Anon owns nothing and is unhappy
(midwest.social)
🍹Early to RISA 🧉
GreentextBut anon isn't happy, why would he say that if he didn't think he would be happy? Is Anon retarded?
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.
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.
Capitalism. Yay!
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.
There are tons of great games you can play with old hardware. Relax and start half life 2
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?
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?
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
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)
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.
This is capitalism at work
Where did it all go wrong?
When we stopped publicly executing politicians and millionaires (there were no billionaires yet at the time).
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.
"They" do not say "you will own nothing and be happy". That is a term we have made to show us the true nature of them.
who are the AIslop games taking over gaming? Are they in the room with us right now?
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.
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.
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.
Gamergate. It went wrong in gamergate.
Just wanted to say that I love Reze.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We'll just mod the old games.
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.
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
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.
fires up klondike
Microslop ads intensify
"We have upgraded your klondike game to be CoPilot Klondike, with more CoPilot enabled features, such as CoPilot and CoPilot 365 for every move!"
Uses DOSBOX to run Windows 3.1 to play Solitare Vegas Mode
Cross out "of PC gaming" and you got it.
At least we'll always have the classics. Download, play, and seed emulated games folks.
not when your computer goes to the cloud.
When's the last time you tried to emulate something? The Wii and PSP can handle up to N64 decently, and that hardware is going on 20 years old.
Depending on your phone you can emulate PS2 and even Switch games.
Just hold on to whatever you have, even phones, and emulator devs will figure out the rest. Accuracy has been king for a long time while we've had strong hardware availability, but there's no reason we can't do per game speed hacks again like old SNES emulators when hardware gets scarce.
Steam Deck runs everything up to a PS3 and Xbox 360, and the Switch.
Almost everything a generation prior to ran runs with 0 problems, PS3/360/Switch can be hit or miss somewhat, depending on the game.
A Steam Deck will also run MGS5 and Titanfall 2.
Its entirely possible to make new games that look that good and will run on comparable hardware, just gotta, you know, have an optimized engine, render pipeline, game.
Hell you can get a solid, never dips below 45 FPS on CyberPunk 77 with a Deck, with med/high settings, then sync the VRR to a 45/90 split.
my main worry is that these things aren't built to last. especially phones.
yeah if they switched everyone to the cloud right now, i'd have a decade of computer at this point, maybe a bit more if i can fix it, and then what?
consoles tend to last longer but they don't do general computing, which is an important thing we'd be losing in the process.
Phones degrade through daily use as the charging port wears out or it gets dropped and damaged. Beyond that, software update assume more resources because they're tuned to new models that have that. If new models don't, we'll see that change.
The only part with a real use before date in it is batteries, but you can use them plugged in. Capacitors too, technically, but we're long past the days of the capacitor plague. Most should hold up for decades, as far as I'm aware.
As far as what we do a decade down the line?
I'd be shocked if business trends don't shift back to owned hardware which will in turn revitalize the consumer market. They'll take the functional parts that don't pass QC for business use and rebrand them for comsumers. They've been doing that with tons of hardware for ages now. The ram chips don't hit the right clock speed for the premium product so they'll bin those ones together into a lower grade cheaper product instead of trashing them entirely.
In a lot of ways this is just another go around of mainframe and terminals vs personal computers again. So we had the mainframe in the cloud vs on-prem setup, and various companies fell on either side based on their needs by now. Cloud is fairly stable, and we're at the point that most companies are able to evaluate pros and cons in a more clear headed manner. Most are discoverign that it makes sense to keep some things on-prem.
So now we get another go-around due to hardware scarcity because of AI hype. We're already seeing news stories talking about the importance of having actual metrics to judge success of "AI-enhanced" 🤮 workflows. Companies can stay irrational longer than we'd like, but they can't do it indefinitely.
Enough companies have enough legitimate use cases (and cash to burn) that on-premises hardware isn't going to just die. Eventually that will trickle back down to consumers.
And if it somehow doesn't, people will continue to figure out how to keep older stuff running. There has always been specialists doing it, now there will be more due to more demand.
I'm not really seeing where there's a lack of compute power in citizen hands that can't be overcome with more resource aware programming techniques, which will also start coming back into vogue if it has to.
There's no point (financially or open-source wise) making software no one can run. People will adapt.
I'm not trying to say that it won't suck, and that we aren't likely to see some big changes coming. I just can't imagine a future in which we all don't adapt and keep moving forward.
The only way everything goes into unsalvagable shit is if people just wholesale stop trying, and that's not something I've seen people just give up and do as some mass homogenous group in my life.
Seeing shit get worse and worse every year has thr goblinest mask of all callin' like:
Reject modernity.
August will mark 10 years of playing Rimworld for me.
Obv its not the only thing I play, but I come back to it every 3-4 months after little breaks. Was the same for Mount and Blade till the sequel came out. The sequel was both such an upgrade and such a downgrade it made it hard to keep interest. It's been probably 2 years since I booted that up. Maybe I should give it another try.
The sequel was both such an upgrade and such a downgrade
How is the sequel a downgrade? (I don't know basically anything except playing one of the games for half an hour-ish)
Downgrade? I'm curious what you didn't like about the sequel. Was it the family/diplomacy/story being too in your face? I think that was my only real gripe, but not a big one because it was interesting and easily removed if I wanted with mods.
Buy old PC, play Minecraft, be happy.
Team Fortress 2 is still populated.
Also use Prism Launcher or PolyMC to play all the modpaci you can dream of.
Also uzdoom/gzdoom and all the Doom II mods you can download
Prism launcher -> new instance -> modrinth -> fabulously optimized
To get a vanilla experience with all of the best performance mods preloaded
quake also has endless content! i've been going through the hundred or so levels from the recent brutalism map jam, there is so much good level design with quake's awesome gameplay
OOP is wrong about one thing: They're not happy.
At least an age verification law didn't turn valid just yesterday for OP.
It's way better than "you will have a big car, a big house, an fat wife and a dog "
oh no, not home ownership and pets
Lmao you think that's happiness? Owning stuff?
I pity you
it fucking beats not having control over my home fucking environment
and food security
Hell, Kristi, did you get so bored after being fired that you found the fediverse?
?
