Technology

People are simultaneously too poor and spending more on video games

https://www.statista.com/statistics/252457/consumer-spending-on-video-games-in-the-us/

. . . with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need

Why is this a need? The constant push for better and better has not been healthy for humanity or the planet. Exponential growth was always going to hit a ceiling. The limit on Moore's Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.

We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away

Sure you can, today, and this is why:

So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because . . .

Regardless of the reasons, the AAA space is going to have to pull back. Which is perfectly fine by me, because their games are trash. Even the good ones are often filled with micro transaction nonsense. None of them have innovated anything in years; that's all been done at the indie level. Which is where the real party is at.

Would it be so bad if graphics were locked at the PS4 level? Comparable hardware can run some incredible games from 50 years of development. We're not even close to innovating new types of games that can run on that. Planet X2 is a recent RTS game that runs on a Commodore 64. The genre didn't really exist at the time, and the control scheme is a bit wonky, but it's playable. If you can essentially backport a genre to the C64, what could we do with PS4 level hardware that we just haven't thought of yet?

Yeah, there will be worse graphics because of this. Meh. You'll have native 4K/144Hz just by nature of pulling back on pushing GPUs. Even big games like Rocket League, LoL, and CS:GO have been doing this by not pushing graphics as far as they can go. Those games all look fine for what they're trying to do.

I want smaller games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I'm not kidding.

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 love to have a VR headset that didn't require a damn account with a 3rd party just to use it. I don't need an account for my monitor or my mouse. Plus when I bought the thing, it was just Oculus, then meta bought it and promised nothing would change, before requiring a meta account to use the fucking thing.

We still don't have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz.

And we really don't need that. Gameplay is still more important than game resolution. Most gamers don't even have hardware that would allow that type of resolution.

I agree with you on the GPU hardware and AI bubbles, but I'm not sure I would consider VR/AR to be a bubble right now. The hype has mostly died down by now, and I think it's stabilized to the point where it will remain until we have new advances in hardware.

COVID also inflated a lot of tech stock massively, as everybody suddenly had to rely a lot more on it to get anything done, and the only thing you could do for entertainment was gaming, streaming movies, or industrial quantities of drugs.

Then that ended, and they all wanted to hold onto that "value".

It is a bubble, but whether it pops massively like in 2000, or just evens off to the point where everything else catches up, remains to be seen.

"The markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" are wise words for anyone thinking of shorting this kind of thing.

I really truly suggest diversifying to newsfeeds without comment sections like techmeme for a bit.

Increasing complexity is overwhelming and theres plenty of bad shit going on but theres a lot overblown in your post.

Sorry for the long edit: i personally felt improvement for my mental health when i did this for 6 months or so. Because seriously, whatever disinformation is happening in american news is so exhausting. We need to think whatever we want and then engage with each other when our thoughts are more individualized. Dont be afraid to ask questions that might seem like you are questioning some holy established lemmy/reddit consensus. If you are being honest about your opinions and arent afraid to look dumb then you are doing the internet a HUGE service. We need more dumb questions and vulnerability to combat the obsession of appearing as an expert. So thank you for making a genuine post of concern.

As others have said, gaming is thriving - AAA and bloated incumbants are not doing well but the indie sector is thriving.

VR is not on the verge of collapse, but it is growing slowly as we still have not reached the right price point for a mobile high powered headset. Apple made a big play for the future of VR with its Apple Vision Pro but that was not a short term play; that was laying the ground works for trying to control or shape a market that is still probably at least 5 if not 10 years away from something that will provide high quality VR, untethefed from a. PC.

AI meanwhile is a bubble. We are not in an age of AI, we are in an age of algorithms - they will and are useful but will not meet the hype or hyperbole being banded about. Expect that market to pop and probably with spectacular damage to some companies.

Other computing hardware is not really stagnating - we are going through a generational transition period. AMD is pushing Zen 5 and Intel it's 14th gen, and all the chip makers are desperately trying to get on the AI band wagon. People are not upgrading because they don't see the need - there aren't compelling software reasons to upgrade yet (AI is certainly not compelling consumers to buy new systems). They will emerge eventually.

