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This is a glimpse at our future under Techno-Feudalism, by the way. Five companies own all the entertainment and charge you extortionate rates to rent it. Please enjoy these last few years of Steam allowing indie games to be published with $20.00 or lower prices - once Gabe Newell goes away, inide devs are going to get "Spotified" out of existence by whatever venture capitalist buys up Steam.
There’s gotta be a reaction at some point where people just revert en masse to retro and free/super cheap video games (if not board games or fuckin charades). There’s got to be a ton of fun games that are freely available, offline, and fit on a flash drive. There’s got to be diminishing returns where people stop caring about realism and just want to play the game. Heck, in many games it’s best to set graphics to minimum detail and maximum contrast because it provides a tactical advantage.
But the “high end” video games offered by M$ aren’t really about playing per se, but escapism. Nobody can afford to do anything cool. The planet is dying and we’re working all the time anyway. Hence people want max realism, at least for now… when you make that unaffordable, something is gonna give.
Are we not at that point already? Balatro has sold five million copies.
I mean, I got to that point years ago and don’t really play any video games anymore. I assumed it’s still going strong but maybe my finger isn’t on the pulse anymore
It's probably just subjective, but it definitely doesn't feel like anyone's excited for new AAA games anymore, and nobody's really clamoring to pay ridiculous amounts of money for a PS5 Pro either. Sure, the Switch 2 is selling well, but Nintendo still has appeal beyond
s.
The Steam Deck doing relatively well is probably related too, it was marketed as being capable of AAA gaming and sure, there are some people endlessly tweaking configs to make Hogpoopballs Legacy run at 40 FPS or whatever, but it's really goated for emulators and indie games.