Game Developers publishing games that only play correctly on obscenely expensive hardware is strangling PC gaming.

I think we will see the triple A gaming industry eventually adjust system requirements/performance to conform with he new realities of the market. No point making games for the 4060 as the recommended GPU when most of the market cannot afford that. Also, AI based upscaling might help alleviate things on the hardware requirement front.

In many ways I see parallels between the current component price crisis and the 1970s fuel crisis. As a result of the oil shock back then, big muscle cars gave way to smaller, more fuel efficient vehicles. The focus moved from raw power to efficiency and cost. We saw the rise of the compact and sub-compact cars, which did not exist in the US back in the 50s and 60s.

I think the computer market will go thru the same process now. IGPUs/APUs could become the baseline for gaming moving forward.

I for one refuse to pay $500+ for a discrete GPU and I don't think I am in the minority.

The boundless wisdom of unimpeded capitalism will solve this

Time to actually start writing more effective code and efficient hardware use.

Using ultra-enthusiast hardware as an excuse not to make anything run well is strangling PC gaming.

That said, I haven't bought a PC game from those studios in a decade, so carry on. I'll be over here playing fifty roguelites and loving it :P

I guess where I'm confused is... So what? My 2080 graphics card in my Lenovo desktop from 2019 runs everything I've ever thrown at it.

This sounds like a problem for people who buy a new smartphone every year, not for anyone with enough sense to not "need" a card or other hardware that came out less than 6 months ago to me.

Maybe I'm just missing something.

It's not ultra-enthusiasts that are strangling PC gaming. It is that NVIDIA and AMD expected miners to continue to buy high end cards to mine crypto.

Now that mining is a thing of the past, both companies are sitting on a pile of chips while at the same time, used GPUs from miners are flooding the market.

They should have seen the writing on the wall when the warning was given that mining crypto will no longer be a thing a year prior to it ending.

What will most likely happen in the next year or two, is cards will come down in price but most likely not to where they were before the pandemic.

Can't wait for late 2024/early 2025 when the next gen of cards comes out and is somehow even more expensive. Oh, maybe they'll use even more wattage and take up even more space in my case, too! Can't wait for that.

Is every article a vitriolic argument now? Are we blaming people for not spending their money correctly?

I got into the pc hardware scene late 2016. Back then (even though it was only 7 years ago lol) things were a lot more affordable. 10 series was just coming out and was fairly priced for the big performance leap it was. Technology has advanced today and I understand that thing’s naturally get more expensive to research and develop but the top end gpu now costs 1,600 and the best of the time then which was the 1080ti cost 700 dollars. Things have gotten way out of wack. Several of my older pc building buddies have put a new rig on hold and are using a ps5 or Xbox because they’re affordable for good performance and a comparable pc is something like 1k usd. What sucks about all of this is that things will only get worse …. Not better.

I’m running a 1080ti and can play whatever I want.

This article is a bit off imo. Any computer can run almost any game these days. Sure you can go overboard with your spending it it’s completely unnecessary. An i5-2500k and a 970 will probably play 99% of future 2023 releases just fine.

Denuvo is a big problem as well. User resources shouldn’t be used for that type of garbage.

It's the same model for cars and houses. It's a model that works great when the market volume is limited. You have limited sales, and you maximize profits to that limited number by focusing almost exclusively at the high end. It's a model that's good for business but forces customers to buy nothing, buy old, or buy into only the high end at exorbitant prices. ALL the in-between stuff is gone.

For video card makers, they have a unique hurdle. They are pushing hard into edge case tech, pushing as far as they can achieve with the physics of materials. And outside of ideological change of structure optimizations and good software optimization, this is really just a game of attempting to produce at the edge of science and do so without massive scrap losses. Worse yet, all the costs are tied into the process of it all, so cards from low end to high end barely cost different. It doesn't cost them hardly anything less to produce a bottom tier video card, but they'll make a lot less from it. Plus they have to be competitive with other brands and older generations of themselves. The push for performance and push for higher cost go hand-in-hand making sure the new stuff remains just barely the better value.

For raw cost, crypto miners and scalpers have played a big part of scarcity, unfortunately. And they are driving real costs well above MSRP. This in turn makes older cards more valuable and pushes up the entire market space as a whole. Everything is expensive just for the sake of being expensive. A few people simply exist to make a pile of money from it. And for these dumb reasons a 10 year old card can be sold for as much as it was bought new a decade ago.

Now our saving grace as PC gamers is that games have long become very flexible in hardware needs. The transition to Steam and the high analytics it brought to manufacturers showed quite starkly how ancient people's hardware had become. Game developers are forced to temper their designs to work on much, much older hardware. This has provided a customer base with a LOT of breathing room for holding onto very old tech or only performing very minor upgrades to retain the ability to play brand new games.

