Hard to believe it’s been 24 years since Y2K (2000) And it feels like we’ve come such a long way, but this decade started off very poorly with one of the worst pandemics the modern world has ever seen, and technology in general is looking very bleak in several ways
I’m a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space. So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because people are either too poor, don’t want to play a live service AAA disaster like every single one that has been released lately, Call of Duty, battlefield, anything electronic arts or Ubisoft puts out is almost entirely a failure or undersales. So many gaming studios have been shuttered and are being shuttered, Microsoft is basically one member of an oligopoly with Sony and a couple other companies.
Hardware is stagnating. Nvidia is putting on the brakes for developing their next line of GPUs, we’re not going to see huge gains in performance anymore because AMD isn’t caught up yet and they have no reason to innovate. So they are just going to sell their next line of cards for $1,500 a pop for the top ones, with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need. We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away
Virtual reality is on the verge of collapse because meta is basically the only real player in that space, they have a monopoly with them and valve index, pico from China is on the verge of developing something incredible as well, and Apple just revealed a mixed reality headset but the price is so extraordinary that barely anyone has it so use isn’t very widespread. We’re again a decade away from seeing anything really substantial in terms of performance
Artificial intelligence is really, really fucking things up in general and the discussions about AI look almost as bad as the news about the latest election in the USA. It’s so clowny and ridiculous and over-the-top hearing any news about AI. The latest news is that open AI is going to go from a non-profit to a for-profit company after they promised they were operating for the good of humanity and broke countless laws stealing copyrighted information, supposedly for the public good, but now they’re just going to snap their fingers and morph into a for-profit company. So they can just basically steal anything they want that’s copyrighted, but claim it’s for the public good, and then randomly swap to a for-profit model. Doesn’t make any sense and just looks like they’re going to be a vessel for widespread economic poverty…
It just seems like there’s a lot of bubbles that are about to burst all at the same time, like I don’t see how things are going to possibly get better for a while now?
Gaming now is more amazing that ever in part because we have access to classic games too. If someone thinks gaming was amazing 10 years ago, cool. We still have those games! I’m playing a really old game right now myself and loving it.
I think OP confuses this whole bubble bursting thing. When a phenomenon passes out of its early explosive growth phase and settles into more of a steady state, that’s not the “bubble bursting” that’s maturity.
Tech as a whole is now a more mature industry. Companies are expected to make money, not revolutionize the world. OP would have us believe this means that tech is over. How does the saying go? It’s not the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning.
Companies are expected to make money, not revolutionize the world
I’d like to believe that, but I don’t think investors have caught on yet. That’s where the day of reckoning will come.
AI is a field that’s gone through boom and bust cycles before. The 1960s were a boom era for the field, and it largely came from DoD money via DARPA. This was awkward for a lot of the university pre and post grads in AI at the time, as they were often part of the anti-war movement. Then the anti-war movement starts to win and the public turns against the Vietnam war. This, in turn, causes that DARPA money to dry up, and it’s not replaced with anything from elsewhere in the government. This leads to an AI winter.
Just to be clear, I like AI as a field of research. I don’t at all like what capitalism is doing with it. But what did we get from that time of huge AI investment? Some things that can be traced directly back to it are optimizing compilers, virtual memory, Unix, and virtual environments. Computing today would look entirely different without it. We may have eventually invented those things otherwise, but it would have taken much, much longer.
I’m playing a really old game right now myself and loving it.
Same. I’m slowly working my way through the Yakuza series (started w/ Yakuza 0), and I’m currently halfway through Yakuza 3, which was released in 2010. I play them about a year or two apart because I get kinda burned out near the end.
I have way more games than I can reasonably play, and my wishlist of games I want to play is still unreasonably big. There’s no way I’m running out of interesting games to play anytime soon. And I haven’t really gotten into emulation either, so these are purely PC titles that I’m still trying to catch up on.
Companies are expected to make money, not revolutionize the world
Exactly. There’s a clear reason why Warren Buffett still owns a massive stake in Coca-Cola, and it’s not because they’re a hot young startup. Tech hardware is fantastic, and honestly, most people really don’t need big improvements year over year. I think game devs can do a lot more with the hardware we already have, so we should be looking at refining the HW we have (small improvements in performance, larger improvements in power efficiency and reduction in die size to improve margins). Likewise for desktop and cloud software, a round of optimizations would probably yield better gains than hardware revisions.
I’m excited to see VR headsets get cheaper and more ubiquitous (i.e. I think something like the Valve Index could be done for half the price), handheld PCs like Steam Deck getting better battery life, etc.
