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.
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!
Sounds interesting. Any way I can wishlist or sign up for a news letter to be notified about development and release date?
There are tons of great games you can play with old hardware. Relax and start half life 2
Where did it all go wrong?
See that part where millionaries became billionaires while everyone else got, at best, just enough raise to be stagnated with inflation? Yeah, that’s a good starting point
remind me, what do we need billionaires for again?
Buy a console anon.
Join the filthy gaming working-class. You will own it, and forever feel inferior with your pathetic 30-60 FPS.
those will also be expensive what are you on about.
a ps5 is like $500. That’s not expensive compared to a gaming PC. I just helped my newphew build a low-end gaming PC and it was $1500. the GPU was $400 alone.
oh, still not going to every buy one tho, for the obvious system limitation reasons and lame exclusives.
you don’t have to. buy what you want, play what you want. you can even buy used machines.
I think that gaming is headed fast into some kind of deep economic divide.
On the one hand, we have high-end gaming that chases seasonal updates, massive multiplayer experiences, requiring high-end system specs to even start. It’s all practically a subscription model one way or another: keep buying new games, DLC, hardware, just to keep playing with your friends. Alternately, sign up for a subscription to play all this stuff in the cloud, dodging the need to maintain your own hardware, but never really owning anything in exchange.
Then there’s the other way.
Right now, we’re sitting on top of nearly 50 years of video games going back to the primordial sludge of Pong. Modern system specs are far more than what’s required in almost all cases so it’s practically all there for the taking for cheap. I promise you, there are grand single and multiplayer experiences to be had by dipping into that monstrous catalog. At the same time, some of the very best of those are getting new life with modern updates, fan-edits, fan-made content packs, and so on. Finally, there’s the hobby and indie scenes, where new things are being made all the time in various game-jams, early access on Steam, and so much more. You have to dig for all of that of course; the people pushing you to pay a high price for entertainment will never make this easy.
You forget about Indie games too though, STS2 is a great recent example.
I made a small edit to reflect this! You are correct: that’s a huge part of what’s driving innovation and fresh ideas in this space. Plus, it’s usually for a bargain.
That’s what happens when you let a libertarian have a monopoly
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
its funny they say you’ll “own nothing and be happy” but they keep taking the things away from us that have been keeping us content with their systems for so long, they do realize this right? that they’re setting themselves up for disaster.
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)
Gamergate. It went wrong in gamergate.
This is capitalism at work
who are the AIslop games taking over gaming? Are they in the room with us right now?
Where did it all go wrong?
When we stopped publicly executing politicians and millionaires (there were no billionaires yet at the time).
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.
