like, it feels like the aaa game industry has intentionally turned itself into an extremely profitable cadaver, where fewer devs make fewer large scale games with less competition, and the userbase stays static in a quasi-“niche” way as the profits increase, and like generational technical development also grows increasingly asymptotically niche in terms of who’s interested and popular/industrial investment in “the future,” and everything slows down and thins out on purpose while only growing internally, and that’s what makes money. but the majority of the non-aaa mainstream games geist cited that “everyone else” plays (fortnite and minecraft and counterstrike and league etc.) are also like really old by previous industry standards? obviously there are new entries into that group that blow up for some period of time every so often, and a constant stream of shit getting manufactured, but in practice it feels similarly corpselike - the difference is that they do have to expand their player bases, but because they’re detached from any of the traditional industry models around generational progress and external rather than internal novelty, they can stay dominant as platforms indefinitely as long as they continue to grow and offer enough entertaining variety for their users. i guess this is sustainable but it’s incredibly boring and insular. well that’s capitalism or whatever
We’re finally starting to see multiplayer games become something closer to sports, where the game can build a metagame over years and years and technology doesn’t obsolete older games. It’s really different than the novelty-driven environment games have had for forty, fifty years, and in some ways it’s healthier but on the other hand you get the same entrenching around popular games that can really ossify the participants.
That tech-driven churn was really wasteful of ideas but it gave new entrants a shot every few years, and as games settle into something closer to films or television production it’s going to get harder. I still don’t think it’s nearly as dire as the late '90s until the late '00s, when studios became large enough that they couldn’t be easily started but every game had to be released in stores. The back half of the 360’s library is just the roughest thing possible. I remember a year where Mirror’s Edge was plausibly the most interesting game released
Michel Ancel just announced he’s quitting video game development. Officially it’s to focus on running a wildlife sanctuary but you’ve gotta wonder how it relates to all the shenanigans going on at Ubi.
256 color mode, though it looks like it’s probably rendering it in full color and then dithering/downsampling in post (which might explain the poor performance)
I wonder what it would take to make it run at playable speed. There were some software 3D games that could challenge the N64… Looks like this still has perspective-correct texture mapping, good z-sorting
Whatever this thing did to add tony hawk to steam made it so that a controller worked over steam link and it also very painlessly added all my games from epic and gog so I recommend it
