Hard to believe it’s been 24 years since Y2K (2000) And it feels like we’ve come such a long way, but this decade started off very poorly with one of the worst pandemics the modern world has ever seen, and technology in general is looking very bleak in several ways

I’m a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space. So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because people are either too poor, don’t want to play a live service AAA disaster like every single one that has been released lately, Call of Duty, battlefield, anything electronic arts or Ubisoft puts out is almost entirely a failure or undersales. So many gaming studios have been shuttered and are being shuttered, Microsoft is basically one member of an oligopoly with Sony and a couple other companies.

Hardware is stagnating. Nvidia is putting on the brakes for developing their next line of GPUs, we’re not going to see huge gains in performance anymore because AMD isn’t caught up yet and they have no reason to innovate. So they are just going to sell their next line of cards for $1,500 a pop for the top ones, with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need. We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away

Virtual reality is on the verge of collapse because meta is basically the only real player in that space, they have a monopoly with them and valve index, pico from China is on the verge of developing something incredible as well, and Apple just revealed a mixed reality headset but the price is so extraordinary that barely anyone has it so use isn’t very widespread. We’re again a decade away from seeing anything really substantial in terms of performance

Artificial intelligence is really, really fucking things up in general and the discussions about AI look almost as bad as the news about the latest election in the USA. It’s so clowny and ridiculous and over-the-top hearing any news about AI. The latest news is that open AI is going to go from a non-profit to a for-profit company after they promised they were operating for the good of humanity and broke countless laws stealing copyrighted information, supposedly for the public good, but now they’re just going to snap their fingers and morph into a for-profit company. So they can just basically steal anything they want that’s copyrighted, but claim it’s for the public good, and then randomly swap to a for-profit model. Doesn’t make any sense and just looks like they’re going to be a vessel for widespread economic poverty…

It just seems like there’s a lot of bubbles that are about to burst all at the same time, like I don’t see how things are going to possibly get better for a while now?

  • Telorand@reddthat.com
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    3 months ago

    I’m a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space.

    I would like to introduce you to the indie game scene. Where AAA is faltering, indie has never been in a better place.

    Overall, I don’t see things the way you see them. I recommend taking a break from social media, go for a walk, play games you like, and fuck the trajectory of tech companies.

    Live your life, and take a break from the doomsaying.

    • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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      3 months ago

      I would like to introduce you to the indie game scene. Where AAA is faltering, indie has never been in a better place.

      Amen.

      Indie games might not be flashy, but they’re often made with love and concern about giving you a fun experience. They also lack all those abusive DRM and intrusive anti-cheat systems that A³ games often have.

      • Rob Bos@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        They also tend to have linux support. Where the AAA companies want to eat the entire mammoth and scorn the scraps, small companies can thrive off of small prey and the offal. :)

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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            3 months ago

            It’s a great analogy though - Linux users aren’t deemed profitable by the A³ companies, just like offal is unjustly* deemed yucky by your typical person.

            *I do love offal though. And writing this comment made me crave for chicken livers with garlic and rosemary over sourdough bread. Damn.

            • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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              3 months ago

              Idk, I’ve spent way more on games since Valve came to Linux. I was a Linux user first, and mostly played games on console because I didn’t like rebooting into Windows or fiddling w/ WINE, so if I played games, it’s because it had Linux support (got a ton through Humble Bundle when they were small and scrappy). When Steam came to Linux, I created an account (didn’t have one before) and bought a bunch of games. I bought Rocket League when the Steam Controller and Steam Deck launched (was part of a bundle), and when Proton launched, I bought a ton of Windows games.

              So at least for me, I’ve easily spent 100x what I would’ve spent on video games due to Steam supporting Linux. That said, there are easily 50 other people spending more than me on Windows for every one of me, so I get that Linux isn’t a huge target market. But I will spend more on an indie game if it has native Linux support.

      • Telorand@reddthat.com
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        3 months ago

        And I’ll add on to that, even if every GPU company stops innovating, we’ll still have older cards and hardware to choose from, and the games industry isn’t going to target hardware nobody is buying (effectively pricing themselves out of the market). Indie devs especially tend to have lower hardware requirements for their games, so it’s not like anyone will run out of games to play.

    • dinckel@lemmy.world
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      Genuinely wish more people understood this. I’ve mostly only been playing indie games for the past few years. By far the best fun i’ve had in gaming. A ton of unbelievably creative, unique games out there. Not to mention that 99% of them are a single-purchase experience, instead of a cash treadmill

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      3 months ago

      Hello indie gamer, it’s me, you, from the future.

