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Nah, it’s getting better every year. Adding crappy games doesn’t change the huge backlog of great games I have.
My response to the points:
- Don’t buy games until reviews are good - don’t buy on release day, and certainly don’t preorder
- See 1
- See 1, but replace “games” with “PC hardware”
- We probably need a law here, but until then, see 1
- This is stupid. Buy indies, they don’t pull this crap.
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.
Never buy early access on the hope that the game will get better. Buy it if it’s at least good enough to justify its current price tag right now.
Or if you really want to support the project, but accept that it might not turn out.
IDK, I just buy the soundtrack or whatever if I really want to support it. But the game needs to be good enough to justify the price before buying.
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.
Nah, I don’t care too much about their reputation, I care about reviews. If it’s good, someone will have reviewed it.
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.
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.
You can’t judge PC gaming by cherry picking shit releases. I could easily make the argument that it’s the absolute best time for PC gaming.
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.
GPUs are obscenely expensive
If you wrote this about 2 years ago I’d agree, but since then have crashed in price. You can get a 4060 for about $300 now.
a lot of game studios
I’d agree if you wrote “some AAA game studios”.
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!
As someone who doesn’t play games from AAA studios or Early-Access games, I don’t really experience any of these problems.
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.
Some early access games are way better than fully released triple A trash with 79 bucks price tag.
Manor Lords is the least example
Yeah its rough but you can fucking play it and have fun
My backlog is large enough that I can wait to see how a game is when/if it reaches a 1.0 state before deciding to invest any time or money into it.
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.
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.
And if there ever was a dark age for PC hardware, we’ve recently crawled out of it, thankfully.
With high-end GPUs costing what they still cost, I don’t think we’re out of it just yet.
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.
A 4070 is the high end, though. Any laptop with a 4070 in it will cost over £1.5k
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.
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.)
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.
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 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
Personally I disagree.
I am having fun playing some excellent indies that is released this year. This is not possible 25 years ago.
So glad the indie scene exists and is thriving. Media outlets/youtubers give AAA way too much airtime.
Even if it’s them complaining about bad AAA games, that’s still time that could be shouting out truly creative games.
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.
The number of gamers that are still entirely unaware of games like Noita or Project Zomboid (to name a few) is absolutely criminal.
Have not heard of project zomboid, will check it out. Noita is on my radar.
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.
The indie scene still seems good though.
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
Here are some great games I played recently:
- Subnautica
- Horizon
- Obra Dinn
- Enter the Gungeon
- Oxygen not included
- Slay the spire
- Cuphead
- Papers please
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.
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.
It’s the enshitification taking hold, which is essentially Wall Street pressing their thumbs on creators to squeeze out every bit of money they can.
There are diamonds out there though, and not a surprise they always come from private or indie companies. These are the games I’ve gravitated to.
Kinda trash but I hope maybe some interesting discussion about just the trends both positive and negative.
Wtf is going on with the thumbnail of this article?
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.
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