BUT! I feel that lost hope could/will turn into a new forms of "min-maxing" or whatever where we will see people focusing on small, efficient software to make the most of what we have to weather the drought. We got spoiled with cheap hardware. Time to make the most of all that cheap hardware we have.
Though of course, replacing this hardware as it breaks down will be expensive. Perhaps we could go back to 1/2/4 GB RAM sticks and 256/512 GB Disks. Then run minimal Linux installs, minimal GUIs, minimal services, minimal software.
To amend this: Reading the 8088 domination article and the little $8 RISC-V Linux board I think we have plenty of opportunity. Maybe we learn to shed our inefficient BIG computers for small, low power, purposeful, yet general computers. I play with Plan 9 a lot and its portability, small footprint, low resource, and distributed design has showed me we can do a lot with a little as long as we stay disciplined to keep things simple and to the point.
Many games that come out still, and are quite successful, do not require such technologies.
1. Indy developer releases a game or trailer of a game. 2. Within an extremely short time (days to weeks at most) there are clones on the market. 3. These games often outperform the original.
It's absolutely not something that's gone on for ages.
It might be a novel gameplay idea / twist on a genre, and mere days after launch instead of being able to stand on its own and gather attention it's drowning in a pool of lookalikes. It's no longer distinct.
The speed of being able to slop together something like this is less than 1% of what it used to be.
So yes maybe it happens more often now, but it’s still not new.
5 years ago it would have been science fiction
Also, this reminds me so much of the download more RAM ads back in the day.
I wonder what it would look like if Apple offered a slimmed down shell from the Neo for ~$300 that required a connected iPhone. Maybe as iOS and MacOS converge we'll get there.
There should be a big enough back catalog of great games for you to enjoy without having to buy a new gaming rig.
gaming does not equate to only things like the last of us or cyberpunk which need extreme machines. a lot of visual fidelity can be reached still without having such a monster. Just need to not use certain features which are currently pretty much exclusive to Nvidia...
And I assume they will only continue to go up. When it came out, purchasing one seemed like an easy decision. But I paid half as much for one with the same CPU/RAM (and upgraded my SSD for cheap).