because I have a very advanced and therefore terrible brain, I woke up earlier pondering how ridiculous and fucked up and outright bad it is that it's near universally accepted that games are just something that HAVE to become more demanding and "advanced" to play over time.

Despite being well into a second decade of the actual abilities of computer hardware being exactly the same

this isn't luddism. It's not just me being poor either. There's just no reason, other than corporate greed and the mindless culture it's nurturted for 40+ years, that a computer from a decade ago shouldn't be able to play a modern game

Yes, the average corporate game will look shinier and demand more of the hardware. But it doesn't have to. Very little of that changes anything about what the game is

We don't do this with any other form of art or entertainment. It's entirely bad

The first new PC I ever bought was in early 2011. It was the first time I'd ever had enough money, and also the time when games had finally, FINALLY stepped off the hardware races for a while (largely because of gog and then steam opening distribution of older and small-scale independent games).

That PC, with only a bit of extra ram once or twice, was able to run games all the way up to red dead redemption 2 in early 2021. And it only struggled with that because of a specific incompatibility

(I must grudgingly acknowledge that this suggests rockstar did an impressive job with making the cowboy game run well even if the loading times were atrocious)

(also luddism is anticapitalism and pro-humanity and it is good and one time a rich guy threatened to kill them so they kidnapped him and shot his dick off, we need this now more than ever)

genuinely though, this is just bad. The hardware race bullshit has come back these last few years, and there really is no difference between anything the games are actually doing compared to ten years ago. We hit diminishing marginal returns on shiny graphics over a decade ago, and even greater scale has mostly been used just for extra spectacle

"ho ho ho, you can't expect a pc from seven years ago to play today's games!"

Why? Why not? Tell me. Apart from "it uses fancier tech". What difference does this actually make to your game? Why is some pleasant little tech frippery worth ten million perfectly functional computers going to landfull?

It's like this because you made it like this. If you told people they had to spend hundreds just to play a new album they would tell you to fuck off. It's all just rich people conning us again

It's not a coincidence that the golden age of games happened when it suddenly became possible for people to release and buy smaller, more imaginative (not always obv) games that were playable on cheaper, older machines for much less money.

Piracy didn't fade JUST because of convenient distribution, it's also because games became affordable and playable for more people. The "core" audience of "gamers" with more money than personality traits are merely loud, not actually necessary

I'm sure there are lots of technical explanations and dependencies and architecture changes that all amount to "the industry forced a change to a more demanding way of doing the same thing as before"

entirely fucked that people go "x game has posted hardware requirements and they are high. I will have to upgrade!!!" like... fucking what? That should tell you they can EAT SHIT

@sinvega what is this, the fucking 90s? Tech doesn't evolve fast enough anymore that they should be targeting anything more recent than a 5-10 year old setup

@sinvega All this, while also aknowledging that AAA games budget and developing time has gone NUTS. The last Assassin's Creed cost some $500 M and took to produce like 4 or 5 games 10 years ago. Its just unsustainable. Its crazy. It makes no funcking sense at all.

@sinvega @exameter with the exception of VR, if i can't run it on a steamdeck at this point then i'm not interested

@eniko genuinely, if most of the industry hadn't spinelessly/vichily caved to the fascist shits in 2014, we'd probably have seen a bigger movement away from this bullshit

@sinvega @eniko what happened in 2014??

@valdezWOOF @eniko things in games culture were starting to look good for the first time. So a fascist hate movement formed from its general bigotry mire (4chan etc in particular) to drive out anyone who wasn't an angry little gamer boy, and most of the media refused to take any kind of stand against it.

It was so effective that its tactics spread to the internet at large, and here we are

@sinvega not to mention the minimum spec consistently being Completely Unrelated to what you actually need to run a game because nobody actually tests anything on low end hardware

the number of games that say they need a gtx 1070 minimum that have run on my ten year laptop is upsetting to say the least

@mynotaurus @sinvega I was hoping the steam deck (and valve’s commitment to it) would change that status quo but that doesn’t seem to have worked