I grew up in Russia and it’s sometimes so mindboggling that people don’t know their way around digital piracy. It may sound bad, but I actually think that it’s the only thing that can keep the market healthy. I pay for games, movies, books and whatever else there is purely because I like them. And if I don’t like the content you made, you are getting no money. If I have to pay for it before judging it’s value, what insentive does the producer of the content have to make it actually good?
Comment on Anon is a PC gamer
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
Alternative outcomes:
Gaming bifurcates.
Indies and certain AAs aim for the ‘good ending’, realize fancy graphics are not only harder to produce, but you’re actually just shooting yourself in the foot in terms of potential customers.
AAA on the other hand continues to double down and enshittify, figure out new ways to turn gaming into leasing and renting.
Third potential outcome:
Something akin to netcafes/arcades recurs.
Rent out a space, run a local network solution and also a miniature rendering farm, all the actual PCs (or maybe VR headsets) are connected to thin client local machines that are then networked to the mini rendering farm.
TwilightKiddy@programming.dev 4 days ago
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
See I just grew up as poor white trash in the US.
I guess just more technically inclined than much of my fellow white trash?
But yeah, exactly… why pay for something you can get for free, safely, if you know what you are doing?
You do it because you either really, really want to support a particular game or developer, or, as Steam/Valve has been saying for like 20 years now… because the version that you are paying for is actually substantially better, is substantially easier to access.
Basically, if official market prices are so high that the risk and hassle of using a gray or black market is less than the differential between gray/black market price snd official price… you use the gray/black market.
This is a pretty well understood concept in actual, academic economics, but in the US we have an insanely corpo/finance slanted public representstion of what ‘economics’ even is.
If the fundamental framework of IP laws and market practices is inherently biased against the consumer… obviously, people are going to broadly not like that, and other people are going to just skirt around them…
The main difference between the US and Russia in say, the 90s, is that everyone in the US knew they were destined to become a millionaire (economy doing quite well) where in Russia, things were just generally being gutted and sold for scrap, under the table (economy doing quite bad).
Its the Always Sunny in Philly scene, oh you’re new poor, its easy to tell… see, we’re old poor, we know how to do this.
I’d say there is a reasonable likelihood that the broad, ongoing economic collapse of living standards for 90% of Americans will lead to a cultural tone shift.
Quexotic@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I see secondhand hardware and indie devs winning out. I see local AI suffering too. Almost as if they’re trying to keep it to themselves.
Why would they ever do that?
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
What do you mean by ‘local AI suffering’?
Did you mean to say ‘surviving’?
As in small, less capable, but still potentially useful when used in sane ways… people doing more of that?
Like, the fundamental problem with the idea of local AI dying out as a thing… is that most of the Chinese developed models are developed under a much more open souce type of paradigm.
Its not 100% open source, but its way more open source than than US corpo models.
So… anybody can still download an run one of those.
I’ve had Qwen3-8B working on my Steam Deck for around a year now. Not super fast, but it does work, and… a Steam Deck is not exactly a juggernaut of GPU compute power.
Anybody with a modern laptop could figure it out.