Alternative outcomes:
Gaming bifurcates.
Indies and certain AAs aim for the ‘good ending’, realize fancy graphics are not only harder to produce, but you’re actually just shooting yourself in the foot in terms of potential customers.
AAA on the other hand continues to double down and enshittify, figure out new ways to turn gaming into leasing and renting.
… but, as always, mostly marketing, ad campaigns, paying off “journalists” and “influencers”.
3rd potential outcome:
Something akin to lan parties/netcafes/arcades recurs.
Rent out a space, run a local to global network solution and also a miniature rendering farm.
All the actual PCs (or maybe VR headsets) are connected to cheap, thin client local machines that are then networked to the mini rendering farm.
4th potential outcome:
… nobody can actually stop people from emulating or running old, good games. ‘Piracy’ becomes as normalized in many other parts of the world as it is in Russia currently.
I grew up in Russia and it’s sometimes so mindboggling that people don’t know their way around digital piracy. It may sound bad, but I actually think that it’s the only thing that can keep the market healthy. I pay for games, movies, books and whatever else there is purely because I like them. And if I don’t like the content you made, you are getting no money. If I have to pay for it before judging it’s value, what insentive does the producer of the content have to make it actually good?
Will we really have more performant games? Are game companies going to invest in an opensource game engine to pool their talent and make the most performant game engine out their that makes the most performant games?
It’s way more likely they’ll try and sell us yet another SaaS product or even better, an AI product that guzzles a cubic metre per request.
Here’s my conspiracy theory; as local gen ai is closing in on cloudmodels even on modest gaming hardware they need to phase it out to make subscriptions pay. So they buy more hardware than they need to make local a nonviable way
plays another 2,000 hours of dwarf fortress
Plays another 666 hours of Doom 2 and all the custom wads. I particularly love Zone 300 and the DSDA Doom engine.
Unironically, yes. Also,
ssh nethack@alt.org(or some other server) strongly recommended. My first ascension is still one of my most memorable gaming experiences.
My view about this shortage is european company won’t be able to take back their data from US Cloud.
Or a stockpile of ram so they can step back and let china fuck taiwan
But the honest answer is they’re coked up monkeys doing stupid shit because $$$
SSD prices really pisses me off. I use those for work as an independent and regularly need new ones, and the ones I usually get have gone up like crazy!
I need the other stuff for work too but for now my rig is chugging along so I’m not feeling that yet.
I mean, if all new gaming becomes cloud based shit I’m just going to be playing old games on emulators forever, or at least as long as my computer functions. And then when that fails, I’ll go back to analog enjoyments.
I have a harddrive with about 2.7 TB of Ps2 isos. This should be enough for the next 10 years.
Just hope the cost of storage is reasonable when you need a replacement/backup
It’s saved in a RAID system so theoretically I can risk one failure and still have a backup. On the other hand, the collection is available as a torrent with an acceptable number of seeders so I should be fine.
Let’s hope! Who knows what catastrophic mess the world will be in by then.
When I think about it, between emulators and various icon collections I have enough games to last me for the rest of my life. And that’s a feeling of being free, not trapped.
I also have to do a shout-out for analog enjoyments. Interacting with the natural world and exercising all of your senses are just straight-up good for you.
My steam library alone is enough to last me a decade probably
They are going to make PC out of reach for common folk and force us to pay a monthly subscription for computing power.
devs are not in control of pc optimization, it is their bosses. plus idont think this ai thing is gonna write fast code…
Secret ending: you keep playing the huge selection of games we already have, endlessly, forgetting games you played a while ago as you restart one you already forgot.
Edit: currently playing Warhammer 40k: Space Marine. So far it’s really fun. It’s as if you’re playing Doom as a more normal guy.
Real ending: your gpu dies in a year or so and you can no longer play anything ever.
Well damn, I hope it doesn’t.
Though, if it does, it would be under warranty, and thankfully I’m not in america so my warranty has a chance to actually be useful
Maybe this is a good time to visit the hundreds of never-installed games we have in our steam libraries.
