4 ms·

If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected. If buyers can't afford the har

by andix 4mo ago

If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected. If buyers can't afford the hardware anymore, the studios need to adjust. It's definitively possible to scale games down a lot. There are a few AAA games that were "dumbed down" for the Switch 1 (Hogwarts, cyberpunk, ...). And that's a really low-spec device. There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier. Why games? Because there is a clear point where people stop buying games. Minimum hw specs are known before buying.

operatingthetan 4mo ago
If you listen to gaming Youtube then the gaming industry is already in trouble from hardware costs and availability. I'm not sure if they are making a mountain out of a mole hill or not though.
- laughing_man 4mo ago
  I don't know if I buy it. In the last few years the AAA gaming industry has turned out a lot of bad games, and that probably explains most of the trouble.
thomastjeffery 4mo ago
That's memory efficient assets, not memory efficient code. The latter is already optimized for the former.
tayo42 4mo ago
Are programmers and their use of data structures driving up storage requirements in games though? Or is it just high poly models and high res textures?
- andix 4mo ago
  I guess it's not just models and textures. Those should be the easiest to dial down, even optionally with a "low" setting. Maybe making high-res assets an optional download, to reduce game size (ssds are also getting expensive)
- applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
  Helldivers 2 was in the news a few months ago for "optimizing" and saving over 130gb of disk space required for installation or something to that effect. In actuality, what they did was remove an "optimization" they had implemented without ever once benchmarking and realising it was making things significantly worse. The software development industry is a freaking wreck filled with easy opportunities for improvement if only anyone gave enough of a shit about their consumers to profile their code, ever.
rvz 4mo ago
> There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier. Spot on. Now with LLMs and desktop app libraries such as Tauri, there is little excuse in choosing Electron to build memory hungry apps other than laziness.
- andix 4mo ago
  Tauri sucks on macOS and especially Linux, because the native browsers are a huge issue. Tauri/Windows uses a recent Chromium engine, which is fine.
KronisLV 4mo ago
> If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected. Recently I booted up Insurgency: Sandstorm. With a 5800X and an Intel Arc B580 at 1080p and high graphics, the game runs at around 200 FPS. Meanwhile, pretty much any modern UE5 title (with the exception of Ready or Not and Split Fiction, from what I've seen) runs horribly - the interesting thing is that no matter how much you tweak the .ini files or change the graphics settings you can't get something like STALKER 2 or The Forever Winter or Borderlands 4 to run as well as UE4 with the graphics similar to those old games. Instead you get something that runs at like 10% of the render resolution and still doesn't get 60 FPS (I'm not exaggerating, literally the performance I got in The Forever Winter). There's no good technical reason for things to be that way (Unity still exists, and the games made in it struggle less) other than the devs or the higher ups choosing higher fidelity but more expensive rendering technologies and using upscaling and framegen not as something that helps laptops or when you need the spare GPU capacity (e.g. encoding a video recording of the game), but rather as something that's supposed to be used to even get to 60 FPS in the first place. I don't know what needs to change for things to get better. I also don't see anyone particularly caring about regular software, Electron et al are just too convenient to develop in (having to create per-platform UIs sucks in already-overworked teams).
- 59nadir 4mo ago
  > I don't know what needs to change for things to get better. Studios need to start creating custom engines again, for one. We'll get better games with less unsatisfying jank, some of the projects will actually cost less (which is paradoxical to some) and performance is likely to jump significantly. Off-the-shelf engines have as many costs as they have benefits, but like a lot of technology people refuse to look at the choice as a trade-off, and to the extent that they acknowledge it's a trade-off the implicit admission is always that it's a trade-off that the user/player is paying the most for, so it's OK. If companies start creating custom engines en masse again it will also help solve part of the competency crisis in the industry, because they'll be forced to actually learn and educate people on how things work.
  - tuna74 4mo ago
wmf 4mo ago
Games are designed for consoles which aren't going to change in the near term.
thewebguyd 4mo ago
I hope we continue local gaming, but my gut tells me we are going to see the opposite. I'd be willing to place a big bet on the new XBox leaning heavily into streaming, like GeForce now. Studios still get to build big, and the consoles get to rent hardware to you now, basically a wet dream for them. hardware costs must come down or every consumer segment is going to be renting, not owning, everything.
- timacles 4mo ago
  > hardware costs must come down or every consumer segment is going to be renting, not owning, everything. Is this not exactly what companies want
- VohuMana 4mo ago
  I wouldn’t be surprised if they try but I think the game streaming business model is mostly dead. Stadia was a huge flop, PlayStation has streaming for previous gen games and it sucks, Xbox also has a streaming offering but I haven’t heard anything good about it. It’s a bad user experience and a significant cost to the company providing the streaming.
Dwedit 4mo ago
Switch was notorious for having a few Cloud streamed-games that don't run on the actual hardware.
- socalgal2 4mo ago
  which ones were those? I want to check them out
  - tuna74 4mo ago
    The Switch 1 Kingdom Hearts game are like that.
Stevvo 4mo ago
No reason to see it in AAA games. They already have to run on Series S, which has ~8 GB usable memory. Consoles are the primary target for any game (if they are not, it is not AAA). So minimum specs remain relatively static through a generation.

