I don’t know what games people are buying but I’m having a blast. This is more referring to the average top budget game or most marketed game than anything else
I really don’t understand all these articles either, I’ve been playing a lot of recent games and IMO this is one of the best years for gaming in nearly a decade. Tekken 8, Helldivers, animal well, and lethal company are all very recent games I’ve had a blast with this year. Maybe it feels bad because of consolidation under Sony and Microsoft, but I feel like nearly all the buyouts I’ve seen have been studios that were on life support creatively, if not monetarily. ActiBliz hadn’t released anything other than trendchasing crap and COD installments since overwatch, which went to shit long before OW2. The last good game Bethesda publiahed was prey and you’ve gotta go even further back for a good first party title.
Clearly game journos and I are playing different games because things are great so long as you drop AAA (garbage) and multiplayer FPS (cheating).
GPU prices are a bit stupid but I have been playing/buying with a new rule lately and it’s great: if it doesn’t play well on the Steam Deck, I just don’t buy it. Problem solved.
It’s so rare that a game that even needs a better card comes up it’d be hard to justify a new card even if prices were normal. I feel like I play maybe one game a year that makes me consider upgrading.
Title needs to be “AAA Gaming is getting worse every year”.
I’m getting tons of fun out of smaller games.
The problem with AAA games is that we are going through a period of consolidation and contraction. This is just a normal business cycle and we’ll be back to companies throwing money at games in a few years. I’m reminded of an old comic (I think Far Side in the 90’s, but I can’t find it at the moment) which has a class staring at a black board with the following:
Business Strategy 101:
Convince Microsoft you are a threat
Accept their buyout offer
This has all happened before and it will all happen again. I doubt we’re staring down another video game crash like the 80’s, but things may slow down for a bit and we may go through a period of the major studios putting out more shovelware. Eventually, the economic situation will rebound and so will AAA games.
I think it’s more likely that a new batch of AA studios take the crown of leading the industry. All the mega corporate publicly owned old guard will continue to cannibalize themselves into irrelevance.
Simultaneously were in the age of retro revivals with emulation being at its peak thanks to the open source software community and the absolute pile of handheld form factor consoles available in the market.
Every bad launch has damaged the industry as a whole. The reputation for PC gaming has been diminished by a thousand cuts. No one expects a game to be good on launch. Everyone has been burned at least once by this.
Yeah my experience is that gaming gets better and better every year. Also, I do play early access games if they are from small studios and appear to have enough content to engage me. I just avoid triple A games.
I mean, 2023 had a ton of “wow, this is definitely game of the year” releases one after another. So many that you couldn’t even fit all of them into the category of most gaming shows. And for some inane reason Todd Howard still thought he had a shot.
The article has some valid points though, one being that GPUs are obscenely expensive, like it is not normal in my eyes a single mid range GPU to cost more than a console. And mind you this GPU is not even future proof because NVIDIA for example didn’t want to put more VRAM.
Plus a lot of game studios are trying to push micro transactions and other bullshit into games, and turn the whole gaming industry into pay to win and gaming as a service.
Of course there are plenty of decent game studios that actually generate great games, but the majority of those big studios are concentrated on how to maximize their profit and disregard the will of their customers.
Are we talking the same 4060, that can’t beat 3060Ti? That’s an absolute disgrace if you ask me, and should have been called 4050Ti at most, if not 4050. Or the fact that 3060 had 12GB of VRAM, while 4060 had 8Gb. NVIDIA bumped all their lineup with one tier up, in order to make their current offering look a bit better compared to last gen.
Or are we talking about the fact that NVIDIA made a whole lineup of unworthy GPUs except 4090.
You need to shed 850-900 bucks to get a 4070Ti Super that has 16Gb of VRAM, in a year when RAM is dirt cheap. And the mid range is priced as high end.
Is that okay in your books? Because in my books, it is definitely not!
Much of this isn’t unique to PC gaming. And if there ever was a dark age for PC hardware, we’ve recently crawled out of it, thankfully.
