Hard to believe it’s been 24 years since Y2K (2000) And it feels like we’ve come such a long way, but this decade started off very poorly with one of the worst pandemics the modern world has ever seen, and technology in general is looking very bleak in several ways
I’m a PC gamer, and it looks like things are stagnating massively in our space. So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because people are either too poor, don’t want to play a live service AAA disaster like every single one that has been released lately, Call of Duty, battlefield, anything electronic arts or Ubisoft puts out is almost entirely a failure or undersales. So many gaming studios have been shuttered and are being shuttered, Microsoft is basically one member of an oligopoly with Sony and a couple other companies.
Hardware is stagnating. Nvidia is putting on the brakes for developing their next line of GPUs, we’re not going to see huge gains in performance anymore because AMD isn’t caught up yet and they have no reason to innovate. So they are just going to sell their next line of cards for $1,500 a pop for the top ones, with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need. We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away
Virtual reality is on the verge of collapse because meta is basically the only real player in that space, they have a monopoly with them and valve index, pico from China is on the verge of developing something incredible as well, and Apple just revealed a mixed reality headset but the price is so extraordinary that barely anyone has it so use isn’t very widespread. We’re again a decade away from seeing anything really substantial in terms of performance
Artificial intelligence is really, really fucking things up in general and the discussions about AI look almost as bad as the news about the latest election in the USA. It’s so clowny and ridiculous and over-the-top hearing any news about AI. The latest news is that open AI is going to go from a non-profit to a for-profit company after they promised they were operating for the good of humanity and broke countless laws stealing copyrighted information, supposedly for the public good, but now they’re just going to snap their fingers and morph into a for-profit company. So they can just basically steal anything they want that’s copyrighted, but claim it’s for the public good, and then randomly swap to a for-profit model. Doesn’t make any sense and just looks like they’re going to be a vessel for widespread economic poverty…
It just seems like there’s a lot of bubbles that are about to burst all at the same time, like I don’t see how things are going to possibly get better for a while now?
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The pace of technological change and innovation was always going to slow down this decade. But Covid, Ukraine and a decoupling from Russia/China has further slowed it.
You need three things in abundance to create tech. First an advanced economy, which narrows down most of the world. Second you need lots of capital to burn while you make said advances. Finally you need lots of 20 and thirty something’s who will invent and develop the tech.
For the last 20 years we’ve had all of those conditions in the Western world. Boomers were at the height of their earnings potential and their kids were leaving home in droves letting them pour money into investments. Low interest rates abound because capital was looking for places to be utilized. China was the workshop of the world building low to mid range stuff allowing the West to focus its excess Millennials age workforce on value added and tech work.
Now in the USA boomers are retiring and there aren’t enough GenX to make up the difference. Millennials and finally getting down to household creation or their oldest cohorts (Xennials) just now entering into their mid 40s and starting to move up in their careers but they probably still have kids to support. So it will be some time before capital becomes plentiful again. Gen Z is large but they aren’t enough to back fill the loss of Millennials.
Ohh I made a point to highlight that this was a US demographic phenomena. Europe and Japan do not have a large Millennial or GenZ populations to replace their aging boomers. We have no modern economic model to map out what will happen to them.
China is going through a demographic collapse worse than what you see in Europe or Japan. Only they aren’t rich to compensate add in the fact that they decided to antagonize their largest trading partners in the West causing the decoupling we are now seeing.
The loss of their labor means the West has to reshore or find alternative low wage markets for production and expend a lot of capital to build out the plant in those markets to do so.
Add on top geopolitical instability of the Ukraine and you have a recipe for slower tech growth.
What’s happening is that support from VC money is drying up. Tech companies have for a long time survived on the promise that they will eventually be much more profitable in the future. It doesn’t matter if it’s not profitable today. They will be in the future.
Now we’re in a period where there’s more pressure on tech companies to be profitable today. That’s why they’re going for such anti consumer behaviors. They want to make more with less.
I’m not sure if there’s a bubble bursting. It could just be a plateau.
I agree. Smartphones, for example, have hardly changed at all over the last ten years, but you don’t see Apple and Samsung going out of business.
I understand you don’t appreciate where we’ve come from and how fast, can’t see the year to years changes, but the iPhone is just a little over ten years old. Do you really not see huge changes between an early iPhone and today’s?
On the contrary, I absolutely appreciate it. I was about 15 when mobile phones first became a thing that everyone owned, so I’ve lived through the entire progression from when they were something only a well to do businessman would have all the way through to today. The first iPhone was 2007, 17 years ago btw.
