I agree. It's the same to me with how people get mad at yearly phone releases. There are people upgrading every year. It could be after 3 years 5 years. It's best that they have the best that is possible that day then buying 3 year old hardware because some people think release cycles should mirror their upgrade cycles

Plus hardware progression pushes the low end higher which is a great thing. The Steam Deck 4 years ago was an awesome thing. It was cheap for the time. Sub $400 for access to nearly the whole PC library. A successor would make more higher end games that have released since more accessible especially if pricing didn't become so wonky since. Plus older games could then be played at 4-10w TDP settings meaning longer battery life on older games

Same with the Steam Machine. Could have been a great cheap Valve supported mini-PC gaming console that was multiple times stronger than a Steam Deck. It's was something that can push forward open platforms (Linux) in multiple ways. It would have in the box a gamepad. It would be a play for the living room. Maybe services like Crunchyroll and Netflix would have interest in releasing apps onto Steam or Flathub for it. It could grow to be a strong competitor to Android TV and fully proprietary walled gardens like Apple TV and Roku. Any delay delays the ecosystem developing

Delaying the PS6 is unlikely to mean an upgrade in its capabilities. It's waiting for manufacturing prices to drop, not for engineering to complete. Upgrades require further funding for engineering redesigns. Really a PS6 delay is only good for the continued viability of the Switch 2 and Steam Deck for new releases

Poor optimization is also a result of the democratization of video game development. You don't need to be a wiz at assembly, C, and C++ anymore. You don't need to be a wiz at shader programming, GPGPU programming. You don't have to learn the nuances of the underlying hardwares architecture. Not it's GPU, CPU, memory design, etc. Most devs aren't engine developers and I'm most games people enjoy today would not be made today if it wasn't for the streamlined development that video game engines like Unreal, Godot, Unity, Creation, Source, etc enable. Even with source available, only a limited number of developers would modify Unreal Engine for optimizations (I wouldn't do that for Epic. It's not a free engine. That's their job). Most won't modify Godot or O3DE

The big problem is that nobody thinks about those people that don't have the hardware right now.

Literally yes they do, because even though they don't have the latest and greatest hardware, they have some money to spend. That's the argument being made: until now the assumption was that new hardware would get cheaper over time, and people would gradually move to new hardware. Devs spend years making games, and historically bank on that assumption so that when the game comes out, it has the largest audience available to purchase it.

The fact that it looks like that won't be the case in the near future means devs have to shift their behavior to accommodate what their playerbase has, i.e. continue developing and optimizing the same hardware.

That said, this is all temporary. Whether they widen the pipeline, or the AI bubble bursts, in 2-3 years there will be a deluge of hardware hitting markets. (Provided trade/actual wars don't get in the way, which is the bigger concern imo).

A lot of people say that the price increases will force developers to optimize and to work with what hardware they have to make good games and stop using AI gen and DLSS tech as an excuse for poor optimization.

The main problem with this is simply that it won't happen. Every company would have to spend more on their games for no monetary gain, while their competition likely won't do the same.

Not to mention, big game companies already have insanely powerful hardware, so it doesn't impede the development in the slightest.

the way games are going now is the way games have BEEN going. capitalism's only purpose is infinite growth at any and all expense. this is what that looks like for gaming, bigger bigger bigger while bandaging it up with TAA and framegen and DLSS. when this house of cards tumbles, i know i will capitalise on it by not investing in the same mistakes again. but, i can only really hope that others do the same.

I was gonna upgrade when the steam machine came out but with the likely price hike taking it to $800+ I think I’ll just keep playing 20 year old Call of Duty: United Offensive

I view it less as a defense of the current situation and more people trying to find what little optimistic takes are left to take while dealing with this hobby killer greed.

I don't embrace it, but I can do nothing about it. I'm just going to try to keep what hardware I have alive as long as possible with DIY repairs where I can and buy overpriced used parts when I must including oddball stuff from China.

At the moment, my NAS is becoming unaffordable to maintain if things stay as they are. Datahoarders weep.

They can just buy used shit and not play at 4k resolution with 120fps. That stuff will also last longer now.

I just spent a few hundred to upgrade my gaming computer. I bought an old amd r5 5600x from 2020 for $150 and an old amd rx 6600 xt that came out 5 years ago.

I'm more than happy to let the "ever more demanding giant game" trend disappear. Half the games I play use pixel art graphics anyhow. If this pushes devs to make smaller and more creative games that run on decade old systems to reach the most gamers, I'm fine with this, still. Less e waste. Less constant feeling of needing newer components. Less bloatware from shitty games that want 100+GB storage.

Before prices get outrageous on 5+ year old components all these bullshit AI and data centers buying up everything will be dumping the current high end stuff out on the market to make way for newer stuff. And that's IF the ai bubble doesn't burst beforehand.

I'm 90% certain that none of the resources being "bought" by AI actually have been sold, or created yet.

Either warehouses of GPUs and RAM are gonna go in a shredder in 12 months, or they're just decreasing supply and charging more, like the auto industry.

Speaking of the auto industry: Is AI a mirage, like the dreams of a working rotary engine? Many companies have tried, but it keeps killing companies and it still is an impossible goal. The technology projects a mirage for investors that it just can't reach.

AGI isn't coming out of LLMs and statistical weights.

Their model, which has scraped the internet and therefore by definition knows how to make a pipe bomb, cannot be proven that it wont tell the user how.

The guard rails are impossible to build because LLMs aren't deterministic.

Shit‘s been fucking expensive before this year and most triple-A stuff ran like doodoo anyway. Now prices are just even worse and somehow that‘ll make the suits care? At best we‘ll get the same level of bad.

MH Wilds has been out for a year and today‘s patch pushed it to the bottom range of acceptable.

Even if somehow more money was put into engineering now, the argument would still be weak, it‘s naive on its own merit at best.

Honestly I hope the ENTIRE console industry completely dies off. Hopefully Nintendo bites it first, but they're all fucking shitty as hell (for SO many reasons) and I hope they all go extinct by the time Trump does.

There, I said it, I'm not sorry, and I will die on this hill. I don't even think there's any reasonable counter point beyond it being a simple entry point with easy to plug in pre-configured boxes.

So fight me. Consoles suck, and they should go extinct.

That's a weird take.

I still rock a gtx 1060, I have no issue playing a wide variety of games, obviously most classics and many newer indie titles.

The games I "can't run" are modern AAA titles that put a lot of emphasis on spectacle and pay no attention to optimization.

Yes it sucks for people who want new hardware right now because they have literally nothing, but even then something used from 5-10 years ago will play 95%+ of all games, including many many classics and very popular games like minecraft and fortnite.

Modern developers simply were not ever taught the old ways. The old ways are light years ahead in terms of optimization and efficiency than what modern developers can even imagine. Imagine creating a C compiler and it has to run in 16KB of RAM and be powerful enough to build unxz, untar and sha256sum. Because it was done because they needed it.

While I understand the pain of someone having no hardware right now, I think you should still be able to get an old gaming PC or an old Playstation 4 to enjoy games for cheap.

In fact, almost everyone has something like this lying around..

While it means running old AAA or lower demanding current games, it’s still great gaming time.

It's not just an AI problem.

You've pointed out the scalpers and speculators of the market. Are we going to do anything about them? No? It's all just AI, right?

What good is it for the developers when they're whipped by companies with unrealistic demands and people who're strained from paying top-dollar for the games? It's all just AI!

It's a multi-pronged issue.