Hard to believe it’s been 24 years since Y2K (2000) And it feels like we’ve come such a long way, but this decade started off very poorly with one of the worst pandemics the modern world has ever seen, and technology in general is looking very bleak in several ways
I’m a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space. So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because people are either too poor, don’t want to play a live service AAA disaster like every single one that has been released lately, Call of Duty, battlefield, anything electronic arts or Ubisoft puts out is almost entirely a failure or undersales. So many gaming studios have been shuttered and are being shuttered, Microsoft is basically one member of an oligopoly with Sony and a couple other companies.
Hardware is stagnating. Nvidia is putting on the brakes for developing their next line of GPUs, we’re not going to see huge gains in performance anymore because AMD isn’t caught up yet and they have no reason to innovate. So they are just going to sell their next line of cards for $1,500 a pop for the top ones, with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need. We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away
Virtual reality is on the verge of collapse because meta is basically the only real player in that space, they have a monopoly with them and valve index, pico from China is on the verge of developing something incredible as well, and Apple just revealed a mixed reality headset but the price is so extraordinary that barely anyone has it so use isn’t very widespread. We’re again a decade away from seeing anything really substantial in terms of performance
Artificial intelligence is really, really fucking things up in general and the discussions about AI look almost as bad as the news about the latest election in the USA. It’s so clowny and ridiculous and over-the-top hearing any news about AI. The latest news is that open AI is going to go from a non-profit to a for-profit company after they promised they were operating for the good of humanity and broke countless laws stealing copyrighted information, supposedly for the public good, but now they’re just going to snap their fingers and morph into a for-profit company. So they can just basically steal anything they want that’s copyrighted, but claim it’s for the public good, and then randomly swap to a for-profit model. Doesn’t make any sense and just looks like they’re going to be a vessel for widespread economic poverty…
It just seems like there’s a lot of bubbles that are about to burst all at the same time, like I don’t see how things are going to possibly get better for a while now?
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/
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.
VR is on the verge of collapse in the USA thanks to the US government banning byte dance. We can’t even order the new Pico 4 ultra, which is one of the most anticipated VR sets in the world right now. Meta basically has a monopoly and just announced they’re cutting funding to VR
Sorry but a new pico headset wouldnt do much of anything. New meta headset, new valve headset would give a bump.
Really needs better content. The hardware is almost there (in terms of cost and accessibility of the experience).
Its slowly getting there. But the current population of vr users is characterized by: who would play the same limited experiences consistently with hardware that is often cumbersome and loading screens that arent super long but become your entire existence and its annoying.
Meta sucks but they have been a boon for vr development.
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.
That unfortunately is the consequence of letting a company have a monopoly. The US govt should’ve opposed that, and should’ve forced them to sell it. They own such a huge share of the entire VR market right now it’s unbelievable, and Pico by byte dance isn’t legally able to be sold on the USA
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.
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.
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.
. . . 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 want smaller games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not kidding.
I agree. Wholeheartedly. I think it’s just so obvious how quality dramatically takes off when the people creating it feel safe, sound, and economically stable. Financial Security (UBI) drives creativity probably more than anything else. It’s a huge win!
The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.
The reason why those economic limits exist is because we’re reaching the limit of what’s physically possible. Fabs are still squeezing more transistors into less space, for now, but the cost per transistor hasn’t fallen for some time, IIRC about 10nm thereabouts is still the most economical node. Things just get difficult and exponentially fickle the smaller you get, and at some point there’s going to be a wall. Of note currently we’re talking more about things like backside power delivery than actually shrinking anything. Die-on-die packaging and stuff.
Long story short: Node shrinks aren’t the low-hanging fruit any more. Haven’t been since the end of planar transistors (if it had been possible to just shrink back then they wouldn’t have engineered FinFETs) but it’s really been taking up speed with the start of the EUV era. Finer and finer pitches don’t really matter if you have to have more and more lithography/etching/coating steps because the structures you’re building are getting more and more involved in the z axis, every additional step costs additional machine time. On the upside, newer production lines could spit out older nodes at pretty much printing press speed.
None of them have innovated anything in years
Well, they’ve innovated news ways to take up disk space…
There’s a reason I don’t play new release AAA games, and it’s because they’re simply not worth the price. They’re buggy at launch, take up tons of disk space (with lots of updates the first few months), and honestly aren’t even that fun even when the bugs are fixed. Indie games, on the other hand, seem to release in a better state, tend to be fairly small, and usually add something innovative to the gameplay.
The only reason to go AAA IMO is for fancy graphics (I honestly don’t care) and big media franchises (i.e. if you want Spiderman, you have to go to the license holder), and for me, those lose their novelty pretty quickly. The only games I buy near release time anymore are Nintendo titles and indie games from devs I like. AAA just isn’t worth thinking about, except the one or two each year that are actually decent (i.e. Baldur’s Gate 3).