When mobile phones became popular, each new generation of phones saw HUGE improvements and innovation. However, the last ten years has pretty much just been slight improvements to screen/camera/memory/CPU. Form wise and functionally, they’re very similar to the phone of ten years ago.
I understand that some technophiles will always be able to justify why the new iPhone is worth £1600 and if that’s what they want to spend their money on then good for them, but I personally think that they are kidding themselves. Today you can get a brilliant phone for £300 or even less.
I’d never justify that urge to spend ridiculous money updating every year to the latest and greatest, but people tend to under appreciate the massive improvements from accumulated incremental improvements.
OLED screen on my iPhone X was revolutionary (and I’m sure Android had it first), as just one example, and now most phones are. Personally I find ultrawideband and “find my” very innovative and well implemented. Or if that’s too small a change, how about the entire revolution of Apple designing their own SoC for every new model. There’s emergency satellite texting, fall/crash detection, even Apple mostly solving phone theft is innovative (even if you don’t like their approach)
When we see steady improvements, humans tend to under-appreciate how it adds up
I’m not going to argue that there has been no progress, just that it’s not on the same scale.
Look at the difference between phones from 2004 to 2014, then from 2014 to 2024 and surely you’d have to agree. We’re looking at huge leaps in tech and innovation Vs much smaller incremental improvements.
And I’d once again like to state that this is not a complaint, just a point of view showing that astonishing amounts of technological innovation are not necessarily required to keep companies in business.
And it would be so easy to make a big splash in the market by having a phone where the camera doesn’t protrude out of the back.
To be fair, some phones already have that but they have much lower spec cameras/lenses, so it’s currently a trade off.
If a flag ship phone were to find away to implement a flush top spec camera, it would still only be an incremental improvement rather than a great new technology or a substantial innovation.
you don’t see Apple and Samsung going out of business.
Samsung is damn near the point of going bankrupt. Samsung saw a 95% drop in profits for a second consecutive quarter 2023
In more recent news;
BBC News - Samsung profits jump by more than 900% on chips https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68738046
Damn that’s wild. Any business that has that drastic of spikes of profit and loss cannot possibly be sustainable. I can’t see how it could be. Look at the automobile giants in the USA. All it took was one major economic event to bankrupt them, and they got bailed out which should’ve never happened. It’s bullshit.
Memory chips have had an utterly fickle market ever since there’s been memory chips, companies in that business are still in that business because they learned how to deal with the swings. If micron can survive (and they will) then so will Samsung whose memory chip business has the whole conglomerate to fall back onto.
Yh, I’m not for bailing out companies that are “too big to fail”, I see it as socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor, but that’s a separate debate.
Tech stocks were a interesting case as they bloated far beyond their actual value during COVID, what happened in 2023 was probably somewhat of a renormalization and now they’re back to business as usual. There will always be peaks and valleys, but I’d be very surprised to see tech stocks fail in the long term.
I really truly suggest diversifying to newsfeeds without comment sections like techmeme for a bit.
Increasing complexity is overwhelming and theres plenty of bad shit going on but theres a lot overblown in your post.
Sorry for the long edit: i personally felt improvement for my mental health when i did this for 6 months or so. Because seriously, whatever disinformation is happening in american news is so exhausting. We need to think whatever we want and then engage with each other when our thoughts are more individualized. Dont be afraid to ask questions that might seem like you are questioning some holy established lemmy/reddit consensus. If you are being honest about your opinions and arent afraid to look dumb then you are doing the internet a HUGE service. We need more dumb questions and vulnerability to combat the obsession of appearing as an expert. So thank you for making a genuine post of concern.
It’s a societal bubble, soon we all go pop. c/collapse
I agree. But also add in the movie industry that’s been complete trash for a while now. Not to mention books. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see another Harry Potter level book again, at least in our lifetimes.
My take is we’ve already left the golden ages of movies, music, and books and probably won’t get another for an extremely long time.
Video games are going through the same downfall which streaming services brought. Physical media left the movie scene as a standard while ago, but video games took longer. Now it’s going to be all streaming and subscriptions where you can never own anything.
Once that happens, enshittification will peak, companies won’t be incentivized to make the games good anymore, standards tank, and people will forget how good things once were.
movie industry that’s been complete trash for a while now.
This is not a callout of you in particular so don’t get offended, but that’s really only true if you look at the trash coming out of Hollywood.
There’s some spectacularly good shit coming out of like France and South Korea (depending on what genres you’re a fan of, anyways), as well as like, everywhere else.
Shitty movies that are just shitty sequels to something that wasn’t very good (or yet another fucking Marvel movie) is a self-inflicted wound, and not really a sign that you can’t possibly do better.
