Greentext

Where did it all go wrong?

Enclosure after the Black Death.

Yep.

I think the “patient gamer” model could be the way through don’t buy new shit and encourage your friends to play older games too. Hardware can be not great and the games are cheap.

Cross out "of PC gaming" and you got it.

At least we'll always have the classics. Download, play, and seed emulated games folks.

The future of PC gaming is the community support of vintage games that you loved.

The future of consoles is amatuer AI taxidermy remakes of your childhood memories. A distorted uncanny-valley resemblence of a game you once held dear, stuffed to the brim with synthetic fluff and hung on a generic skeleton twisted and bent to roughly resemble a once vibrant and living thing.

Where did it all go wrong?

When we stopped publicly executing politicians and millionaires (there were no billionaires yet at the time).

For Americans the answer to 'where did we go wrong' is normally Reagan.

More in general, our biggest problem is that we let billionaires buy our politicians and didn't riot. (Eat the rich, when?)

Seeing shit get worse and worse every year has thr goblinest mask of all callin' like:

OOP is wrong about one thing: They're not happy.

Buy old PC, play Minecraft, be happy.

In my mind, the current timeline always starts with 2013 and the death of Aaron Swartz. You could argue it was his prosecution that started it, but his death was the moment it began to become clear. Maybe he saw where we were heading. He was being over-prosecuted. Almost everyone who wasn’t part of the establishment came to that conclusion.

He represented everything that the new digital age could be: self-educated, a lover of learning, a humanist, an activist. A common man fighting for the common people. Everything he did was to spread information and protect our ability to learn, grow, and fight against injustice.

Maybe he had a Howard Beale moment with someone when his plea deal was rejected. Maybe he saw where we were heading and knew that he would never be able to fight it again. They had done everything to make an example of him...to make it impossible for him to enact change. All he really did was find ways to use the system to share information and help people.

I know, this was about PC gaming, but everything in this current dystopia ties back to this loss for me.

When you blamed the SJWs and Anita Sarkeesian.

Offline games will stay existing, even if the AAA studios won't create those.

But fuck em.

No, we are not.

We can go back to the basics, focus on not graphical realism, and/or, invent new rendering paradigms that lead to new art styles, and compute with less overhead, have modest system requirements.

It isn't impossible.

Look at MGS5, Titanfall 2.

Shit looks pretty good, its a decade old, from before all this modern graphical absurdity.

There has literally never been a better time to become an indie dev, make a small team.

No publisher, no marketing.

Just don't overpromise, and don't take people's money untill you actually have a minimum viable product.

Godot is completely open source, and completely free, and quite capable as an engine.

No one is coming to save us, but ourselves, if we choose to.

Might I recommend the five year lag rule?

They will exploit you right up until the point where you commit crime. So steal and pirate your way to liberation.

Well hold on there, son. You just need to take up a hobby. Have you ever considered working with your hands, sawing up wood, drilling screw holes, learning to balance chains and then build a guillotine? Work proactively - damnit.

At least an age verification law didn't turn valid just yesterday for OP.

I'm making a lo-fi, offline, singleplayer card game designed to be completely moddable in every way so people can add custom characters, enemies, features just by putting JSON into the userdata folder.

Some of us are trying!

It is the grim dark far future of all gaming. Forget the promise of freedom to upgrade and superior graphical fidelity. There is no peace among the Discord servers, only an eternity of monetization, and micro transactions.

Where did it all go wrong?

See that part where millionaries became billionaires while everyone else got, at best, just enough raise to be stagnated with inflation? Yeah, that's a good starting point

I think that gaming is headed fast into some kind of deep economic divide.

On the one hand, we have high-end gaming that chases seasonal updates, massive multiplayer experiences, requiring high-end system specs to even start. It's all practically a subscription model one way or another: keep buying new games, DLC, hardware, just to keep playing with your friends. Alternately, sign up for a subscription to play all this stuff in the cloud, dodging the need to maintain your own hardware, but never really owning anything in exchange.

Then there's the other way.

Right now, we're sitting on top of nearly 50 years of video games going back to the primordial sludge of Pong. Modern system specs are far more than what's required in almost all cases so it's practically all there for the taking for cheap. I promise you, there are grand single and multiplayer experiences to be had by dipping into that monstrous catalog. At the same time, some of the very best of those are getting new life with modern updates, fan-edits, fan-made content packs, and so on. Finally, there's the hobby and indie scenes, where new things are being made all the time in various game-jams, early access on Steam, and so much more. You have to dig for all of that of course; the people pushing you to pay a high price for entertainment will never make this easy.

I'm not happy. Are you?

When companies stopped being able to actually make anything new, they then choose to find new ways to extract profit from the customer. Far cheaper than expending money on R&D, retooling, etc. They all decided to become landlords of the worst kind, squatting on their tech and extracting rent while ensuring the rest of us own nothing.

I recently pulled out my old PSP from way back when. If I don't have any options to buy anything to own, guess there's less incentive to buy anything new. Give me options pls

This is capitalism at work

There are tons of great games you can play with old hardware. Relax and start half life 2