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?
Wait till the Y2K38 event occurs.
If only we had some way of working with a bigger integer…maybe we’d call it something like BigInteger…
I had heard that. Maybe I’ll get my hands on one someday. I hear Commodore makes one.
(I do wonder now if whatever variable is being used to denote time is signed or unsigned, because that would make a big difference, too.)
It’s a societal bubble, soon we all go pop. c/collapse
I’m a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space.
I would like to introduce you to the indie game scene. Where AAA is faltering, indie has never been in a better place.
Overall, I don’t see things the way you see them. I recommend taking a break from social media, go for a walk, play games you like, and fuck the trajectory of tech companies.
Live your life, and take a break from the doomsaying.
I would like to introduce you to the indie game scene. Where AAA is faltering, indie has never been in a better place.
Amen.
Indie games might not be flashy, but they’re often made with love and concern about giving you a fun experience. They also lack all those abusive DRM and intrusive anti-cheat systems that A³ games often have.
And I’ll add on to that, even if every GPU company stops innovating, we’ll still have older cards and hardware to choose from, and the games industry isn’t going to target hardware nobody is buying (effectively pricing themselves out of the market). Indie devs especially tend to have lower hardware requirements for their games, so it’s not like anyone will run out of games to play.
They also tend to have linux support. Where the AAA companies want to eat the entire mammoth and scorn the scraps, small companies can thrive off of small prey and the offal. :)
My only fear with the indie gaming industry is that many of them are starting to embrace the churn culture that has led AAA gaming down a dark path.
I would love an app like Blind that allows developers on a game to anonymously call out the grinding culture of game development, alongside practices like firing before launch and removing credits from workers. Review games solely on how the dev treated the workers, and we might see some cool corrections between good games and good culture.
Hello indie gamer, it’s me, you, from the future.
I’d like to introduce you to PATIENT indie gaming.
The only games I play are small team, longer running, well documented, developers are passionate, mods exist, can play on a potato or a steam deck, etc
Because I’m patient, I don’t ever get preorder, Kickstarter, prealpha disappointed.
I know exactly what I’m getting, I pay once, and boom, I own a great game for ever. (You can more often fully DL indie games)
Genuinely wish more people understood this. I’ve mostly only been playing indie games for the past few years. By far the best fun i’ve had in gaming. A ton of unbelievably creative, unique games out there. Not to mention that 99% of them are a single-purchase experience, instead of a cash treadmill
Plenty of good games out there, even in the early access I have found some real gems. Just recently coffee stain released satisfactory… labor of love and it shows. I recently tried bellwright, it’s impressive, so is manor lords.
And hardware stagnating also means that people get to learn what it’s all about and optimize for it. The last gen games on a console are usually also better optimized than the first series of games on a platform. So yeah…
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.
I love this, and I’ll even one up it. Let the bubbles burst, this is just a transitional period that you see like a predictable cycle in tech. The dot com burst was like a holocaust compared to this shit. Everyone who was in the tech scene before Google has an easier time with this. We can comfortable watch FAANG recede, and even be grateful for it. Let it happen.
it’s time for you to play PACMAN, as i did when i was young 😂
no AI, no GPU, no shitcoin: you just have to eat ghost, which is very strange in fact when you think about it 🤪
Well, that’s the doomer take.
The rumors are that the 80 series card is 10% faster than the 90 series card from last gen: that’s not a ‘10%’ improvement, assuming the prices are the same, that’s more like a 40% improvement. I think a LOT of people don’t realize how shitty the 4080 was compared to the 4090 and are vastly mis-valuing that rumor.
I’d also argue the ‘GAMES MUST BE ULTRA AT 4K144 OR DONT BOTHER’ take is wrong. My gaming has moved almost entirely to my Rog Ally and you know what? Shit is just as fun and way more convenient than the 7700x/3080 12gb desktop even if it’s 1080p low and not 1440p120. If the only thing the game has going for it is ‘ooh it’s pretty’ then it’s unlikely to be one of those games people care about in six months.
And anyways, who gives a crap about AAAAAAAAAAAAA games? Indie games are rocking it in every genre you could care to mention, and the higher budget stuff like BG 3 is, well, probably the best RPG since FO:NV (fight me!).
And yes, VR is in a shitty place because nobody gives a crap about it. I’ve got a Rift, Rift S, Quest, and a Quest 2 and you know what? It’s not interesting. It’s a fun toy that, but it has zero sticking power and that’s frankly due to two things:
- It’s not a social experience at all.
- There’s no budget for the kind of games that would drive adoption, because there’s no adoption to justify spending money on a VR version.
