This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
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
And there's a talk going around about single-player campaigns won't come to PC, they'll be PlayStation only.
single-player campaigns won’t come to PC
glances at the Steam catalog
glances at my unplayed Steam library
laughs
To answer OP's question, I think the place "we went wrong" was allowing ourselves to be driven by the industry hype cycle rather than enjoying the genuine quality games in the orgy of content available on every platform.
There are more high quality games released in any given five year span than you could play in the next ten. If 90% of AAA publishers released nothing but slop for the next 20 years, you would never miss a day of gaming if you just stuck to the existing stock of bangers.
You don't even need a particularly good computer to play the classics - your Starcrafts and emulated Super Marios and Forza racing sims. Nevermind the privately hosted MMOs that can eat up thousands of hours of playtime. Go check out FF14 or Guild Wars 2. I've got a friend who has been doing WoW for 20 years.
If new games are slop, who cares? We are at the tale end of a Golden Age of game development. You're sitting on a treasure trove. Just don't buy the next Call of Duty game and you'll be fine.
Where did it all go wrong?
Enclosure after the Black Death.
They will exploit you right up until the point where you commit crime. So steal and pirate your way to liberation.
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.
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
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.
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
Cross out "of PC gaming" and you got it.
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.
Where did it all go wrong?
When we stopped publicly executing politicians and millionaires (there were no billionaires yet at the time).
Where it all went wrong was the industrial revolution
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.
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)
Yep.
At least we'll always have the classics. Download, play, and seed emulated games folks.
I recently pulled out my old PSP from way back when. If I don't have an options to buy anything to own, guess there's less incentive to buy anything new. Give me options pls
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.
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
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.
Seeing shit get worse and worse every year has thr goblinest mask of all callin' like:
There are tons of great games you can play with old hardware. Relax and start half life 2
OOP is wrong about one thing: They're not happy.
It is the grim dark far future of all gaming. Forget the promise of freedom to upgrade and superior graphical fidelity. There is no peace among the Discord servers, only an eternity of monetization, and micro transactions.
But anon isn't happy, why would he say that if he didn't think he would be happy? Is Anon retarded?