plays another 2,000 hours of dwarf fortress

devs are not in control of pc optimization, it is their bosses. plus idont think this ai thing is gonna write fast code...

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.

Ah I don't care anymore. Gamers complain about performance and prices all the time but still buy it.

These games exist and are becoming more common because they make more profit.

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)_/¯

Wirth's Law

What OS runs wonderfully on old hardware?

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.

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.

Edit: currently playing Warhammer 40k: Space Marine. So far it's really fun. It's as if you're playing Doom as a more normal guy.

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.

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.

If those Devs could read low level they'd be very upset

Cloud gaming is effectively impossible due to little things like the speed of light. Sure, you could play Civilization via cloud but good fucking luck with competitive shooters.