The lack of any landmark PC AAA games is likely holding back demand for consumer graphics cards, and we're seeing similar issues with consoles. The games industry has certainly been here many times before. There is no Cyberpunk 2077 coming up - instead we've had flops like Star Wars Outlaws, or underperformers like Starfield. But look at the biggest game of last year - Baldurs Gate 3 came from a small studio and was a megahit.

I don't see doom and gloom, just the usual ups and downs of the tech industry. We happen to be in a transition period, and also being distracted by the AI bubble and people realising it is a crock of shit. But technology continues to progress.

My biggest gripe with big tech is how governments of the world encourage their worst behaviours. Governments and businesses have failed to maintain their own level of expertise and understanding of technology.

Today everything relies on tech but all the solutions are outsourced and rely on "guidance" and free hand outs from vendors like Microsoft. This has caused situations where billions are poured into digital transformation efforts with fuck all to show for it but administrative headaches, ballooning costs and security breaches.

I'm so tired of silicon valley frat boys being the leaders of our industry. We need to go back to an engineer and ideas led industry. Focused on solving problems and making lives better. Not making bullshit unsustainable business monopolies with a huge pile of money. Right now big tech is the embodiment of all of capitalisms worst qualities.

P.s. apologies if my comment is a bit simplistic and vague. didn't want to write a 10 page rant but still wanted to say my 2c about the state of things.

Mainstream is about to collapse. The exploitation nonsense is faltering. Open source is emerging as the only legitimate player.

Nvidia is just playing conservative because it was massively overvalued by the market. The GPU use for AI is a stopover hack until hardware can be developed from scratch. The real life cycle of hardware is 10 years from initial idea to first consumer availability. The issue with the CPU in AI is quite simple. It will be solved in a future iteration, and this means the GPU will get relegated back to graphics or it might even become redundant entirely. Once upon a time the CPU needed a math coprocessor to handle floating point precision. That experiment failed. It proved that a general monolithic solution is far more successful. No data center operator wants two types of processors for dedicated workloads when one type can accomplish nearly the same task. The CPU must be restructured for a wider bandwidth memory cache. This will likely require slower thread speeds overall, but it is the most likely solution in the long term. Solving this issue is likely to accompany more threading parallelism and therefore has the potential to render the GPU redundant in favor of a broader range of CPU scaling.

Human persistence of vision is not capable of matching higher speeds that are ultimately only marketing. The hardware will likely never support this stuff because no billionaire is putting up the funding to back up the marketing with tangible hardware investments. .. IMO.

Neo Feudalism is well worth abandoning. Most of us are entirely uninterested in this business model. I have zero faith in the present market. I have AAA capable hardware for AI. I play and mod open source games. I could easily be a customer in this space, but there are no game manufacturers. I do not make compromises in ownership. If I buy a product, my terms of purchase are full ownership with no strings attached whatsoever. I don't care about what everyone else does. I am not for sale and I will not sell myself for anyone's legalise nonsense or pay ownership costs to rent from some neo feudal overlord.

What’s happening is that support from VC money is drying up. Tech companies have for a long time survived on the promise that they will eventually be much more profitable in the future. It doesn’t matter if it’s not profitable today. They will be in the future.

Now we’re in a period where there’s more pressure on tech companies to be profitable today. That’s why they’re going for such anti consumer behaviors. They want to make more with less.

I’m not sure if there’s a bubble bursting. It could just be a plateau.

Wait till the Y2K38 event occurs.

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:

1. It's not a social experience at all.
2. 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.

Also, the movie industry is struggling because of many reasons. Movies are getting too expensive, the safe formulas big studios relied on aren't working anymore, customer habits are changing with people going less to movie theaters.

At the same time, just like with video games, the indie world is in a golden age. You can get amazing cameras and equipment for quite a small budget. What free software like Blender can achieve is amazing. And learning is easier than ever, there are so many free educational resources online.

Guys, I'm actually getting nostalgic over the messy-but-still-kinda-fun 2010s. Everything was just so much more exciting back then, and if it was absolute garbage, it was still fun to make fun of it (cough cough 2013 Mac Pro, garbage quite literally).