by andix 4mo ago

operatingthetan 4mo ago

If you listen to gaming Youtube then the gaming industry is already in trouble from hardware costs and availability. I'm not sure if they are making a mountain out of a mole hill or not though.

laughing_man 4mo ago
I don't know if I buy it. In the last few years the AAA gaming industry has turned out a lot of bad games, and that probably explains most of the trouble.

thomastjeffery 4mo ago

That's memory efficient assets, not memory efficient code. The latter is already optimized for the former.

tayo42 4mo ago

Are programmers and their use of data structures driving up storage requirements in games though? Or is it just high poly models and high res textures?

andix 4mo ago
I guess it's not just models and textures. Those should be the easiest to dial down, even optionally with a "low" setting. Maybe making high-res assets an optional download, to reduce game size (ssds are also getting expensive)
applfanboysbgon 4mo ago
Helldivers 2 was in the news a few months ago for "optimizing" and saving over 130gb of disk space required for installation or something to that effect. In actuality, what they did was remove an "optimization" they had implemented without ever once benchmarking and realising it was making things significantly worse. The software development industry is a freaking wreck filled with easy opportunities for improvement if only anyone gave enough of a shit about their consumers to profile their code, ever.

rvz 4mo ago

> There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier. Spot on. Now with LLMs and desktop app libraries such as Tauri, there is little excuse in choosing Electron to build memory hungry apps other than laziness.

andix 4mo ago
Tauri sucks on macOS and especially Linux, because the native browsers are a huge issue. Tauri/Windows uses a recent Chromium engine, which is fine.

KronisLV 4mo ago

> If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected. Recently I booted up Insurgency: Sandstorm. With a 5800X and an Intel Arc B580 at 1080p and high graphics, the game runs at around 200 FPS. Meanwhile, pretty much any modern UE5 title (with the exception of Ready or Not and Split Fiction, from what I've seen) runs horribly - the interesting thing is that no matter how much you tweak the .ini files or change the graphics settings you can't get something like STALKER 2 or The Forever Winter or Borderlands 4 to run as well as UE4 with the graphics similar to those old games. Instead you get something that runs at like 10% of the render resolution and still doesn't get 60 FPS (I'm not exaggerating, literally the performance I got in The Forever Winter). There's no good technical reason for things to be that way (Unity still exists, and the games made in it struggle less) other than the devs or the higher ups choosing higher fidelity but more expensive rendering technologies and using upscaling and framegen not as something that helps laptops or when you need the spare GPU capacity (e.g. encoding a video recording of the game), but rather as something that's supposed to be used to even get to 60 FPS in the first place. I don't know what needs to change for things to get better. I also don't see anyone particularly caring about regular software, Electron et al are just too convenient to develop in (having to create per-platform UIs sucks in already-overworked teams).

59nadir 4mo ago
> I don't know what needs to change for things to get better. Studios need to start creating custom engines again, for one. We'll get better games with less unsatisfying jank, some of the projects will actually cost less (which is paradoxical to some) and performance is likely to jump significantly. Off-the-shelf engines have as many costs as they have benefits, but like a lot of technology people refuse to look at the choice as a trade-off, and to the extent that they acknowledge it's a trade-off the implicit admission is always that it's a trade-off that the user/player is paying the most for, so it's OK. If companies start creating custom engines en masse again it will also help solve part of the competency crisis in the industry, because they'll be forced to actually learn and educate people on how things work.
- tuna74 4mo ago

wmf 4mo ago

Games are designed for consoles which aren't going to change in the near term.

thewebguyd 4mo ago

I hope we continue local gaming, but my gut tells me we are going to see the opposite. I'd be willing to place a big bet on the new XBox leaning heavily into streaming, like GeForce now. Studios still get to build big, and the consoles get to rent hardware to you now, basically a wet dream for them. hardware costs must come down or every consumer segment is going to be renting, not owning, everything.

timacles 4mo ago
> hardware costs must come down or every consumer segment is going to be renting, not owning, everything. Is this not exactly what companies want
VohuMana 4mo ago
I wouldn’t be surprised if they try but I think the game streaming business model is mostly dead. Stadia was a huge flop, PlayStation has streaming for previous gen games and it sucks, Xbox also has a streaming offering but I haven’t heard anything good about it. It’s a bad user experience and a significant cost to the company providing the streaming.

Dwedit 4mo ago

Switch was notorious for having a few Cloud streamed-games that don't run on the actual hardware.

socalgal2 4mo ago
which ones were those? I want to check them out
- tuna74 4mo ago
  The Switch 1 Kingdom Hearts game are like that.

Stevvo 4mo ago

No reason to see it in AAA games. They already have to run on Series S, which has ~8 GB usable memory. Consoles are the primary target for any game (if they are not, it is not AAA). So minimum specs remain relatively static through a generation.