Nooo! I won’t ruin my pristine collection by playing the games!
Good ending for the gamers, bad ending for the devs…
If a dev is good they can make games worth buying with current hardware
Second secret ending: the games you have won’t run on your pc.
-someoone who waited 5 years to play fallout 76 after buying it 2 weeks after launch.
I mean, fallout 76 doesn’t really fall in the category of games I’d even consider
Already did this last year and according to Steam data many others, too.
I have used an Xbox Gamepass trial a few times. Its a good deal honestly, especially if you play a variety of games.
Except its competing with essentially a 40+ year backlog of games I own that Inhave collected over my life. I have zero need for it.
And frankly, its biggest competition is something like HumbleBundle, where you can often get a pile of games per month to keep without the subscriotion.
Worst ending: Devs continue chasing higher graphical settings, consoles continue to release but at much higher price points to cover these costs. Cloud gaming also becomes much more expensive to afford the infrastructure. Gaming becomes less accessible to everyone except the wealthy.
Devs continue chasing higher graphical settings
What, “higher”? The games don’t look better, they are just more poorly optimized now.
“We are now modeling the subsurface scattering of each individual hair. Each hair has a unique texture”
“Gamers finally rise up” scenario
Cloud gaming is effectively impossible due to little things like the speed of light. Sure, you could play Civilization via cloud but good fucking luck with competitive shooters.
That and the US being such a large market while having some of the worst internet in the developed world. Last I read only ¼ of the network is fiber
I live in France, has fantastic fibre, would still hate to play civilisation “in the cloud”.
There is just no incentive to do so IMO. Even a cheap mobile phone can render well enough, and I just hate any kind of even “possible” lag.
/Rant off 😋
I play games over 4G happily. Not likely to work very well with game streaming. Especially if everyone else is. I did it during covid and it was ok but input lag was noticeable. SSH dwarf fortress and got into cdda was a better experience.
tbf: The US is huge as fuck. Most countries in the developed world could fit in Texas.
Yeah but the ones that have shit internet don’t have money to pay for the games anyways
It’s so stupid. It’s a solution looking for a problem.
I’m happy that Google Stadia died.
As with anything these techbro oligarchs comes up with. Unfortunately they do have the power to bend reality to their twisted wills.
What if everyone is on the cloud in the shooter?
Everyone can suffer together, yay
Wanna bring about the next French Revolution, worldwide? Cause that seems like a good way to do it!
Would be cool to play civ5 on a long term server.
I’m thinking something that emails you when its your turn too. Like playing chess over mail.
Isn’t that a thing in freeciv, that open source version of civilization?
There is a freeciv? How did i not know this
Yeah, there’s a web version of the game if you want to try it out, though it seems to be based on civilization 2 or 3 rather than 5 or 6.
I believe freeciv is civ 1.
Unciv is based on civ5 and has support for BNW from the mod list.
Civ over mail. Physical mail. Like those old mail chess games in the times before online chess (use https://lichess.org/ btw <3 ).
Move a scout, wait 3-5 days for the answer.
Interesting. I mean it more in the sense that civ is just a long game regardless, so some async maybe help.
I completed Nier Automata via GeForce Now just fine. Competitive shooters maybe not, but that’s just a subset of gaming anyway.
“Sure, you could play good games, but good luck playing garbage.”
Shooters aren’t garbage to people who like them. Different people prefer different games.
Google appropriating the concept to rename it after one of their C suits is the most Google shit ever.
We need to turn this law into an electron app.
Oberon… A2… rabbit hole alert i’m out!
deleted by creator
The first ending has already been happening.
The second ending keeps failing to happen. We’ve got graveyards full of Cloud Gaming markets. Google Stadia, OnLive, Walmart’s cloud service LiquidSky, and various smaller platforms like Vectordash and Bifrost.
stadia people got lucky as they got full refunds on everything after it shut down. what a deal tbh
Plus why would anyone use the expensive ram ssds and gpus to make a datacenter for videogames when they can hop onto the AI hype before it’s gone?