This used to not be the case at all. In the early days games forced hardware development, to the point where every new game was nearly unplayable on anything but the absolute newest hardware. You HAD to upgrade your entire computer every 2 to 4 years just to play anything new. You couldn't simply set graphics to low and magically make an older PC play it. The tech and software advanced way too fast. You could literally spend $3k on a brand new PC, and there was a chance that it could not play the game that was coming out 6 months later. The technology race was that aggressive.

This ground to a halt in the late 90s and early 2000s when this model was no longer viable. It shifted the burden of flexibility on game developers and forced them to slow down and accommodate. Today, you can play current year titles with a 15 year old PC. Not long ago that was unfathomable.

However, what this has also created was this weird vacuum in the hardware world. There actually isn't much driving next generations. You do have commercial users and professionals wanting faster task speeds for simulations, rendering, etc. But outside of that, PC gamers haven't really had drivers outside of high res monitors. There isn't much actually pushing graphics cards these days. Many developers are also bound by the heavy console market that are all stuck in one time period in history, and all these new titles have to work on them too. But for PC folks, the push is pretty much solely monitor resolution, stepping from 1080 to 4k and now into 8k. The need for that isn't even worthwhile. It's just there. And it's about the only thing pushing video cards forward. Sure, there's ray tracing too, but that's a singular use case. You still have developers catering to decade or older tech, so the game itself can never really ever again push the boundaries like it used to. And thinks like 4k, 8k, multi-monitor, etc. are just throughput equations. So the game in today's graphics card world is just that, throughput of pixel volume.

I’d say the lack of games is strangling all of gaming. I own a PC and a PS4. I can’t think of any titles that are generation defining technology wise. Don’t get me wrong, games like GOW Ragnarok are amazing but I was more impressed with the story telling and performances than the visuals.

just do what I do and buy high end hardware to play pixelart indie games and 10 year+ old emulated games

Yes. I completely agree.

But I think the real problem is YouTube hardware reviewers. Especially Linus Tech Tips. Probably the biggest tech channel currently. I say this because they are constantly focused on the top tier products instead of mid tier which is where the bulk of PC gamers live at.

I know their mission is to generate views to make money but hyping primarily top tier products will keep causing manufacturers to focus production/supply on those product lines.

They also have a pulpit to say 'make more mid tier cards and leave the elite to the elite' but don't use it. I got a kick out of one of their WAN shows where they addressed themselves as not being influencers. That they just reviewed products purely on their merits. How are you non-biased when you choose which products to review?

Another thing that annoys the fuck out of me about their channel is that they went out of their way to get the ARC team to come to them recognizing the importance of a 3rd party in the GPU market to keep AMD and NVIDIA honest. So they know the importance of a 3rd party for competition even going so far as to use some Intel cards in a month long challenge. But were picky about the feedback regarding things like VR compatibility and streaming issues which effect how many gamers? DX9 stuff was addressed and still being worked on because it's just drivers. The overlay nonsense...it's software in infancy Luke. Grow the fuck up. Then as a dick smack in the face saying they couldn't get their NVIDIA cards back in fast enough. Must be nice to be able to give feedback from an ivory tower of gear.

Bottom line, I feel like YouTube channels like LTT are influencers and chose not to actively advocate for mid range gamers.

I do agree the lower cards are more the. Fine a 1060 will play almost every game out there some of the market is for people who want to have the best, some is for work. I have the 4090 not because I need it to play a game I have it because I want it and can run everything on ultra. The game looks nicer. But that being said even if it did not look nice I would still play said game because I enjoy the game.

Twas always thus. It was why I only played consoles until Civ V came out and I had to have a PC to play it.

Is it just me or where these more options for cards 15 to 20 years ago? I remember playing 3d games in the late 90s/early 2000s with inadequate hardware and the games weren't perfect but definitely playable.

I used to like buying ultra enthusiasts hardware because it meant you could set your games to max but nowadays developers don’t bother optimizing for the majority and develop for the next generation so you need high end hardware to get good performance. The problem isn’t hardware it is lazy developers. There are plenty of good examples but too many bad examples.

What a stupid article. Just play with what you have, there tons of games out there that don’t require the latest hardware

my brother in Christ indie games exist

To me it’s kind of what happened to low cost digital cameras once good cameras started appearing on phones. The only cameras that people buy these days are high end / prosumer/professional cameras.

Consoles are pretty much mini PCs these days and you get a much better gaming experience with a $500 console than a $500 PC (or even putting in a $500 GPU in a PC a lot of times).

The true beauty of PC gaming, where they just crush consoles, can only really been seen at the higher end gaming PCs with high end monitors.

LOL my 2016 graphics card is still 2/3 the price it was in 2016 accounting for inflation according to newegg. What a fucking failure of the "free market"

I think it's the opposite. With manafacturers constantly pushing the edge higher and higher the result is the mid market gets discounted lower and lower. You don't neeeeed to buy the top end GPUs when building a new rig. My 2080 serves me just fine right now.