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?
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.
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. :)
Equating Linux enthusiasts to offal is a bold move on this site
It's a great analogy though - Linux users aren't deemed profitable by the A³ companies, just like offal is unjustly* deemed yucky by your typical person.
*I do love offal though. And writing this comment made me crave for chicken livers with garlic and rosemary over sourdough bread. Damn.
Idk, I've spent way more on games since Valve came to Linux. I was a Linux user first, and mostly played games on console because I didn't like rebooting into Windows or fiddling w/ WINE, so if I played games, it's because it had Linux support (got a ton through Humble Bundle when they were small and scrappy). When Steam came to Linux, I created an account (didn't have one before) and bought a bunch of games. I bought Rocket League when the Steam Controller and Steam Deck launched (was part of a bundle), and when Proton launched, I bought a ton of Windows games.
So at least for me, I've easily spent 100x what I would've spent on video games due to Steam supporting Linux. That said, there are easily 50 other people spending more than me on Windows for every one of me, so I get that Linux isn't a huge target market. But I will spend more on an indie game if it has native Linux support.
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.