Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open

vane@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  AI did a number to gaming, but truthfully, gaming technology was probably about to stand still anyway. Barely any studios can afford to make a game that’s so technologically advanced that it pushes our current hardware to its limits.

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  • binarytobis@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Oh please, plenty of games push my top tier hardware to its limits!

    It’s just that they do it by not bothering to optimize their software.

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    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      The handful of companies that can afford to spend $100M+? Sure. There are only so many of those, and plenty of them go bankrupt after spending that much.

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    • PhAzE@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Yet AI will actually be good at optimizing software, and might help push devs to do so. Both stifling and assisting.

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  • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    And the GPU makers were already hitting a plateau around the first RTX cards.

    Node shrinks have dried up. Games got use to those handing them major leaps.

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  • CosmoNova@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Gaming isn‘t standing still though, it‘s reverting. You can‘t get the same hardware you got 5 years ago for the same price anymore. Hardware ALWAYS got cheaper until recently. This is truly unprecedented.

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• BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  You’re probably right…

  As an optimist, I really hope this hardware crunch leads to a greater focus on polish and optimization. I feel like a lot of development studios have let specs inflate to cover being unwilling to focus on building their games efficiently. It can feel crazy when you start comparing specs on games from different studios.

  As a realist, I imagine we’re just going to have a lot more cloud gaming services and that may just end up being the norm. I’m still waiting for a AAA publisher to start releasing their games exclusively to cloud platforms, probably first as a pre-release or early access bonus of some sort. I have my money on Ubisoft as the first big one if they manage to keep it together as a company.

  As an anarchist, I’ve been looking into selling all my electronics and investing in some farmland.

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  • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    As a realist, I don’t see any way cloud gaming services are an option that customers en masse will be willing to pay what the providers have to charge to make a profit. Stadia was not that long ago, and Google couldn’t make it work under what had to be a softball toss for that business model.

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    • mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Don’t forget the latency. I can barely tolerate streaming between my PC and Deck witg Sunlight/Moonlight.

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    • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      There’s a lot of companies thinking about it that are big enough that they don’t have to profit immediately. I think they’re mostly waiting to see Geforce Now raise prices and enshittify more. My prediction is we’ll have the various datacenter providers giving more deals on compute to make use of wasted cycles, maybe leading to various services renting that compute and dynamically tuning quality based on current cost. I.e., high performance gaming during off-peak hours and degraded performance during AI peak hours. Time limits will definitely become more frustrating.

      Google might jump back in then if they didn’t have to run the service. For them, I think they exited because they established that they’d have to actually support the product if they wanted it to grow and there is nothing they hate more. Part of me feels like the dystopian future we’re heading to may be publisher based subscription passes similar to xbox game pass but more focused and providing drastically less value.

      I think I’m out though, I don’t have to buy a battlepass for the chickens and if support ends I get to make curry.

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  • suxen_tsihcrana@anarchist.nexus ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Fellow anarchist here, I’ve been accumulating used hardware that’s on the older side to Frankenstein together a homelab/cluster, brush up on self-hosting foss, and increase my personal tech sovereignty.

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    • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Man, I feel ya there, I think I have Lenovo’s entire 2015 enterprise portfolio. There’s a channel called Hardware Haven on youtube and I realize I may have gone too far as whenever there’s a new video on old tech released it’s for something I already have in my basement.

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  • West_of_West@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    The wife and I keep tossing around the idea of buying some land and simplifying/becoming semi-sustainable. Unfortunately, even bareland is a premium in the areas we are looking

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    • BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      From experience, if you do, take a very long look at your neighbors. I almost ended up with what I now realize was suspiciously cheap land down the street from a cockfighting operation.

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• SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  I’m not going to post what I almost did, but I’ll just say that I’m mad.

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  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Wait til you hear about all the fucked up shit that isn’t related to video games and is actually consequential

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    • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      It’s all consequential to me

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• jordanlund@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  As did Covid.

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• brachiosaurus@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Would be nice if it pushed back 20 years before steam become so popular

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