This post really nails my take on the issue. Give me original cs level graphics or even aq2 graphics, a decent story, more levels, and a few new little gimmicks (rocket arena grappling hook, anyone?!?!) and you don’t need 4k blah blah bullshit.
The #1 game for kids is literally Minecraft or Roblox…8 bit level gfx outselling your horse armor hi res bullshit.
The last game i bought was 2 days ago. Mohaa airborne for PC for $5 at a pawn shop Give me 100 of this quality of game instead of anything PS5 ever made.
Here are the number of hours I’ve spent on indie games VS AAA titles, according to my Steam library:
- Indie - Valheim - 435 hours
- Indie - Space Haven - 332 hours
- Indie - Satisfactory - 215 hours
- Indie - Dyson Sphere Program - 203 hours
- AAA - Skyrim - 98 hours
- AAA - Control - 47 hours
- AAA - Far Cry 6 - 29 hours
- AAA - Max Payne 3 - 43 minutes
If we’re talking about value - the amount of playtime I’ve gotten out of games with simpler graphics and unique ideas blows the billions spent by the industry out of the water.
Depending on where you draw the line, mine looks similar:
- EU4 - >800 hours
- Cities Skylines - ~180 hours
- Magic: Arena - >100 hours
- Crusader Kings 2 - ~100 hours
After that it depends on the length of the game. I normally just play through the campaign on most games once (except the above, which have lots of replay value), so looking at playtime isn’t particularly interesting IMO. The ratio of games with interesting playtime (i.e. I probably rolled credits) between indie and AAA is easily 2:1, if not something way higher like 5:1 or even 10:1, but again, that really depends on where you draw the line. If we look at 100% completion, I have 22 indie games and zero AAA games, because I rarely find AAA games to be worth going after achievements in. If I sort by achievement completion, the top two AAA games are Yakuza games (I love that series), and that’s after scrolling through dozens of indies, many of which have a fair amount of achievements (i.e. you need to do more than just roll credits).
So yeah, AAA games really don’t interest me. If you compare the amount I’ve spent on indie vs AAA games, it would be a huge difference since I pretty much only play older AAA games if I get them on sale, and that’s mostly so I can talk about them w/ friends…
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.
So far they didint do the same mistake intel did with cpus.
Exactly. Think of where Intel would be if they didn’t sit on their hands. AMD completely ate their lunch, and they’re scrambling to retain some amount of their core business while expanding into other businesses. If they kept their CPUs solid, they would be able to devote more resources to the GPU division and probably be eating AMD’s lunch and eating a bit into Nvidia’s marketshare.
Meta isn’t the only VR space. Resontite VR plays like VR chat meets Gary’s mod, and supports most equipment you can hook up. It is not perfect but there are frequent updates trying to address the issues, same as any platform.
Meta is the only VR space for anyone not able/willing to spend as much on a VR headset as a mid range desktop (especially when that VR headset might not even function without the addition of a mid range desktop), and for people who want VR and a vague semblence of privacy there isn’t really any affordable headset at all.
Resontite doesn’t require a headset. It runs in desktop just as well… You just don’t get body tracking.
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!
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.
The entire entertainment industry is floundering. Wages lagging inflation in many sectors, people are paying significantly more to eat. They’re going to cut back on the streaming services and they’re going to cut back on going out to the movies. I’m right here at these crossroads where the only thing that makes sense is to give people a little more value for the money, instead we’re going to pull every fast trick we can to make more in advertising and gambling.
Or you had several companies try to start their own streaming services from scratch and thought you needed a ton of new shows to fill it. Disney+ could have easily gotten away with archived Disney Channel shows, all the animated Disney cartoons, the old Star Wars & Marvel movies, and the Simpsons. It didn’t need a lot of the new shows, no matter how cool they looked.
I wouldn’t say the movie industry is struggling, I would say that people that work for a living are struggling. Actors are still getting paid huge sums of money, so are directors and producers. They are getting their pound of flesh one way or another. They are just not producing anything that people want to watch. For example all this marvel post-infinity War bullshit, no one wants to see that. No one cares about marvel Disney anything right now, it’s low quality drivel. But Beetlejuice, Barbie, oppenheimer… These are proof that people do still want to see movies, they just don’t want to produce anything meaningful.
The people struggling that I’m talking about, however, are the supporting roles. People doing the filming, set dressing, makeup, special effects. Lots of these lower levels supporting roles get almost nothing compared to their cost of living in California, while some of the main actors can get tens of millions
Just like AAA game studios, movie studios don’t want to take risks, so they go with productions they consider “safe”: aim for the lowest common denominator, play into nostalgia, don’t make anyone upset by touching subjects like politics, religion. And you end up with the garbage they are making right now.
I’ve just been watching older movies, there’s this amazing sweet spot when CGI just became a thing where the visual effects are passable but not so prevelant that the entire plot gets replaced with pointless explosions.
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.
