Idk, i feel like the AAA gaming industry put themselves already in a pretty unsustainable path for the last decade. With or without the several consumer hardware crisis we had a long the way. That constant push for even more graphical fidelity doesnt provide better experiences anymore but drives the costs up to stupid levels(hundreds of millions). I’m an enthusiast and i can spot the differences and advancements we made even in the last 5 years. But i dont think the results as impressive as they can be are really worth it. We’re at a place where we can boot up games with particularly well crafted artstyles which are 10 years old which look better than currently released AAA titles with lesser visions. But i can also boot up 10 year old games with for their time average looking graphics and forget about the slighly less shiny lighting in 5 minutes when the gameplay doesnt suck.
But even if we entertain the idea that consumer hardware pogress stalls and we only buy replacements parts with equal performance we would still have an industry which pushes the software side forward. Consoles are the best examples where we see considerably better utilization of the hardware over the years by game devs.
With all that said: Fuck the AAA industry. They can implode for all that matters to me. In this regard i consider the “good” times over since roughly 2013 with the hyper monetization, dlcs, mtx, gambling, live services, kernel level anti-cheat, kernel level drm, revokable licences, fomo mechanics, etc. But there will always be small studios and indie devs which will release new and fresh games which run on potato.
Ptsf@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
Not even remotely true if you’re at all familiar with several massive hardware developments in the pipeline. People have been saying it’s the end of significant progress since 2010 and yet I’m playing what used to be 300w+ console games on a 2.5w A20 SoC. Ram will even come back down in 2-5 years. This is literally a company selling it. Ofc they’re going to embellish the demand and stretch their excessive revenue goals far into the future, they’re pumping stock.
KeenFlame@feddit.nu 5 hours ago
As soon as someone captures the gaming market with a gpu arch that lacks tensor cores all scalpers will realize they bought hybrid cards but should have bought tensor boards and a scalp run will just destroy the entire market. Ram will stay up through this probably but you don’t need too much ram to game if devs just seg properly
alakey@piefed.social 7 hours ago
I don’t think we ever had a handful of billionaires buying up every single component they can get their hands on before, though. And even if their companies technically “run out of money”, the government will just bail them out because they are “critical to the defense industry”.
Ptsf@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Extreme surges in demand have happened before, and if you weren’t familiar the memory production market has actually always struggled with consistent long term demand, having several periods where they’d heavily cut production and investment. Which actually it’s worth saying there’s not much inherently special about Samsung/Sk/Micron beyond they had happened to have invested in the required R/D & Infrastructure to manufacture HBM at a time when it appeared to be far less lucrative. Memory was actually in such a surplus for the short time around covid prior to ai that they had implemented reduced production capacity. Now with the demand soaring in long term projections and a shortage in supply more will find it financially viable to accept the costs to enter the market, and the current 3 will ramp longterm supply even bringing full new fabs online. There’s scenarios where this isn’t the case, ofc, but it’s a general trend that has proven fairly reliable in modern industry and in specific the memory industry.
uncoveralpha.com/…/every-memory-cycle-ends-the-sa…
www.eetimes.com/dram-capex-to-plunge-28-in-2019/