      I’d like to introduce you to PATIENT indie gaming.

      The only games I play are small team, longer running, well documented, developers are passionate, mods exist, can play on a potato or a steam deck, etc

      Because I’m patient, I don’t ever get preorder, Kickstarter, prealpha disappointed.

      I know exactly what I’m getting, I pay once, and boom, I own a great game for ever. (You can more often fully DL indie games)

        • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          Bro I’m from the future you can’t ask me stuff like that, be patient, you’ll figure it out

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      My only fear with the indie gaming industry is that many of them are starting to embrace the churn culture that has led AAA gaming down a dark path.

      I would love an app like Blind that allows developers on a game to anonymously call out the grinding culture of game development, alongside practices like firing before launch and removing credits from workers. Review games solely on how the dev treated the workers, and we might see some cool corrections between good games and good culture.

      • Telorand@reddthat.com
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        3 months ago

        There’s certainly room to grow with regard to workers’ rights. I think you could probably solve at least a few of them if they were covered by a union, and publishers who hire them would have to bargain for good development contract terms.

    • RubberDuck@lemmy.world
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      Plenty of good games out there, even in the early access I have found some real gems. Just recently coffee stain released satisfactory… labor of love and it shows. I recently tried bellwright, it’s impressive, so is manor lords.

      And hardware stagnating also means that people get to learn what it’s all about and optimize for it. The last gen games on a console are usually also better optimized than the first series of games on a platform. So yeah…

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      Gaming now is more amazing that ever in part because we have access to classic games too. If someone thinks gaming was amazing 10 years ago, cool. We still have those games! I’m playing a really old game right now myself and loving it.

      I think OP confuses this whole bubble bursting thing. When a phenomenon passes out of its early explosive growth phase and settles into more of a steady state, that’s not the “bubble bursting” that’s maturity.

      Tech as a whole is now a more mature industry. Companies are expected to make money, not revolutionize the world. OP would have us believe this means that tech is over. How does the saying go? It’s not the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.

      • frezik@midwest.social
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        Companies are expected to make money, not revolutionize the world

        I’d like to believe that, but I don’t think investors have caught on yet. That’s where the day of reckoning will come.

        AI is a field that’s gone through boom and bust cycles before. The 1960s were a boom era for the field, and it largely came from DoD money via DARPA. This was awkward for a lot of the university pre and post grads in AI at the time, as they were often part of the anti-war movement. Then the anti-war movement starts to win and the public turns against the Vietnam war. This, in turn, causes that DARPA money to dry up, and it’s not replaced with anything from elsewhere in the government. This leads to an AI winter.

        Just to be clear, I like AI as a field of research. I don’t at all like what capitalism is doing with it. But what did we get from that time of huge AI investment? Some things that can be traced directly back to it are optimizing compilers, virtual memory, Unix, and virtual environments. Computing today would look entirely different without it. We may have eventually invented those things otherwise, but it would have taken much, much longer.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        I’m playing a really old game right now myself and loving it.

        Same. I’m slowly working my way through the Yakuza series (started w/ Yakuza 0), and I’m currently halfway through Yakuza 3, which was released in 2010. I play them about a year or two apart because I get kinda burned out near the end.

        I have way more games than I can reasonably play, and my wishlist of games I want to play is still unreasonably big. There’s no way I’m running out of interesting games to play anytime soon. And I haven’t really gotten into emulation either, so these are purely PC titles that I’m still trying to catch up on.

        Companies are expected to make money, not revolutionize the world

        Exactly. There’s a clear reason why Warren Buffett still owns a massive stake in Coca-Cola, and it’s not because they’re a hot young startup. Tech hardware is fantastic, and honestly, most people really don’t need big improvements year over year. I think game devs can do a lot more with the hardware we already have, so we should be looking at refining the HW we have (small improvements in performance, larger improvements in power efficiency and reduction in die size to improve margins). Likewise for desktop and cloud software, a round of optimizations would probably yield better gains than hardware revisions.

        I’m excited to see VR headsets get cheaper and more ubiquitous (i.e. I think something like the Valve Index could be done for half the price), handheld PCs like Steam Deck getting better battery life, etc.

    • Shadywack@lemmy.world
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      I love this, and I’ll even one up it. Let the bubbles burst, this is just a transitional period that you see like a predictable cycle in tech. The dot com burst was like a holocaust compared to this shit. Everyone who was in the tech scene before Google has an easier time with this. We can comfortable watch FAANG recede, and even be grateful for it. Let it happen.