Shows that You are in the UK. Just want to clarify I’m talking specifically about the USA but I agree with everything you said. Tech stocks became so inflated! Don’t know if people are seeing it in Europe, but here in the USA, there is this really toxic and very cringe behavior from these tech companies to get people back to office, they can force people to return to office across the country, basically you have to relocate and upend your entire life which could cost you $50,000 and they’re not paying for that, if you don’t do that you get fired. Easy way to start laying off people without having to pay them anything because you can call it insubordination, since they refuse to return to office. Now they supposedly have cause to get rid of people or deny them promotions for more money. IBM for example is doing this right now, Cisco was doing it as well. One of the most major networking software companies in the market. Scumbag behavior
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 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.
Gameplay is still more important than game resolution
In your opinion*. You forgot that part. For lots of people, graphics are way more important because they want a beautiful and immersive experience. They are not wrong to want that. I respect that you feel the way you do, but I respect others who care more about graphics. I’ll even go so far as to say that I am of the same mind as you, I don’t care about the graphics much at all but there are some games where the graphics have truly wowed me, or the visual effects. For example two that come to mind, Ori and the will of the wisps, or No Man’s sky. Two very different games but absolutely crazy visual effects and graphics on high-end computers. Another game that I play a lot is World of Warcraft, gameplay is so damn fun but it’s hard to get any of my friends to play it because it’s so ugly, looks like a poorly rendered PS3 game. That horrible quality of graphics prevents people from even trying it
Most gamers don’t even have hardware that would allow that type of resolution.
This is because they refuse to innovate. Think of the DVD player. You think a DVD player costs a lot today? Of course not, there’s a million of them and no one wants them anymore. If they actually innovated and created drastic leaps and technology, then older technology would be cheaper. It’s not expensive to go out and get an RTX 2080, which is the graphics card I currently have. Is about 250 or $300 now, pretty damn solid card. If they actually innovated and kept pushing the limits, technology would accelerate faster. Instead they want the inverse of that. They want as slow growth in technology as feasibly possible, maximum amount of time to innovate, maximum amount of revenue, and maximized impact on the environment. All those carbon emissions and waste of graphics cards being thrown out
If graphics were with it, people would pay for it.
The fact of the matter is that exponential graphics capabilities requires an exponential input of developer and asset creator budget. Given that there is a ceiling on game prices, it isn’t worth it going for higher fidelity games when the market isn’t going to pay for it.
You can have the most realistic graphics in the world, pushing your AMViditel RTX 5095Ti Plus Platinum Ultra with 64TB VRAM to it’s absolute maximum, but if the gameplay sucks, you won’t have as much fun as you would with a pixel art indie game with lots of fun gameplay.
I remember when running counter strike at 30fps on a 480p monitor meant you had a good computer.
Modern graphics are amazing, but they’re simply not required to have a good gaming experience.
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.
I agree. Smartphones, for example, have hardly changed at all over the last ten years, but you don’t see Apple and Samsung going out of business.
And it would be so easy to make a big splash in the market by having a phone where the camera doesn’t protrude out of the back.
you don’t see Apple and Samsung going out of business.
Samsung is damn near the point of going bankrupt. Samsung saw a 95% drop in profits for a second consecutive quarter 2023
In more recent news;
BBC News - Samsung profits jump by more than 900% on chips https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68738046
Damn that’s wild. Any business that has that drastic of spikes of profit and loss cannot possibly be sustainable. I can’t see how it could be. Look at the automobile giants in the USA. All it took was one major economic event to bankrupt them, and they got bailed out which should’ve never happened. It’s bullshit.
I understand you don’t appreciate where we’ve come from and how fast, can’t see the year to years changes, but the iPhone is just a little over ten years old. Do you really not see huge changes between an early iPhone and today’s?
On the contrary, I absolutely appreciate it. I was about 15 when mobile phones first became a thing that everyone owned, so I’ve lived through the entire progression from when they were something only a well to do businessman would have all the way through to today. The first iPhone was 2007, 17 years ago btw.
When mobile phones became popular, each new generation of phones saw HUGE improvements and innovation. However, the last ten years has pretty much just been slight improvements to screen/camera/memory/CPU. Form wise and functionally, they’re very similar to the phone of ten years ago.
I understand that some technophiles will always be able to justify why the new iPhone is worth £1600 and if that’s what they want to spend their money on then good for them, but I personally think that they are kidding themselves. Today you can get a brilliant phone for £300 or even less.
I’d never justify that urge to spend ridiculous money updating every year to the latest and greatest, but people tend to under appreciate the massive improvements from accumulated incremental improvements.
OLED screen on my iPhone X was revolutionary (and I’m sure Android had it first), as just one example, and now most phones are. Personally I find ultrawideband and “find my” very innovative and well implemented. Or if that’s too small a change, how about the entire revolution of Apple designing their own SoC for every new model. There’s emergency satellite texting, fall/crash detection, even Apple mostly solving phone theft is innovative (even if you don’t like their approach)
When we see steady improvements, humans tend to under-appreciate how it adds up
