alt Hacker NewsIf 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.
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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.
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.
Games are designed for consoles which aren't going to change in the near term.
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.
Switch was notorious for having a few Cloud streamed-games that don't run on the actual hardware.
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?
That's memory efficient assets, not memory efficient code. The latter is already optimized for the former.
> 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.
> 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).