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?
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.
Sure you can, today, and this is why:
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.
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).
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.
Here are the number of hours I've spent on indie games VS AAA titles, according to my Steam library:
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.
Depending on where you draw the line, mine looks similar:
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...
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.
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!