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
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.
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.
That’s what happens when you let a libertarian have a monopoly
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.
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?)
Gamergate. It went wrong in gamergate.
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)
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.
Offline games will stay existing, even if the AAA studios won’t create those.
But fuck em.
There’s already more amazing games than you or I could possibly play in a lifetime. If they only make shitty games, I’ll just play old games. I’ve been gaming on a retro handheld and honestly there’s so many amazing games I missed.
Indy devs are also killing it in the multiplayer space with silly and charming co-op experiences. I played a lot of Peak and Motor Town with friends lately and both are just so fun.
I’m not happy. Are you?
I am when I refuse to buy their slop.
When companies stopped being able to actually make anything new, they then choose to find new ways to extract profit from the customer. Far cheaper than expending money on R&D, retooling, etc. They all decided to become landlords of the worst kind, squatting on their tech and extracting rent while ensuring the rest of us own nothing.
