306
“Gaming is becoming unaffordable” — Xbox CEO says the industry has an accessibility crisis
(www.windowscentral.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2026
306 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
85719 readers
4177 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Prices for games have stayed constant for 35 years. Can you think of anything else that has stayed the same price in that time frame?
For real. Nintendo 64 was not a niche hobby, and the games were still 70 to 80 bucks. That’s like $160 in today dollars. It shows, too. We got all this technology, but the care, polish, attention just isn’t there.
I disagree. You're comparing polishing a marble to polishing the ISS while it's in orbit.
An N64 game like Ocarina of Time or GoldenEye was a masterpiece, but it fit entirely onto a 32-megabyte cartridge. The entire codebase, every asset, and every line of logic could be held in the heads of a tight team of 15 to 30 people. The constraints were brutal, but they were static.
A modern AAA game is often over 100 gigabytes, that is a 3000x increase in asset data size. You aren’t managing a single, self-contained loop anymore. You are orchestrating the collision of massive, volatile, overlapping systems: real-time global illumination, dynamic physics engines, streaming open-world asset pipelines, complex AI behavior trees, and branching narrative databases. All of this has to run smoothly across vastly different hardware setups, from high end PCs down to consoles.
When people say the "care and polish" isn't there, they are usually reacting to the friction of this sheer scale, not a lack of effort. In the 90s, if a mechanic broke, one programmer could trace it. Today, a bug might be the result of a physics calculation conflict with an audio asset streaming millisecond late over a network layer. The fact that these massive digital ecosystems even boot up and run at 60 frames per second is an engineering miracle that dwarfs the entire development scope of the 90s. We aren't getting less care; we are getting infinitely more complexity for effectively half the inflation-adjusted price.