[andix]

If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected.

If buyers can't afford the hardware anymore, the studios need to adjust. It's definitively possible to scale games down a lot. There are a few AAA games that were "dumbed down" for the Switch 1 (Hogwarts, cyberpunk, ...). And that's a really low-spec device.

There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier.

Why games? Because there is a clear point where people stop buying games. Minimum hw specs are known before buying.

[KronisLV]

> If that happens, we will see it in triple-A games first. If some new titles have significant lower hardware specs than expected.

Recently I booted up Insurgency: Sandstorm. With a 5800X and an Intel Arc B580 at 1080p and high graphics, the game runs at around 200 FPS. Meanwhile, pretty much any modern UE5 title (with the exception of Ready or Not and Split Fiction, from what I've seen) runs horribly - the interesting thing is that no matter how much you tweak the .ini files or change the graphics settings you can't get something like STALKER 2 or The Forever Winter or Borderlands 4 to run as well as UE4 with the graphics similar to those old games. Instead you get something that runs at like 10% of the render resolution and still doesn't get 60 FPS (I'm not exaggerating, literally the performance I got in The Forever Winter).

There's no good technical reason for things to be that way (Unity still exists, and the games made in it struggle less) other than the devs or the higher ups choosing higher fidelity but more expensive rendering technologies and using upscaling and framegen not as something that helps laptops or when you need the spare GPU capacity (e.g. encoding a video recording of the game), but rather as something that's supposed to be used to even get to 60 FPS in the first place.

I don't know what needs to change for things to get better.

I also don't see anyone particularly caring about regular software, Electron et al are just too convenient to develop in (having to create per-platform UIs sucks in already-overworked teams).

[59nadir]

> I don't know what needs to change for things to get better.

Studios need to start creating custom engines again, for one. We'll get better games with less unsatisfying jank, some of the projects will actually cost less (which is paradoxical to some) and performance is likely to jump significantly. Off-the-shelf engines have as many costs as they have benefits, but like a lot of technology people refuse to look at the choice as a trade-off, and to the extent that they acknowledge it's a trade-off the implicit admission is always that it's a trade-off that the user/player is paying the most for, so it's OK.

If companies start creating custom engines en masse again it will also help solve part of the competency crisis in the industry, because they'll be forced to actually learn and educate people on how things work.

[tuna74]

Do you actually believe in what you wrote above?

[Azantys]

Game studios should choose CryEngine/Decima again over UE5

[SleepyMyroslav]

>There's no good technical reason for things to be that way

Of course there is. What people gets presented is look how new graphics is shining. What devs get presented is look how much less manual work you need to get this graphics out of the door. Look at any UE5 presentation aiming at devs. You will be able to see a lot of 'just do this and technology will handle the rest of it'. There is no going back to manually making 3-5 replacements for each and every thing in the game. And the same goes for lights every few meters of a game world.

As a gamedev I don't really care about the regular software. You can see that the main problem for devs is to get paid for it. All kind of schemes with subscriptions and online services and such were tried. People just don't want to pay for the software. The mentality is 'we will get it for pennies on a sale' is the same like with the steam sales. Or even worse people will choose 'free' version with 'promotions' and data collection and whatever else that saves them pennies. Look at 'free to play games' steam category for the example of the horror show.

Oh and I don't think devs are the saints there. You can find a lots of examples that prey on gullible customers or trick people to buy 'digital goods' they don't need or outright bad things with gambling addictions and more.

The only thing consumer can do is to only vote with their wallet and push their representatives to regulate. The stop killing games is an example of the latter. The former is often deemed inefficient but Imho it is the only thing that will separate surviving studios and the shattered ones. As you may see in the press the names and past successes don't save studios from closing their doors now.

[tuna74]

Yes, Lumen (and raytracing in general) has a performance overhead. If you don't want that you can skip that feature. Split Fiction and other games choose to do so.

I think certain games like Robocop are awesome on UE5.

[KronisLV]

> If you don't want that you can skip that feature.

Unfortunately, for the consumer this can also mean skipping some games altogether: for example, I might not be able to play the latest Indiana Jones or Doom game because they refuse to let RT be disabled (unless they get enough pushback, but we can all see where things are heading).

At least there are some (usually indie) games that let you do that, like Incursion: Red River but even with Lumen and other features turned down, the performance is still worse than UE4 games of comparable scene fidelity (not necessarily complexity). I think the industry might have jumped into Nanite and all the adjacent tech way too eagerly.

[tuna74]

My comment was of course from the perspective of the game developer. For PC/Windows games it has always been the case that you need the required HW to play the game in a "satisfying" performance.

A lot of RT features makes game development faster (or more efficient) so you won't be able to play the game without them.

[Stevvo]

No reason to see it in AAA games. They already have to run on Series S, which has ~8 GB usable memory. Consoles are the primary target for any game (if they are not, it is not AAA). So minimum specs remain relatively static through a generation.

[thewebguyd]

I hope we continue local gaming, but my gut tells me we are going to see the opposite. I'd be willing to place a big bet on the new XBox leaning heavily into streaming, like GeForce now. Studios still get to build big, and the consoles get to rent hardware to you now, basically a wet dream for them.

hardware costs must come down or every consumer segment is going to be renting, not owning, everything.

[VohuMana]

I wouldn’t be surprised if they try but I think the game streaming business model is mostly dead. Stadia was a huge flop, PlayStation has streaming for previous gen games and it sucks, Xbox also has a streaming offering but I haven’t heard anything good about it. It’s a bad user experience and a significant cost to the company providing the streaming.

[timacles]

> hardware costs must come down or every consumer segment is going to be renting, not owning, everything.

Is this not exactly what companies want

[operatingthetan]

If you listen to gaming Youtube then the gaming industry is already in trouble from hardware costs and availability. I'm not sure if they are making a mountain out of a mole hill or not though.

[laughing_man]

I don't know if I buy it. In the last few years the AAA gaming industry has turned out a lot of bad games, and that probably explains most of the trouble.

[wmf]

Games are designed for consoles which aren't going to change in the near term.

[tayo42]

Are programmers and their use of data structures driving up storage requirements in games though? Or is it just high poly models and high res textures?

[applfanboysbgon]

Helldivers 2 was in the news a few months ago for "optimizing" and saving over 130gb of disk space required for installation or something to that effect. In actuality, what they did was remove an "optimization" they had implemented without ever once benchmarking and realising it was making things significantly worse. The software development industry is a freaking wreck filled with easy opportunities for improvement if only anyone gave enough of a shit about their consumers to profile their code, ever.

[andix]

I guess it's not just models and textures. Those should be the easiest to dial down, even optionally with a "low" setting. Maybe making high-res assets an optional download, to reduce game size (ssds are also getting expensive)

[Dwedit]

Switch was notorious for having a few Cloud streamed-games that don't run on the actual hardware.

[socalgal2]

which ones were those? I want to check them out

[tuna74]

The Switch 1 Kingdom Hearts game are like that.

[thomastjeffery]

That's memory efficient assets, not memory efficient code. The latter is already optimized for the former.

[rvz]

> There are two factors: existing gamers not able to afford upgrading. But also new gamers, that might only be able to afford much lower spec PCs than people who bought 2 years earlier.

Spot on.

Now with LLMs and desktop app libraries such as Tauri, there is little excuse in choosing Electron to build memory hungry apps other than laziness.

[andix]

Tauri sucks on macOS and especially Linux, because the native browsers are a huge issue. Tauri/Windows uses a recent Chromium engine, which is fine.