There are so many indie games and older PC titles, that it is not really an issue.
Will we really have more performant games? Are game companies going to invest in an opensource game engine to pool their talent and make the most performant game engine out their that makes the most performant games?
It’s way more likely they’ll try and sell us yet another SaaS product or even better, an AI product that guzzles a cubic metre per request.
Alternative outcomes:
Gaming bifurcates.
Indies and certain AAs aim for the ‘good ending’, realize fancy graphics are not only harder to produce, but you’re actually just shooting yourself in the foot in terms of potential customers.
AAA on the other hand continues to double down and enshittify, figure out new ways to turn gaming into leasing and renting.
… but, as always, mostly marketing, ad campaigns, paying off “journalists” and “influencers”.
3rd potential outcome:
Something akin to lan parties/netcafes/arcades recurs.
Rent out a space, run a local to global network solution and also a miniature rendering farm.
All the actual PCs (or maybe VR headsets) are connected to cheap, thin client local machines that are then networked to the mini rendering farm.
4th potential outcome:
… nobody can actually stop people from emulating or running old, good games. ‘Piracy’ becomes as normalized in many other parts of the world as it is in Russia currently.
I grew up in Russia and it’s sometimes so mindboggling that people don’t know their way around digital piracy. It may sound bad, but I actually think that it’s the only thing that can keep the market healthy. I pay for games, movies, books and whatever else there is purely because I like them. And if I don’t like the content you made, you are getting no money. If I have to pay for it before judging it’s value, what insentive does the producer of the content have to make it actually good?
See I just grew up as poor white trash in the US.
I guess just more technically inclined than much of my fellow white trash?
But yeah, exactly… why pay for something you can get for free, safely, if you know what you are doing?
You do it because you either really, really want to support a particular game or developer, or, as Steam/Valve has been saying for like 20 years now… because the version that you are paying for is actually substantially better, is substantially easier to access.
Basically, if official market prices are so high that the risk and hassle of using a gray or black market is less than the differential between gray/black market price snd official price… you use the gray/black market.
This is a pretty well understood concept in actual, academic economics, but in the US we have an insanely corpo/finance slanted public representstion of what ‘economics’ even is.
If the fundamental framework of IP laws and market practices is inherently biased against the consumer… obviously, people are going to broadly not like that, and other people are going to just skirt around them…
The main difference between the US and Russia in say, the 90s, is that everyone in the US knew they were destined to become a millionaire (economy doing quite well) where in Russia, things were just generally being gutted and sold for scrap, under the table (economy doing quite bad).
Its the Always Sunny in Philly scene, oh you’re new poor, its easy to tell… see, we’re old poor, we know how to do this.
I’d say there is a reasonable likelihood that the broad, ongoing economic collapse of living standards for 90% of Americans will lead to a cultural tone shift.
What is the Russian term, schmekalka, something like that?
Basically: Coming up with an improvised solution based on what you already have, as opposed to figuring out how to buy some new thing for the task?
A lot of the US is going to have to think a lot more like that, otherwise they’ll just become literal debt slaves.
Like, shit, I still refuse to pay for any fixed location internet plan that charges for datacap, data limits. This is now common and widespread in the US, but is completely bullshit and unjustifiable from an actual ‘what does this cost the ISP’ perspective.
We largely lost that fight over a decade ago, but I’m still pissed about it.
I see secondhand hardware and indie devs winning out. I see local AI suffering too. Almost as if they’re trying to keep it to themselves.
Why would they ever do that?
What do you mean by ‘local AI suffering’?
Did you mean to say ‘surviving’?
As in small, less capable, but still potentially useful when used in sane ways… people doing more of that?
Like, the fundamental problem with the idea of local AI dying out as a thing… is that most of the Chinese developed models are developed under a much more open souce type of paradigm.
Its not 100% open source, but its way more open source than than US corpo models.
So… anybody can still download an run one of those.
I’ve had Qwen3-8B working on my Steam Deck for around a year now. Not super fast, but it does work, and… a Steam Deck is not exactly a juggernaut of GPU compute power.
