The future of PC gaming is the community support of vintage games that you loved.
The future of consoles is amatuer AI taxidermy remakes of your childhood memories. A distorted uncanny-valley resemblence of a game you once held dear, stuffed to the brim with synthetic fluff and hung on a generic skeleton twisted and bent to roughly resemble a once vibrant and living thing.
The console wars are over. Xbox is being spun down.
Xbox is going to be a subscription game console service, like stadia was.
Microsoft is going to use the “free” compute cycles when their AI slopcenters aren’t at full utilization to run Xbox games.
SO RIGHt
Also with microtransactions
I wish I had more than one upvote for this.
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.
Such a tragic story.
They will exploit you right up until the point where you commit crime. So steal and pirate your way to liberation.
Mines more like 15 years or more lol
Well hold on there, son. You just need to take up a hobby. Have you ever considered working with your hands, sawing up wood, drilling screw holes, learning to balance chains and then build a guillotine? Work proactively - damnit.
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!
Magic the Fappering?
Well that’s the joy, I’ll build it so you can just draw tits and penises in.
Sounds interesting. Any way I can wishlist or sign up for a news letter to be notified about development and release date?
I’m a ways off from that I think. About 11 months in (mostly the odd day at weekends) and I have a working card system and the AI can play a card that beats you if it can but it’s very simplistic and all the art is either drawn in paint, a text or untextured placeholder, or royalty free avatars I downloaded from itchio
I’ll plug it in a few game-making communities when I have a demo It’s (very early) working title is “Cartoquaria” (as in a place where one stores cards, in Latin) and it uses a deck of tarot cards you imbue with mystical powers - but I’m easily a year or two out.
I recently pulled out my old PSP from way back when. If I don’t have any options to buy anything to own, guess there’s less incentive to buy anything new. Give me options pls
There are tons of great games you can play with old hardware. Relax and start half life 2
But anon isn’t happy, why would he say that if he didn’t think he would be happy? Is Anon removed?
Where it all went wrong was the industrial revolution
Capitalism. Yay!
Where did it all go wrong?
Enclosure after the Black Death.
Yep.
I think the “patient gamer” model could be the way through don’t buy new shit and encourage your friends to play older games too. Hardware can be not great and the games are cheap.
If you buy them off Steam you don’t actually own the game. You own a license to play the game, and that license is non-transferable and can be revoked. Doesn’t matter if it’s on your hard drive.
How long is that going to work though? Today’s slop is not going to unslop in 5 years, and it seems like every big name game publisher is exclusively doing slop now. Especially the optimization issue won’t go away, and it looks like the times where you could just wait for a generation or two of more powerful hardware are over, too - hardware might be getting more powerful, but the performance per dollar isn’t improving because the performance is only improving incrementally and I don’t see hardware prices going down to what was normal pre-Covid.
Still plenty of indie devs making good games. Really, you could just work through all the good games made up to this point and be fine for the rest of your life.
Otoh, if what you really care about is the social connection you get from playing games and talking about them with other people, you can just take up gardening or community service or pole dancing to get that.
it seems like every big name game publisher is exclusively doing slop now.
You have to understand the capitalism, it is doing slop because slop is what sells to people
You will need to shift your monies away from big name game publishers to smaller ones that make content that you prefer thereby encouraging them to make more non-slop
But I’ve been saying it for years even before AI, call of duty 29 and fifa 56 etc are all cash cows
There is no incentive to improve if what you’re doing works
I have enough unplayed games for years. And I haven’t even bought all games that interest me on my wishlist.
So to answer your question: I think it will work long enough till AI either implodes or is big enough that the state forces you to connect your brain implant to it.
Theoretically, we could see the PC gaming market come to resemble that of eastern Europe in the past, where everybody has very minimal or outdated hardware and the indie scene builds games with this in mind.
That’s pretty dire, but I prefer it over cloud subscriptions becoming the norm for gaming and other compute heavy tasks.
We’ll just mod the old games.
There are options that don’t involve buying. Open source games exist.
I’m talking about the hardware. “not buying” that and getting away with it is quite a bit harder than for software.
Cheaper hardware also exists, raspberry pi can run loads of games. Could even run old flash games on it.
Pis (Pi’s? Pi-s?) are cool, but it seems like overkill in this case. A second-hand thinkpad should be accessible enough, both cost-wise and difficulty-wise.
Yeah that also works. Still want to make a briefcase pi some day. Power everything by USB and stick a few powerbanks in there so it would run for days. It’s also easier to fix any broken part compared to a laptop. Made with some padding and it should be reasonably impact resistant too.
Oh yeah, that sounds awesome. Kinda like something out of a spy movie or something.
Which games are slop nowadays?
That only works if you already own the hardware and/or the majority does NOT do that model. The moment most people jump on board, the cost of old hardware will skyrocket too.
Except even if the majority DOES adopt this model:
- that will make repairing old hardware more profitable, so supply will rise to meet demand at least a bit (and is also objectively a good thing)
- a lot of old hardware isn’t compatible with Win11+ and unless Microsoft is visited by the Three Ghosts of Software or the long-anticipated Year Of The Linux Desktop arrives, so that’s one moat you can take advantage of (I assume you, a Lemmy user, are more likely to try Linux than an average person would, or are using it already)
- if the price still goes up, manufacturers will step in to take advantage
- at some point, the new slop business model won’t have enough customers to sustain itself