Yeah, it was no "sunshine and lollipops" timeline, but still, over the literal boring hell of the 2020s, it was LEAGUES better.

The pace of technological change and innovation was always going to slow down this decade. But Covid, Ukraine and a decoupling from Russia/China has further slowed it.

You need three things in abundance to create tech. First an advanced economy, which narrows down most of the world. Second you need lots of capital to burn while you make said advances. Finally you need lots of 20 and thirty something’s who will invent and develop the tech.

For the last 20 years we’ve had all of those conditions in the Western world. Boomers were at the height of their earnings potential and their kids were leaving home in droves letting them pour money into investments. Low interest rates abound because capital was looking for places to be utilized. China was the workshop of the world building low to mid range stuff allowing the West to focus its excess Millennials age workforce on value added and tech work.

Now in the USA boomers are retiring and there aren’t enough GenX to make up the difference. Millennials and finally getting down to household creation or their oldest cohorts (Xennials) just now entering into their mid 40s and starting to move up in their careers but they probably still have kids to support. So it will be some time before capital becomes plentiful again. Gen Z is large but they aren’t enough to back fill the loss of Millennials.

Ohh I made a point to highlight that this was a US demographic phenomena. Europe and Japan do not have a large Millennial or GenZ populations to replace their aging boomers. We have no modern economic model to map out what will happen to them.

China is going through a demographic collapse worse than what you see in Europe or Japan. Only they aren’t rich to compensate add in the fact that they decided to antagonize their largest trading partners in the West causing the decoupling we are now seeing.

The loss of their labor means the West has to reshore or find alternative low wage markets for production and expend a lot of capital to build out the plant in those markets to do so.

Add on top geopolitical instability of the Ukraine and you have a recipe for slower tech growth.

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 🤪

Ok . So first of all while NVIDIA is absoluetly a scumy company but the reason they are able to be this scummy is because they do generaly deliver unreasonable performance improvment ( at an unreasonable price tho ) and this time its unlikely to be any diffrent and 50xx series is expected to be monstrous as far as performance go. So far they didint do the same mistake intel did with cpus.

Second . You cant collapse something that hasnt risen. Virtual reality never gained enough traction for it to collapse. I personaly blame PlayStation for this. If there is anyone that could make a diffrence it would be them .

Third. If that's true thats actually fucked up. Alghtough to be fair openai is very strange company and very closed one for a supposedly openai. Also i dont think going from non profit to for profit comapny changes much since it requires a thing they dont have. Profit.

I had a similar feeling, the trapped part of Windows and the enshitifying erroding privacy and ownership tipped me. I stepped back to Linux and wow! Its so much better now, a friend nagged me into nix and I have been soo impressed at just how better Linux is now compared to Windows. It used to be the polar opposite with Windows being easy and shiny, now so many desktop environments are just so far ahead of Windows, its really impressive. Thats also let alone before I consider how novel nix is. As my friend would nag, I use nix btw ❤️

We are sorry. So sorry indeed man! We are sorry that because of a pandemic many people in the industry had to move to safe locations and realize how much better those places were so they're not going back. We're sorry to have inconvenienced your game play. But we're working hard to get you to pay another salary's worth on the next tumb raider! We promised so much many more transistors that the boob wobble will be endless! Thru AI, anything is possible!

It's interesting how interconnected those points are.

Generative A"I" drives GPU prices up. NVidia now cares more about it than about graphics. AMD feels no pressure to improve GPUs.

Stagnant hardware means that game studios, who used to rely on "our game currently runs like shit but future hardware will handle it" and similar assumptions get wrecked. And gen A"I" hits them directly due to FOMO + corporates buying trends without understanding how the underlying tech works, so wasting talent by firing people under the hopes that A"I" can replace it.

Large game companies are also suffering due to their investment on the mobile market. A good example of is Ishihara; sure, Nintendo simply ignored his views on phones replacing consoles, but how many game company CEOs thought the same and rolled with it?

I'm predicting that everything will go down once it becomes common knowledge that LLMs and diffusion models are 20% actual usage, 80% bubble.