Anybody with a modern laptop could figure it out.
I’ve tried a number of local models and even the 8b models aren’t that good. Unless there’s some insane breakthrough, much better hardware will be required to get the kind of results that would be timely enough or high quality enough to be useful.
So it might drive the kind of performance enhancement that will be needed to truly democratize and make the technology accessible, but until then more performance is needed.
My 2024 laptop has basically increased $800 or so in price because of the buy ups. This will either drive optimization or kill progress or maybe some of each on a continuum.
<foil hat time>I also firmly believe that part of the storage and ram buy-up was intended to make higher end compute further out of reach of us plebs, forcing us further into the “everything as a service" model and that corporate AI is a big bet that they can lay off even more people </foil hat time>
That said, if you found good results with qwen, 8b, dm me a link for the specific model, I’d love to try it. I’m still a hobbyist. 😁
I use the Alpaca flatpak, it just lets you download a variety of models, manages them all inside a contained local environment.
Even has some tools support that is expanding, basic web searches, speech to text, text to speech… and if you can find a GGUF format model, supposedly Alpaca can run this manually, and there’s a good deal on huggingface.
https://github.com/Jeffser/Alpaca
Unfortunately, if you’re running Windows, I… have no clue how to set up an LLM there.
Also your tin foil hat thing isn’t even tin foil hat.
Like, various people in the AI space have outright stated that they want to see a paradigm where everyone just rents compute time from them because PCs are othereise too expensive, while acting like it just happens to be the new reality that everything is so expensive, for some reason.
Nvidia went from gaming GPUs being about 50% of its business to something more like 5%, in about 5 years.
Fortunately the AI bubble will be popping soon, as … everyone has run out of money to lend.
Unfrotunately this will destroy the economies of the West.
Yay capitalism!
For the moment, I haven’t had the motivation to switch everything over to Linux, but it is coming down the line. To that end, I do know how to set up models and windows, and it’s not all that hard, but what is the specific model name? Is it just the Quen 8b?
Come to think of it, I might actually be able to install the flat pack into the Windows subsystem for Linux if it behaves the way I think it’s supposed to.
Could be a very interesting experiment.
SSD prices really pisses me off. I use those for work as an independent and regularly need new ones, and the ones I usually get have gone up like crazy!
I need the other stuff for work too but for now my rig is chugging along so I’m not feeling that yet.
My view about this shortage is european company won’t be able to take back their data from US Cloud.
Or a stockpile of ram so they can step back and let china fuck taiwan
But the honest answer is they’re coked up monkeys doing stupid shit because $$$
Batman Lego just announced it was reducing ram recommendations to 16gb. Its a start
Reducing… to 16GB?
It’s over
Lego Star Wars The Complete Collection from 2009 has a minimum RAM requirement of 156MB. Yes, megabytes. 512MB if you’re using Vista (God help you)
Just thought I’d point that out.
a lego game?? when I played lego games circa 2011 AD I didn’t know what ram is
Yes, we just had to write the bytes that came up on screen into a book with a pencil, and then type in the contents of whichever page the computer asked for
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.
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.
That’s a thin client. You can rebrand it however many times you want. I still see em in the ewaste. At the end of the day you can’t remove the computing requirements of running a network stack, a crypto stack, a compression stack, HID, and frame and audio buffering.
Maybe in theory, but in practice, Chromebooks.
When, not if, the AI bubble pops, they will have all these server farms built and will want to push people to cloud gaming to recoup some of their investments
Alternately, a glut of secondhand god-tier GPUs, which only smell a little toasty.
The GPUs they’re ordering are designed for AI and can’t really be used for gaming, from my understanding.
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.
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
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.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.
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?
you cannot put a datacenter GPU in a regular computer.
Bet?
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.
Right? People have been doing crazy shit to make non-ideal hardware work for them pretty much since computing was invented lol
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’ll need right to repair first.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Real ending: your gpu dies in a year or so and you can no longer play anything ever.
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
Maybe this is a good time to visit the hundreds of never-installed games we have in our steam libraries.
