Oh these fuckers.

So now the horribly expensive games with micro transactions isn't enough for them? Well of course.

Nothing is ever enough for them.

Fucking are we gonna have to do a violent armed socialist revolution just to checks notes keep having graphics in games we have to pay an arm and a leg for?

that's fine bc nobody can run it anyway. just do your graphics like control and it'll run fine even without upscaling.

Hardware to run them is getting too costly for consumers. I think there is a solution everyone can be happy with somewhere.

Like, we found acceptable, beautiful levels of graphics years ago.

We’re not the ones saying “make it look even better.” They are the ones that seem to be whipping themselves into some frenzy and saying “we can’t keep doing this!”

So fuckin stop.

Industry Crysis you say?

What cutting edge graphics? The blurry as smudge that is TAA in all the modern games? Fuck off. What's expensive is the actual slop that is modern games

Animal Well was the best game I played this year and it was made by one dude who built his own engine.

Balatro is a close second with the best soundtrack. The Dev bought it on Fiverr.

the broader genre of single-player action games has mostly diminished to Soulslikes and gacha games a la Genshin Impact

I call bullshit. There are all kinds of awesome, successful, action games that don't fit this mold. This whole piece reads like it was placed by a high level exec that's preparing to lay off a bunch of graphic artists and devs.

Art > graphics, but this article sucks.

Graphics in my opinion peaked at around 2015. I still boot up games from that time and I think they’re not that different from today’s titles

I can only really think of two games that really justify enormous development costs, and that's Red Dead Redemption 2 and Baldur's Gate 3.

If your game isn't pushing things to that level of expectation, you really need to rethink what you're doing with that budget.

Watch them start selling ray tracing as dlc 😂

Anno 1800 looks great, better than all the previous titles and is definitely a plus

Some of the game industry followed the movie format: make a visual masterpiece with barely a plot or purpose.

Unlike the movie crowd, gamers usually want more depth and fun. Personally, I've been grabbing indie games with simple/pixel graphics and great gameplay.

Do we need cutting-edge tables, cutting-edge water pipes, cutting-edge paintings, cutting-edge windows, cutting-edge power generators even?

That kind of competition really is unhealthy.

If not for this bullshit, we'd have a better choice of personal computer hardware and operating systems. We wouldn't have a lot of what they call enshittification.

What I don't understand is where the wide masses of normies got all this progress-signaling? I first sat behind a PC as a kid, it was DOS, someone showed me how to navigate directories, but I don't remember any specifics. Then Windows 98 at home. Then we got a new PC and there was Windows 2000 on it. I didn't like any Windows after it, but XP was fine.

That was me, like, being 9? I understood a bit more about computers than the average normie since then.

So - why did that me never have this progress-signaling, idea that buying something "cutting-edge" they don't understand somehow makes sense, but the whole crowd of people not knowing what a transistor is would apparently care so much for progress and cutting-edge?

I just don't understand. What do people knowing nothing about certain industry would get from caring about its development?

Fuck cutting-edge graphics