If you could justify spending the kind of money that would lead to having a cool VR experience, then yeah, it might be more compelling but that’s been tried and nobody bought anything. Will say that Beat Saber is great, but one stellar experience will not sell anyone on anything.
And AI is this year’s crypto which was last year’s whatever and it’s bubbles and VC scams all the way down and pretty much always has been. Tech hops from thing to thing that they go all in on because they can hype it and cash out. Good for them, and be skeptical of shit, but if it sticks it sticks, and if it doesn’t it doesn’t.
The 5080 is rumored to be 10% faster, but also use 90% the power. While performance has a normal generational leap, power consumption has gone up to match leaving you with a much smaller actual improvement.
Power consumption numbers like that are expected, though.
One thing to keep in mind is how big the die is and how many transistors are in a GPU.
As a direct-ish comparison, there’s about 25 billion transistors in a 14900k, and 76 billion in a 4090.
Big die + lots and lots of transistors = bigly power usage.
I wouldn’t imagine that the 5000-series GPUs are going to be smaller or have less transistors, so I’d expect this to be in the die shrink lowers power usage, but more transistors increase power usage zone.
Conversly, the apple silicon products ship huge, expensive dies fabbed on leading TSMC processes which sip power relative to contemporaries. You can have excellent power efficiency on a large die at a specific frequency range, moreso than a smaller die clocked more aggressively.
You can also get big power consumption from turning up the voltage and cranking the clock speeds well past their efficient zone. You see that right now with most 40 series cards where turning the clock speeds down a smidge gives you huge power savings at almost no loss in performance.
Cost per MM^2 of die space has only gone up with each process node these last 10 years, so unless you’re paying big money don’t expect big chip.
Little bit of pushback on the vr front: Sure, there aren’t many massive publishers driving it forward, but I would wholeheartedly argue that it can very much be a social experience, and offers experiences it is damn near impossible to get anywhere else, and three games immediately come to mind:
VRchat (obviously): Literally entirely a social game, and has a pretty large community of people making things for it, from character models to worlds because that’s what drives the game. There is a massive scene of online parties, raves, hangouts, etc. that bring people together across the whole world in a medium more real than any flat game because of the custom models, worlds, and the relative abundance of people using full body tracking to show off, dance, and interact with each other.
VTOL VR: This is still fairly social in that you can either play with friends or people online, but the main draw for me is the level of immersion in flying you can get. You have full interactable cockpits that you basically just use your real hands to interact with (depending on your controller/hand tracking) and it’s all pretty realistic. It’s just impossible to have the same level of experience without VR.
Walkabout mini golf: I was pretty skeptical of this game when my friends wanted to play it, it’s literally just a mini golf sim. The thing is, the ability to play mini golf with friends who live across the country/world is amazing, and the physics of just swinging your controller/hands in the same way as real mini golf is so special.
It is still quite expensive to get really good gear, and that is definitely the current biggest hurdle. It may forever be a smaller community due to the space/tech/cost requirements to make the experience truly incredible, but for me even just on a quest 2 in my room without a lot of fancy stuff, it is still interesting and something special. A lot of people really do care a lot about VR, and even if it is far less than conventional gaming, it should not be entirely discounted. And I personally think that while is probably won’t ever replace flat screen gaming, it is an entirely different kind of experience and has a at least decent future ahead
Fair points on VR games being fairly social. I was more thinking of the in-person social experience, which is still involving some portion of people sitting around stuffing their face into a headset and wandering off into their own world.
IMO, this is something that AR/MR stuff could do a great job of making more social by adding the game to the world, rather than taking the person out of the world to the game but, of course, this also restricts what kind of games you can do so is probably only a partial solution and/or improvement on the current state of affairs.
I also agree that it’s way too expensive still, and probably always will be because the market is, as you mentioned, small.
PCVR is pretty much dead despite its proponents running around declaring that it’s just fine like it’s a Monty Python skit. And the tech for truly untethered headsets is really only owned by a single (awful) company and only because the god-CEO thinks it’s a fun thing to dump money on which means it’s subject to sudden death if he retires/dies/is ousted/has to take time off to molt/has enough shareholder pressure put on him.
Even then, it’s only on a second generation (the original Quest was… beta, at best) and is expensive enough that you have to really have a reason to be interested rather than it being something you could just add to your gaming options.
I’d like VR to take off and the experiences to more resemble some of the sci-fi worlds that have a or take place in a virtual reality world, but honestly, I’ve thought that would be cool for like 20 years now and we’re only very slightly closer than we were then, we just have smaller headsets and somewhat improved graphics.
