I mean, if all new gaming becomes cloud based shit I’m just going to be playing old games on emulators forever, or at least as long as my computer functions. And then when that fails, I’ll go back to analog enjoyments.
When I think about it, between emulators and various icon collections I have enough games to last me for the rest of my life. And that’s a feeling of being free, not trapped.
I also have to do a shout-out for analog enjoyments. Interacting with the natural world and exercising all of your senses are just straight-up good for you.
If I can’t play games I might have to get into politics to amuse myself. The trick is to get others to foot the bill for your hobby.
Worst ending: Devs continue chasing higher graphical settings, consoles continue to release but at much higher price points to cover these costs. Cloud gaming also becomes much more expensive to afford the infrastructure. Gaming becomes less accessible to everyone except the wealthy.
Most cloud gaming is pretty hit or miss. Playstation’s seems particularly bad when I’ve used it, Xbox is fine, but GeForce now was really good for me (I have a decent connection at home). Nvidia, who also is helping cause this pricing issue, basically killed their own product by adding this arbitrary monthly limit of 100 hours.
Listen you dinguses, the type of person willing to pay over 20 bucks a month for your highest tier service, when you still have to own the games to play them, are going to want to use it for more than 3 hours a day.
I bought a better computer instead, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What OS runs wonderfully on old hardware?
I run Debian 13 on my 13 year old Thinkpad. It’s perfect for my uses.
Ya I run the latest Debian on some old surplus office machine. Might be dell. Runs great. Got SSD so it’s lightning
Linux or BSD based OSes.
Mint
Oberon… A2… rabbit hole alert i’m out!
We need to turn this law into an electron app.
Cloud gaming isn’t real.
Remote computing almost never makes sense. Budgeting for continued access inevitably costs enough to buy something local - less powerful, but powerful enough. One year university supercomputers could run multiplayer first-person dungeon crawlers. The next year, so could an Apple II. (Christ, $1300 at launch? It did not do much more than the $600 TRS-80 and C64. The Apple I was only $666.) Meanwhile a $150 Atari was better at action titles anyway.
When networks advance faster than computing, there’s glimpses of viability. Maybe there was a brief window where machines that struggled with Doom could have streamed Quake over dial-up… at 28.8 kbps… in RealPlayer quality… while paying by the minute for the phone call. Or maybe your first cable modem could have delivered Far Cry in standard-def MPEG2, right between Halo 2 and the $300 launch of the 360, while Half-Life 2 ran on any damn thing.
Nowadays your phone runs Unreal 5 games. What else were you gonna stream games on? If you have a desktop, it’s probably for gaming. Set-top boxes keep Ouya-ing themselves, trying to become “mini-consoles” that cost too much, run poorly, and stop getting updates. Minimalist laptops like Chromebook find themselves abandoned, even though the entire fucking pitch was an everlasting dumb terminal for the internet. The only place cloud gaming almost works is for laptops, and really only work laptops, because otherwise-- buy a Steam Deck. You’re better off carrying a keyboard for normal desk use than a controller for gaming on the subway.
Back in the ole days network computing made sense simply because of availability.
It took the industry decades to supply physical hardware, and even this is debatable considering the god forsaken prices we’ve seen over the past 7 years.
The industry is struggling to meet every level of pyramid that is computing need.
The other thing is remote gaming is ideally something purposely aimed at the jet setting never home thin and light packed warrior. Shit for the
If you worked from home it makes no sense to not buy your own hardware. Although at today’s insanely inflated prices it’s not making much sense.
“The ole days” meaning 1963 to 1976. Anywhere after that, if you had a monitor and a modem, you might as well buy a microcomputer. Uncontested access, total control, boots into an environment to write your own programs. Only the French made a networked alternative worthwhile - and frankly even Minitel machines should’ve had homebrew for poker or whatever.
Trends over the last decade are general inflation not being matched by any serious growth in wages. Trends over the last year are just grifters with an infinite money glitch buying literally all hardware so the robot can stare at pirated movies. I’m not the sort of person to insist capitalism never works, but this is definitely capitalism not working.
Remote computing makes sense from an environmental perspective. There would be a drastic reduction in e-waste if people were using zero clients instead of desktops.
I don’t know how well that holds. I’m not under the impression that much cloud hardware can be it is reused. Also thin clients tend to have short lifecycles
I said zero client, not thin client. A zero client is basically just a device that connects to remote computing, not unlike a dedicated streaming device.
OnLive’s zero-client console wishes to have a word with you.
Oh wait, it can’t. It’s dead.
Even zero clients become outdated, with the additional detriment of being 100% dependent on the service they are connected to.
Maybe in theory, but in practice, Chromebooks.
The first ending has already been happening.
The second ending keeps failing to happen. We’ve got graveyards full of Cloud Gaming markets. Google Stadia, OnLive, Walmart’s cloud service LiquidSky, and various smaller platforms like Vectordash and Bifrost.
Plus why would anyone use the expensive ram ssds and gpus to make a datacenter for videogames when they can hop onto the AI hype before it’s gone?
stadia people got lucky as they got full refunds on everything after it shut down. what a deal tbh
Unless you’re really chasing the big name games, you don’t need that high powered of a rig anymore. Stylized graphics are better than highly realistic, they hold up better and longer. The most intensive game I have bought is STALKER 2 and even then my rig is holding up fine.
Secret ending: you keep playing the huge selection of games we already have, endlessly, forgetting games you played a while ago as you restart one you already forgot.
