, too.
Cloud gaming is effectively impossible due to little things like the speed of light. Sure, you could play Civilization via cloud but good fucking luck with competitive shooters.
That and the US being such a large market while having some of the worst internet in the developed world. Last I read only ¼ of the network is fiber
I live in France, has fantastic fibre, would still hate to play civilisation “in the cloud”.
There is just no incentive to do so IMO. Even a cheap mobile phone can render well enough, and I just hate any kind of even “possible” lag.
/Rant off 😋
I play games over 4G happily. Not likely to work very well with game streaming. Especially if everyone else is. I did it during covid and it was ok but input lag was noticeable. SSH dwarf fortress and got into cdda was a better experience.
tbf: The US is huge as fuck. Most countries in the developed world could fit in Texas.
Yeah but the ones that have shit internet don’t have money to pay for the games anyways
It’s so stupid. It’s a solution looking for a problem.
I’m happy that Google Stadia died.
As with anything these techbro oligarchs comes up with. Unfortunately they do have the power to bend reality to their twisted wills.
What if everyone is on the cloud in the shooter?
Everyone can suffer together, yay
Wanna bring about the next French Revolution, worldwide? Cause that seems like a good way to do it!
Would be cool to play civ5 on a long term server.
I’m thinking something that emails you when its your turn too. Like playing chess over mail.
Isn’t that a thing in freeciv, that open source version of civilization?
There is a freeciv? How did i not know this
Yeah, there’s a web version of the game if you want to try it out, though it seems to be based on civilization 2 or 3 rather than 5 or 6.
Unciv is based on civ5 and has support for BNW from the mod list.
I believe freeciv is civ 1.
Civ over mail. Physical mail. Like those old mail chess games in the times before online chess (use https://lichess.org/ btw <3 ).
Move a scout, wait 3-5 days for the answer.
Interesting. I mean it more in the sense that civ is just a long game regardless, so some async maybe help.
I completed Nier Automata via GeForce Now just fine. Competitive shooters maybe not, but that’s just a subset of gaming anyway.
“Sure, you could play good games, but good luck playing garbage.”
Shooters aren’t garbage to people who like them. Different people prefer different games.
SSD prices really pisses me off. I use those for work as an independent and regularly need new ones, and the ones I usually get have gone up like crazy!
I need the other stuff for work too but for now my rig is chugging along so I’m not feeling that yet.
I suspect people will just keep their existing equipment running for as long as possible, and secondhand equipment will be worth almost as much as it was when new.
This won’t last forever.
I’ve been waiting for GPU prices to come back down to earth since 2019. I really hope you’re right in a few more years.
In between the crypto scams and the AI hype, there was a brief moment of maybe a few months were GPU prices were affordable. Not good, but affordable enough so that normal people could buy them.
Yeah I vaguely remember some xx60 card being somewhat comparable to the 1060 if you counted for inflation for a little while.
I think we’re at the point where PCs are an afterthought in the GPU market, and have been for a long time.
I have an 8th gen i7 that’s still rocking it, also a 4070 which helps a lot too. Truth be told, I haven’t encountered a game I /want/ that requires sky high specs anymore.
If they keep pushing their cloud renting models it will last forever.
They are going to make PC out of reach for common folk and force us to pay a monthly subscription for computing power.
The first ending has already been happening.
The second ending keeps failing to happen. We’ve got graveyards full of Cloud Gaming markets. Google Stadia, OnLive, Walmart’s cloud service LiquidSky, and various smaller platforms like Vectordash and Bifrost.
stadia people got lucky as they got full refunds on everything after it shut down. what a deal tbh
Plus why would anyone use the expensive ram ssds and gpus to make a datacenter for videogames when they can hop onto the AI hype before it’s gone?
Unless you’re really chasing the big name games, you don’t need that high powered of a rig anymore. Stylized graphics are better than highly realistic, they hold up better and longer. The most intensive game I have bought is STALKER 2 and even then my rig is holding up fine.
Google appropriating the concept to rename it after one of their C suits is the most Google shit ever.
We need to turn this law into an electron app.
Oberon… A2… rabbit hole alert i’m out!
The other good ending: People learn to disassemble e-waste and reuse stuff instead of throwing them in the trash. Think of all the SSDs, HDDs, and RAM sticks that are thrown out in old laptops and gaming consoles. It would be great to bring more of a reuse, repair, Maguyver, culture back to electronics.
I mean, I’m happy to Maguyver my old laptop, I’m just not sure how much utility that last 8gb of ddr3 will deliver to my £5000 gaming rig
That’s fantastic for you that you have a £5000 gaming rig. Not all of us can afford that. A lot of us are still gaming or doing office work or running servers on DDR3 machines.
Unfortunately a lot of secondhand hardware is destroyed. Storage devices due to privacy, other components because corporations are unwilling to expend the man hours needed to sell off perfectly good hardware and instead choose an e-waste recycler they can write off as an expense.
It’s lucky that my dad’s supplier is sensible about these things, my family has I think 5 refurb Fujitsu laptops at €50 and €70 for the last one. Perfectly fine machines for study, browsing 3D-print terminals, vehicle diagnostics and such daily usage.
The plateau of processing power and modern energy efficiency means far older machines are viable users for years and years.
Wish that happened more often. All these crypto mines or whatever that use massive CPU or GPU power should dump them on the market, but I’ve never seen dumps of low-cost hardware.
The problem is that the crypto miners and AI servers run on purpose-built hardware now that can’t be repurposed for gaming.
Yeah, crypto switched to ASIC, but nonetheless there was no cheap hardware dump as they transitioned. And yeah, AI does use regular GPUs, but the consumer versions are used mainly for smaller farms.
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You’ll need right to repair first.
Most cloud gaming is pretty hit or miss. Playstation’s seems particularly bad when I’ve used it, Xbox is fine, but GeForce now was really good for me (I have a decent connection at home). Nvidia, who also is helping cause this pricing issue, basically killed their own product by adding this arbitrary monthly limit of 100 hours.
Listen you dinguses, the type of person willing to pay over 20 bucks a month for your highest tier service, when you still have to own the games to play them, are going to want to use it for more than 3 hours a day.
I bought a better computer instead, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They don’t care if the service is good or not because the days of companies actually competing for customers are rapidly coming to a close.
If they can drive the private hardware market into extinction, then they become the only option.
Worst ending: Devs continue chasing higher graphical settings, consoles continue to release but at much higher price points to cover these costs. Cloud gaming also becomes much more expensive to afford the infrastructure. Gaming becomes less accessible to everyone except the wealthy.
Devs continue chasing higher graphical settings
What, “higher”? The games don’t look better, they are just more poorly optimized now.
“We are now modeling the subsurface scattering of each individual hair. Each hair has a unique texture”
“Gamers finally rise up” scenario