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    . . . with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need

    Why is this a need? The constant push for better and better has not been healthy for humanity or the planet. Exponential growth was always going to hit a ceiling. The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.

    We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away

    Sure you can, today, and this is why:

    So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because . . .

    Regardless of the reasons, the AAA space is going to have to pull back. Which is perfectly fine by me, because their games are trash. Even the good ones are often filled with micro transaction nonsense. None of them have innovated anything in years; that’s all been done at the indie level. Which is where the real party is at.

    Would it be so bad if graphics were locked at the PS4 level? Comparable hardware can run some incredible games from 50 years of development. We’re not even close to innovating new types of games that can run on that. Planet X2 is a recent RTS game that runs on a Commodore 64. The genre didn’t really exist at the time, and the control scheme is a bit wonky, but it’s playable. If you can essentially backport a genre to the C64, what could we do with PS4 level hardware that we just haven’t thought of yet?

    Yeah, there will be worse graphics because of this. Meh. You’ll have native 4K/144Hz just by nature of pulling back on pushing GPUs. Even big games like Rocket League, LoL, and CS:GO have been doing this by not pushing graphics as far as they can go. Those games all look fine for what they’re trying to do.

    I want smaller games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not kidding.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      None of them have innovated anything in years

      Well, they’ve innovated news ways to take up disk space…

      There’s a reason I don’t play new release AAA games, and it’s because they’re simply not worth the price. They’re buggy at launch, take up tons of disk space (with lots of updates the first few months), and honestly aren’t even that fun even when the bugs are fixed. Indie games, on the other hand, seem to release in a better state, tend to be fairly small, and usually add something innovative to the gameplay.

      The only reason to go AAA IMO is for fancy graphics (I honestly don’t care) and big media franchises (i.e. if you want Spiderman, you have to go to the license holder), and for me, those lose their novelty pretty quickly. The only games I buy near release time anymore are Nintendo titles and indie games from devs I like. AAA just isn’t worth thinking about, except the one or two each year that are actually decent (i.e. Baldur’s Gate 3).

    • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      This post really nails my take on the issue. Give me original cs level graphics or even aq2 graphics, a decent story, more levels, and a few new little gimmicks (rocket arena grappling hook, anyone?!?!) and you don’t need 4k blah blah bullshit.

      The #1 game for kids is literally Minecraft or Roblox…8 bit level gfx outselling your horse armor hi res bullshit.

      The last game i bought was 2 days ago. Mohaa airborne for PC for $5 at a pawn shop Give me 100 of this quality of game instead of anything PS5 ever made.

      • solomon42069@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Here are the number of hours I’ve spent on indie games VS AAA titles, according to my Steam library:

        • Indie - Valheim - 435 hours
        • Indie - Space Haven - 332 hours
        • Indie - Satisfactory - 215 hours
        • Indie - Dyson Sphere Program - 203 hours
        • AAA - Skyrim - 98 hours
        • AAA - Control - 47 hours
        • AAA - Far Cry 6 - 29 hours
        • AAA - Max Payne 3 - 43 minutes

        If we’re talking about value - the amount of playtime I’ve gotten out of games with simpler graphics and unique ideas blows the billions spent by the industry out of the water.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          Depending on where you draw the line, mine looks similar:

          1. EU4 - >800 hours
          2. Cities Skylines - ~180 hours
          3. Magic: Arena - >100 hours
          4. Crusader Kings 2 - ~100 hours

          After that it depends on the length of the game. I normally just play through the campaign on most games once (except the above, which have lots of replay value), so looking at playtime isn’t particularly interesting IMO. The ratio of games with interesting playtime (i.e. I probably rolled credits) between indie and AAA is easily 2:1, if not something way higher like 5:1 or even 10:1, but again, that really depends on where you draw the line. If we look at 100% completion, I have 22 indie games and zero AAA games, because I rarely find AAA games to be worth going after achievements in. If I sort by achievement completion, the top two AAA games are Yakuza games (I love that series), and that’s after scrolling through dozens of indies, many of which have a fair amount of achievements (i.e. you need to do more than just roll credits).

          So yeah, AAA games really don’t interest me. If you compare the amount I’ve spent on indie vs AAA games, it would be a huge difference since I pretty much only play older AAA games if I get them on sale, and that’s mostly so I can talk about them w/ friends…

    • barsoap@lemm.ee
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      The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.

