A lot of people say that the price increases will force developers to optimize and to work with what hardware they have to make good games and stop using AI gen and DLSS tech as an excuse for poor optimization.

The main problem with this is simply that it won't happen. Every company would have to spend more on their games for no monetary gain, while their competition likely won't do the same.

Not to mention, big game companies already have insanely powerful hardware, so it doesn't impede the development in the slightest.

The big problem is that nobody thinks about those people that don't have the hardware right now.

Literally yes they do, because even though they don't have the latest and greatest hardware, they have some money to spend. That's the argument being made: until now the assumption was that new hardware would get cheaper over time, and people would gradually move to new hardware. Devs spend years making games, and historically bank on that assumption so that when the game comes out, it has the largest audience available to purchase it.

The fact that it looks like that won't be the case in the near future means devs have to shift their behavior to accommodate what their playerbase has, i.e. continue developing and optimizing the same hardware.

That said, this is all temporary. Whether they widen the pipeline, or the AI bubble bursts, in 2-3 years there will be a deluge of hardware hitting markets. (Provided trade/actual wars don't get in the way, which is the bigger concern imo).

Im coming at it conceptually rather than a place of actual industry knowledge, but games of yesteryear were incredibly clever, pulling off all sorts of crafty hacky bullshit to get their games looking good on pretty low-end basic gear.

I'm not sure if that sort of thing is feasible or possible today, but I'm hoping it'll push some of the bigger brains to find out. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.

I thought the steam deck would have been priced higher than it was as well, so I thought that they’d probably surprise us with a $600 machine. $800 made sense for the specs (Now I expect it to be $1000)

Once GPU prices super inflated 6 or 7 years ago, I got out of PC gaming for new titles. I built a top spec machine for $1200 in 2012 (when I had disposable income and no kids), that barely gets you an entry level today. I guess PC gaming, for new titles at least, will forever be out of my budget.

Of course it's possible. Just not financially viable, according to corporate logic. It's not about profit. It's about ever increasing profit. So what do you do when the sales have reached their peak and stopped increasing? Lower the production costs and/or increase prices.

I've worked in the video game industry for a few years, both at and with large corporations as well as smaller studios. Game optimization has rarely, if ever, been a concern for anyone. Usually, as long as the fps only occasionally drop to 25 on high-end systems - it's good enough.

To be clear, smaller game studios care significantly more about optimization/accessibility. There's no denying that. However, with their limited resources, sometimes there's not a whole lot they can do.

What you're asking for is completely reasonable and would be great. But it's just not gonna happen. Most studios prefer Unreal, because it lets them outsource a lot of work to India, and potentially cuts the development time ever so slightly.

While this is mainly correct, I find it hard to believe the deluge of hardware is going to help us much. The current ones are AI specialized hardware, and switching to consumer hardware requires switching production for consumer hardware after the fact that the bubble pops. Supply will slowly fill the delayed demand.

They're mostly not AI specialized, though. That's why they're so inefficient and why their demand contends with consumer hardware in the first place. Which makes sense, because AI is still in rapid development. They don't know what the right answer is yet, but they know they need a bunch of fast memory and parallel processing.

The AI specific hardware being added to GPUs is still pretty general. CUDA cores are just parallel compute. Tensor cores are for doing parallel compute with fewer bits of precision. Yes, there are niche applications for fp16 and lower, but rendering is one of those applications.

We also need to accept that this isn't the crypto bubble, this is the dotcom bubble. Like it or not, there is a real advancement in technology happening here, and it's not going away. The bubble will pop because there's far more money being invested per unit time than can be returned as profit per unit time, not because the tech is a farce. Yes, 99% of AI applications right now are a farce, but that 1% are giving us actual useful abilities we simply didn't have before. Point being: our world after the bubble pops will still make use of AI, so any hardware over-production will still be useful to the general public for AI applications.

The devs won’t optimize anything. Our problems are not their problems.

Optimization happens when people have time to sit down and reason about the code. A hardware crunch isn’t going to give people more time. The assembly line is going to run at the same pace regardless, and devs are going to churn out the same junk they always have.

It isn’t a lack of limited hardware holding them back. Old, junky hardware has existed since nearly the beginning of the information technology, so a hardware crunch isn’t going to affect anything.

I agree. It's the same to me with how people get mad at yearly phone releases. There are people upgrading every year. It could be after 3 years 5 years. It's best that they have the best that is possible that day then buying 3 year old hardware because some people think release cycles should mirror their upgrade cycles

Plus hardware progression pushes the low end higher which is a great thing. The Steam Deck 4 years ago was an awesome thing. It was cheap for the time. Sub $400 for access to nearly the whole PC library. A successor would make more higher end games that have released since more accessible especially if pricing didn't become so wonky since. Plus older games could then be played at 4-10w TDP settings meaning longer battery life on older games

Same with the Steam Machine. Could have been a great cheap Valve supported mini-PC gaming console that was multiple times stronger than a Steam Deck. It's was something that can push forward open platforms (Linux) in multiple ways. It would have in the box a gamepad. It would be a play for the living room. Maybe services like Crunchyroll and Netflix would have interest in releasing apps onto Steam or Flathub for it. It could grow to be a strong competitor to Android TV and fully proprietary walled gardens like Apple TV and Roku. Any delay delays the ecosystem developing

Delaying the PS6 is unlikely to mean an upgrade in its capabilities. It's waiting for manufacturing prices to drop, not for engineering to complete. Upgrades require further funding for engineering redesigns. Really a PS6 delay is only good for the continued viability of the Switch 2 and Steam Deck for new releases

Poor optimization is also a result of the democratization of video game development. You don't need to be a wiz at assembly, C, and C++ anymore. You don't need to be a wiz at shader programming, GPGPU programming. You don't have to learn the nuances of the underlying hardwares architecture. Not it's GPU, CPU, memory design, etc. Most devs aren't engine developers and I'm most games people enjoy today would not be made today if it wasn't for the streamlined development that video game engines like Unreal, Godot, Unity, Creation, Source, etc enable. Even with source available, only a limited number of developers would modify Unreal Engine for optimizations (I wouldn't do that for Epic. It's not a free engine. That's their job). Most won't modify Godot or O3DE

Yeah many gamers assume devs don’t optimize their games because they are lazy. But every dev wants to optimize their games but they can’t when management doesn’t allocate time and money to optimize.

Not quite development but 3D modelling, there is a really clear split between old threads and more modern ones because a lot of the advice is "it doesn't matter" or "use nanite" whereas in older threads I find esoteric knowledge that I treasure.

8 bit kid here, I played with my uncle's Atari VCS, the original one with six silver switches on the front, and my first computer was a C64.

It is definitely true that the only real difference between games released in the last ten years and games released in the 90s is prettier graphics. We still play platformers.

We don't need all this to have fun. Trust me.

Also it will implode and all of this will be available at fire sale prices.

My stance has nothing to do with the current hardware market. I just wish gaming could evolve past the Weenie Hut Jr stage, at least for most people.

But it seems that they never learn enough to move up past preschool level in that sphere.

Yeah. I'm fine with gaming being a much smaller industry if we can keep people with toddler level IQs out of it. Much rather have quality over quantity.

I don't even care if graphics get better, tbh. Games should be good, not necessarily fancy. Fancy doesn't hurt, as long as making it fancy doesn't cut into the quality of the project.

Keep the writing and gameplay top notch, develop new hardware to meet certain needs, and that's it.

VR is an interesting frontier (haven't experienced it personally), but for most games pushing the graphics is only done to stand out on the shelf.

But new paradigms aren't necessary most of the time.