- Nvidia and Micron are making emotional appeals to consumers while PC users express frustration with big AI companies’ practices and self-serving motives.
- Memory vendors predict DRAM and SSD shortages lasting until mid-2027, while new tariffs on advanced computing chips and potential Steam Machine pricing over $1,000 add to consumer concerns.
- The article highlights how corporations use emotional messaging to mask financial interests, advising consumers to remain skeptical of such appeals.
I hope you are correct, but I don’t think you are.
I don’t think game devs (or web devs or any dev really) even remember what optimization means, at this point. They sure aren’t going to start prioritizing it now, especially if major companies continue to be out of touch about what gamers actually want.
I mean we have microtransactions, we have games as service, we have single player games with online connection requirements, we have games that need logins to other services, etc etc etc. no gamers want these things, but it doesn’t matter because companies do. And companies aren’t going to care if you can’t afford to play their game on your own equipment, they’ll offer you a subscription to stream it from theirs.
You just described the AAA gaming market almost to a T.
The indie market, on the other hand, typically cares about what they produce, and you’re far more likely to get optimized games there that don’t require extra launchers, internet connections, or a massive GPU—not that it doesn’t happen there, mind you, but it’s going to tend to be more of a skill issue than a profit-driven one.
Also, there’s still very good games in the retro space.
Its just personal evidence but i see more and more indie games using UE5 and a lot of them run like shit. Most games dont need real time lighting, global illumination, software or hardware raytracing based solutions etc. But instead of baking that stuff once onto textures like its 2004 on the developers rig we now have indie titles with artstyles and visuals which were achievable 20 years ago but done with bleeding edge graphics technologies which dont even run well on modern mid tier GPUs.
Dont get me wrong we still have tons of indie titles which run on a potato. But more hardware demanding titles really picked up recently even in the indie space.
Absolutely, I agree. I think we are likely to see a shift in what indie devs use for their game engines (love2d, Godot, etc.) as PC specs stagnate, and I am of the opinion that GOG will see an increase in sales, too.
The “runs like shit” games have a shrinking market.
It’s certainly true that the indie market is better about that stuff, but the indie market also generally isn’t considered the driver or trend-setter of the overall games market the way AAA studios are. It would be amazing if that trend shifts, don’t get me wrong, but until or unless it does, I don’t see this going well overall. It does, though, mean that people who care will still have options, and that’s good, so solid point.
I figure the digital-only consoles are a stepping stone toward this. I’d never consider one myself because if I don’t own a copy of the game that I can sell, I’m not paying for it just in principle. But a ton of people wanted the convenience over the practicality of resale. Digital-only consoles have basically killed the physical game market going forward, since it’s been basically dead on PC for ages. I see the same thing happening with the consoles themselves. I mean ps+ already has a streaming option and a substantial portion of their catalogue is only available to play that way. I’m sure Xbox has the same thing, probably with a similar portion of content locked behind streaming from their servers. I don’t even really understand why they would do this since the bandwidth to stream is far higher than to download and play offline, so I have to assume there’s something behind it like a push toward that model. Get people used to it as an option, then make it the only option.
And there’s nothing indie studios can really do about those big trends led by big studios/companies, except to quietly keep doing what they were already doing, and make a huge fuss about it when they get their 15 minutes like larian has done. Wake up as many people as you can sort of thing.
I agree it’s not a win-win, it’s more of a win-lose tradeoff, but it will certainly drive customers away from those shitty companies, and towards the indie developers who don’t do microtransactions and unoptimized PC-crushing graphics-fests with 16-billion-K textures and Nvidia’s latest 600x FSXLAA running on every pixel 3 million times per second.
Indie developers may not prioritize optimization, but if there’s a need to, they will, and most of the time, they simply don’t have to. Balatro and Vampire Survivors are going to be doing just fine on any hardware.