What bugs me the most right now (and doesn’t quite get addressed in this article) is low performance standards. Everyone’s pushing 4K and ray tracing, which makes it hard out here for us framerate nerds. It’s starting to feel like every major release that comes out is Crysis, something for my hardware to grow into. Only with blurry anti-aliasing/supersampling techniques now.
One new, big positive I’m not seeing talked about much is a growing variety of Japanese publishers are taking PC seriously now, and that hasn’t happened in over thirty years. I’m including Sony in this, even with their recent missteps in the space, and Square Enix’s recently announced restructuring suggests simultaneous PC releases in the future for their games. That will inject some competition in PC gaming, although be aware that Japan has its own share of publishers that release broken ports.
My recent realization is that the very high-end of the GPU market is totally unnecessary. A 4070 can play practically any game at 4K with decent framerates. And if you are fine with just "high" settings instead of maxed out, at very good framerates too.
I don't disagree, but gaming laptops are always overpriced. You're paying a premium for the small form factor. (And I assume they also have the much less powerful RTX 4070 Mobile, which makes the value proposition even worse for laptops.)
Pretty sure nobody cares, but man as a third world country guy it feels weird as fuck to see these reasonable-looking numbers only to multiply by 50 and get a heart attack.
In 2020 I bought a 2080 Super for more than 800€, I considered it crazy expensive but I had the money and my 1070 had died. 23 months later it died and Amazon refunded the money, so I proceeded to buy another GPU. That money was only enough for a 3070ti and I still had to pay 30-40€ more. I’m happy with my 3070ti for now, and I hope it lasts long enough, I don’t think I can afford that kind of money anymore.
It’s not raw framerates that are bad now, developers pushing tech is not a bad thing and has been how gaming has been since it’s invention, aside from the “dark ages” of X360 ports where PC just meant 360 graphics at crazy res and framerates.
The problem nowadays is games are straight unplayable even at lowered settings or extreme hardware due to shader compilation or streaming stutters. This is just bad programming with no fix aside from an engine rework, and most devs don’t have engine programmers anymore since they just ship UE4/5
What bugs me the most right now (and doesn’t quite get addressed in this article) is low performance standards.
I’d add low control standards. Since everything is a console port now, everything needs to be dumbed down to be playable by controller. That’s why we don’t see certain genres much any more (sims or RTS) and get shooters with included aim “aids” or cross-play wouldn’t be possible.
It’s because of algorithms. Anything well known gets boosted because it thinks people will be interested. Honestly as gamers we should take a leaf out of the FFXIV community book and advertise the games we love more.
I been avoiding AAA like the plague lately. It's $70 for half the fucking game and you got to consult a spread sheet to make sure you don't get the wrong one. Your lucky if you put 10 hours in on it total.
I found an indy game today for $15 and binged it for 10 hours. Hoping for a slow week at work to play more.
With all the launchers, DRM clients, malware anti cheats, early access scams and what not. I think on the whole that PC gaming has gotten worse compared to 20 years ago. You can still get good experiences but it won’t be AAA. Also gaming sucks in general these days, not just PC gaming
Indie games and non-AAA games are still better than games 20 years ago that generally don’t pull all that shit. There might be some grim darkness out there, but I’m just gonna chill in the sun, because it’s definitely still there.
Yeah. Pretty much boils down to, “There is fewer good triple A games coming out, and less significant hardware advancements.” This doesn’t mean its getting worse, just means its getting better slower. Even if you read it as “getting worse as compared to other platforms” it doesn’t really work seeing as all these issues affect other platforms just as much, and often more.
I would like to point out that indies do indeed pull crap, just different crap. Just look at the ocean of abandoned Early Access games for one example of it.
Just pay attention to the reputation of the developer and see if you like what they make.
Depending on the project, there might not be a soundtrack to buy - especially for indie projects.
I’ve pitched in a few bucks here and there to support projects, with mixed results. I don’t regret supporting even the failed projects though, since I viewed it more like a donation than a purchase.
I will sometimes buy early access if its a game that I hope succeeds and does well. But I also recognize that comes with risk. I am not saying what people should do with their money, just that indies are not some magical saviour that are somehow immune to the same problems AAA studios exhibit.
Buy what you want, just recognize that nowadays no matter what you buy comes with risk greater than what it would have been in the past.
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