Good ending for the gamers, bad ending for the devs…
If a dev is good they can make games worth buying with current hardware
Second secret ending: the games you have won’t run on your pc.
-someoone who waited 5 years to play fallout 76 after buying it 2 weeks after launch.
I mean, fallout 76 doesn’t really fall in the category of games I’d even consider
I have used an Xbox Gamepass trial a few times. Its a good deal honestly, especially if you play a variety of games.
Except its competing with essentially a 40+ year backlog of games I own that Inhave collected over my life. I have zero need for it.
And frankly, its biggest competition is something like HumbleBundle, where you can often get a pile of games per month to keep without the subscriotion.
Already did this last year and according to Steam data many others, too.
The other good ending: People learn to disassemble e-waste and reuse stuff instead of throwing them in the trash. Think of all the SSDs, HDDs, and RAM sticks that are thrown out in old laptops and gaming consoles. It would be great to bring more of a reuse, repair, Maguyver, culture back to electronics.
You’ll need right to repair first.
I mean, I’m happy to Maguyver my old laptop, I’m just not sure how much utility that last 8gb of ddr3 will deliver to my £5000 gaming rig
That’s fantastic for you that you have a £5000 gaming rig. Not all of us can afford that. A lot of us are still gaming or doing office work or running servers on DDR3 machines.
Unfortunately a lot of secondhand hardware is destroyed. Storage devices due to privacy, other components because corporations are unwilling to expend the man hours needed to sell off perfectly good hardware and instead choose an e-waste recycler they can write off as an expense.
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It’s lucky that my dad’s supplier is sensible about these things, my family has I think 5 refurb Fujitsu laptops at €50 and €70 for the last one. Perfectly fine machines for study, browsing 3D-print terminals, vehicle diagnostics and such daily usage.
The plateau of processing power and modern energy efficiency means far older machines are viable users for years and years.
Wish that happened more often. All these crypto mines or whatever that use massive CPU or GPU power should dump them on the market, but I’ve never seen dumps of low-cost hardware.
The problem is that the crypto miners and AI servers run on purpose-built hardware now that can’t be repurposed for gaming.
If those Devs could read low level they’d be very upset
ohh don’t worry, once they sort it out on PC, cloud console gaming 2.0 is on it’s way.
4th ending: The AI bubble bursts,AI companies goes bankrupt and RAM,SSD,Gpu and Consoles plummet to normal prices due to the companies selling their stuff.
5th ending: People move on to used/older PCS and Consoles.
6th Ending: People move on to older/simpler Open source/reverse engineered games that runs on Potato hardware.Older PCs and consoles are only cheap now because people buy newer stuff.
When the newer stuff becomes prohibitively expensive, old hardware and consoles will SKYROCKET as demand goes up, because nobody is MAKING more.
Hoard tech now. We’re not that far away from 2012 laptops going for $500.
Oh I see
When the COVID recession started, dairy farmers were seen dumping surplus milk rather than sell it at a lower price. I foresee a version of this where companies start destroying silicon to keep the supply low rather than let the prices drop to sane levels.
Unfortunately, you cannot buy gaming gpus, not because AI data centers are buying them, but because Nvidia would rather produce server GPUs than gaming GPUs. Same for memory. Once the AI bubble bursts, there still won’t be gaming GPUs to buy unless Nvidia and everyone else switch production, and you cannot put a datacenter GPU in a regular computer.
you cannot put a datacenter GPU in a regular computer.
Bet?
Right? People have been doing crazy shit to make non-ideal hardware work for them pretty much since computing was invented lol
Well, apparently an adapter card costs 80€ on AliExpress. But I’m not sure it will just work, maybe you need to get special drivers from Nvidia or something, and after you have the adapter and the datacenter GPU, you need to fashion your own cooling system for the GPU.
Yeah, also even if you coukd, it will still have the crypto problem. Do you really want a second hand GPU thst has been running full tilt for the laat year nonstop?
thats sucks soo much,i hope its only Nvidia and Crucial right?
It doesn’t matter if it’s only them. They are the suppliers. So even if, say, Asus would like to sell gaming GPUs at a normal price (which they wouldn’t, but let’s pretend) they cannot do that because there is no supply, and the little supply of consumer chips left is sold to those that sell GPU at pumped prices and therefor can give more money to the suppliers
then we are soo cooked 🙏
Real answer. Hoard now. Hope what you have lasts until the baking climate kills you.
4th ending doesn’t matter because after the AI bubble pops companies will do mass layoffs to reduce costs and nobody will have the income needed to buy components at normal price. By the time things start to stabilize there’ll be some new reason consumers are priced out of the hardware market.
Maybe your right
I suspect people will just keep their existing equipment running for as long as possible, and secondhand equipment will be worth almost as much as it was when new.
This won’t last forever.
I have an 8th gen i7 that’s still rocking it, also a 4070 which helps a lot too. Truth be told, I haven’t encountered a game I /want/ that requires sky high specs anymore.
I’ve been waiting for GPU prices to come back down to earth since 2019. I really hope you’re right in a few more years.
In between the crypto scams and the AI hype, there was a brief moment of maybe a few months were GPU prices were affordable. Not good, but affordable enough so that normal people could buy them.
Yeah I vaguely remember some xx60 card being somewhat comparable to the 1060 if you counted for inflation for a little while.
I think we’re at the point where PCs are an afterthought in the GPU market, and have been for a long time.
If they keep pushing their cloud renting models it will last forever.