      The reason why those economic limits exist is because we’re reaching the limit of what’s physically possible. Fabs are still squeezing more transistors into less space, for now, but the cost per transistor hasn’t fallen for some time, IIRC about 10nm thereabouts is still the most economical node. Things just get difficult and exponentially fickle the smaller you get, and at some point there’s going to be a wall. Of note currently we’re talking more about things like backside power delivery than actually shrinking anything. Die-on-die packaging and stuff.

      Long story short: Node shrinks aren’t the low-hanging fruit any more. Haven’t been since the end of planar transistors (if it had been possible to just shrink back then they wouldn’t have engineered FinFETs) but it’s really been taking up speed with the start of the EUV era. Finer and finer pitches don’t really matter if you have to have more and more lithography/etching/coating steps because the structures you’re building are getting more and more involved in the z axis, every additional step costs additional machine time. On the upside, newer production lines could spit out older nodes at pretty much printing press speed.

    • gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      I want smaller games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not kidding.

      I agree. Wholeheartedly. I think it’s just so obvious how quality dramatically takes off when the people creating it feel safe, sound, and economically stable. Financial Security (UBI) drives creativity probably more than anything else. It’s a huge win!

  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.world
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    As others have said, gaming is thriving - AAA and bloated incumbants are not doing well but the indie sector is thriving.

    VR is not on the verge of collapse, but it is growing slowly as we still have not reached the right price point for a mobile high powered headset. Apple made a big play for the future of VR with its Apple Vision Pro but that was not a short term play; that was laying the ground works for trying to control or shape a market that is still probably at least 5 if not 10 years away from something that will provide high quality VR, untethefed from a. PC.

    AI meanwhile is a bubble. We are not in an age of AI, we are in an age of algorithms - they will and are useful but will not meet the hype or hyperbole being banded about. Expect that market to pop and probably with spectacular damage to some companies.

    Other computing hardware is not really stagnating - we are going through a generational transition period. AMD is pushing Zen 5 and Intel it’s 14th gen, and all the chip makers are desperately trying to get on the AI band wagon. People are not upgrading because they don’t see the need - there aren’t compelling software reasons to upgrade yet (AI is certainly not compelling consumers to buy new systems). They will emerge eventually.

    The lack of any landmark PC AAA games is likely holding back demand for consumer graphics cards, and we’re seeing similar issues with consoles. The games industry has certainly been here many times before. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 coming up - instead we’ve had flops like Star Wars Outlaws, or underperformers like Starfield. But look at the biggest game of last year - Baldurs Gate 3 came from a small studio and was a megahit.

    I don’t see doom and gloom, just the usual ups and downs of the tech industry. We happen to be in a transition period, and also being distracted by the AI bubble and people realising it is a crock of shit. But technology continues to progress.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      VR

      Yeah, I think it’s ripe for an explosion, provided it gets more accessible. Right now, your options are:

      • pay out the nose for a great experience
      • buy into Meta’s ecosystem for a mediocre experience

      I’m unwilling to do either, so I’m sitting on the sidelines. If I can get a headset for <$500 that works well on my platform (Linux), I’ll get VR. In fact, I might buy 4 so I can play with my SO and kids. However, I’m not going to spend $2k just for myself. I’m guessing a lot of other people are the same way. If Microsoft or Sony makes VR accessible for console, we’ll probably see more interest on PC as well.

      People are not upgrading because they don’t see the need

      Exactly. I have a Ryzen 5600 and an RX 6650, and it basically plays anything I want to play. I also have a Steam Deck, and that’s still doing a great job. Yeah, I could upgrade things and get a little better everything, but I can play basically everything I care about (hint: not many recent AAA games in there) on reasonable settings on my 1440p display. My SO has basically the same setup, but with an RX 6700 XT.

      I’ll upgrade when either the hardware fails or I want to play a game that needs better hardware. But I don’t see that happening until the next round of consoles comes out.

      • realitista@lemm.ee
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        Yeah Sony was my hope here but despite a few great experiences, they have dropped the ball overall. I’m bored of the cartooney Quest stuff, so I’ll probably not buy another headset for a good 5-10 years until there’s something with a good library and something equivalent to a high end PC experience today.

        • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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          Yup, but with good headsets costing way more than good monitors and generally needing even better GPUs, I’m just not interested. Yeah, the immersion is cool, but at current prices and with the current selection of games, the value proposition just isn’t there. Add to that the bu