That mostly tracks. I think the problem is less the availability of affordable options and more the willingness of the market to take those as a standard, though.
The affordable options are there. You can get a PS5 starting at 400 bucks (tariffs allowing). That’s a lower sticker price than a launch PS3 and on par with the inflation-adjusted price of a 360. It’s also cheaper than some comparably performant GPUs, let alone an entire PC.
Problem is then you’re playing at some variation of upscaled 1080-1440p at 30 to 60 fps and apparently the PC market thinks that’s for peasants and you should only ever play at hundreds of fpss and many megapixels.
And yeah, the tech hasn’t made those specs available to the human-tier and instead the marketers have gotten really good at giving you FOMO for all the high end features you could be getting instead.
There is a low end. I think the fact that a Steam Deck is ostensibly a full handheld PC starting at 420 bucks is absurd. Not gonna raytrace much on it, though.
Do I think games should all be made for Steam Decks and PS5s and not have any features that require beefier hardware? Well, seeing my point about loving visual features I’m going to be a no, but I also think we need to get better at managing the FOMO as a group.
Or the hardware needs to find a new route to get us back on the Moore’s Law curve. Either/or.
Unfortunately, I have a bad wrist/hand, and cannot type much more without extreme pain.
That being said… wonderful conversation, truly, thank you for that.
As a parting comment, I will say:
MooresLawIsDead is great youtube channel. =D
So is uh, Threat Interactive.
They go very in depth into showing the details of … basically, game engine and game optimization is largely dead, everyone is now just relying on assuming every end user has a supercomputer GPU to throw enough raw power and input lag inducing frame gen to smooth over a whole, whole lot of bad optimization and … unsustainable fundamental game design practices, which of course go along with the unsustainable fundamental hardware architectures.
That mostly tracks. I think the problem is less the availability of affordable options and more the willingness of the market to take those as a standard, though.
The affordable options are there. You can get a PS5 starting at 400 bucks (tariffs allowing). That’s a lower sticker price than a launch PS3 and on par with the inflation-adjusted price of a 360. It’s also cheaper than some comparably performant GPUs, let alone an entire PC.
Problem is then you’re playing at some variation of upscaled 1080-1440p at 30 to 60 fps and apparently the PC market thinks that’s for peasants and you should only ever play at hundreds of fpss and many megapixels.
And yeah, the tech hasn’t made those specs available to the human-tier and instead the marketers have gotten really good at giving you FOMO for all the high end features you could be getting instead.
There is a low end. I think the fact that a Steam Deck is ostensibly a full handheld PC starting at 420 bucks is absurd. Not gonna raytrace much on it, though.
Do I think games should all be made for Steam Decks and PS5s and not have any features that require beefier hardware? Well, seeing my point about loving visual features I’m going to be a no, but I also think we need to get better at managing the FOMO as a group.
Or the hardware needs to find a new route to get us back on the Moore’s Law curve. Either/or.
Unfortunately, I have a bad wrist/hand, and cannot type much more without extreme pain.
That being said… wonderful conversation, truly, thank you for that.
As a parting comment, I will say:
MooresLawIsDead is great youtube channel. =D
So is uh, Threat Interactive.
They go very in depth into showing the details of … basically, game engine and game optimization is largely dead, everyone is now just relying on assuming every end user has a supercomputer GPU to throw enough raw power and input lag inducing frame gen to smooth over a whole, whole lot of bad optimization and … unsustainable fundamental game design practices, which of course go along with the unsustainable fundamental hardware architectures.