Not to mention an ungodly amount of Animated content of all varieties. Anime, cartoons, indie (Helluva Boss is hilarious and (un?)surprisingly dark), I recall seeing a screenshot of something French with amazing art style I want to look into watching.
One Piece is gearing up for a re-animation from the beginning using its new style from the Wano arc IIRC, and that is a hell of a long epic story.
Interesting! Anything you’d recommend?
Train to Busan, Parasite, Unlocked, Wonderland, Anatomy of a Fall and Close have been ones I’ve seen recently that I liked.
I think some of those are available on Netflix, but as I don’t use Netflix I can’t say which ones and for certain, though.
Edit: I just realized some of those are vague and will lead to a billion other movies lol. The first 4 are S. Korean, the last two are French and they’re all from 2020 or newer so anything not from there or older isn’t the right one.
Thanks! I’ll look them up and give them a shot.
As with video games, the real gems imo for movies and music are from the indie scenes.
Check out the Mistborn and Wheel of Time series for books that are waaay better than Harry Potter. Anything by Brandon Sanderson and Neil Gaiman is a good time.
Also highly recommend any comics by Moebius and/or Alejandro Jodorowsky, and Neil Gaiman. Some incredible mind altering works to enjoy there like The Incal and Sandman.
Not to mention books. I’m not sure if we’ll ever see another Harry Potter level book again, at least in our lifetimes.
Are you talking quality or popularity? Because there are many, many books that are just as good or better than Harry Potter.
Anything you’d recommend in particular?
. . . with 10% increase in performance rather than 50 or 60% like we really need
Why is this a need? The constant push for better and better has not been healthy for humanity or the planet. Exponential growth was always going to hit a ceiling. The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.
We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz. That’s at least a decade away
Sure you can, today, and this is why:
So many gaming companies are incapable of putting out a successful AAA title because . . .
Regardless of the reasons, the AAA space is going to have to pull back. Which is perfectly fine by me, because their games are trash. Even the good ones are often filled with micro transaction nonsense. None of them have innovated anything in years; that’s all been done at the indie level. Which is where the real party is at.
Would it be so bad if graphics were locked at the PS4 level? Comparable hardware can run some incredible games from 50 years of development. We’re not even close to innovating new types of games that can run on that. Planet X2 is a recent RTS game that runs on a Commodore 64. The genre didn’t really exist at the time, and the control scheme is a bit wonky, but it’s playable. If you can essentially backport a genre to the C64, what could we do with PS4 level hardware that we just haven’t thought of yet?
Yeah, there will be worse graphics because of this. Meh. You’ll have native 4K/144Hz just by nature of pulling back on pushing GPUs. Even big games like Rocket League, LoL, and CS:GO have been doing this by not pushing graphics as far as they can go. Those games all look fine for what they’re trying to do.
I want smaller games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not kidding.
None of them have innovated anything in years
Well, they’ve innovated news ways to take up disk space…
There’s a reason I don’t play new release AAA games, and it’s because they’re simply not worth the price. They’re buggy at launch, take up tons of disk space (with lots of updates the first few months), and honestly aren’t even that fun even when the bugs are fixed. Indie games, on the other hand, seem to release in a better state, tend to be fairly small, and usually add something innovative to the gameplay.
The only reason to go AAA IMO is for fancy graphics (I honestly don’t care) and big media franchises (i.e. if you want Spiderman, you have to go to the license holder), and for me, those lose their novelty pretty quickly. The only games I buy near release time anymore are Nintendo titles and indie games from devs I like. AAA just isn’t worth thinking about, except the one or two each year that are actually decent (i.e. Baldur’s Gate 3).
This post really nails my take on the issue. Give me original cs level graphics or even aq2 graphics, a decent story, more levels, and a few new little gimmicks (rocket arena grappling hook, anyone?!?!) and you don’t need 4k blah blah bullshit.
The #1 game for kids is literally Minecraft or Roblox…8 bit level gfx outselling your horse armor hi res bullshit.
The last game i bought was 2 days ago. Mohaa airborne for PC for $5 at a pawn shop Give me 100 of this quality of game instead of anything PS5 ever made.
Here are the number of hours I’ve spent on indie games VS AAA titles, according to my Steam library:
- Indie - Valheim - 435 hours
- Indie - Space Haven - 332 hours
- Indie - Satisfactory - 215 hours
- Indie - Dyson Sphere Program - 203 hours
- AAA - Skyrim - 98 hours
- AAA - Control - 47 hours
- AAA - Far Cry 6 - 29 hours
- AAA - Max Payne 3 - 43 minutes
If we’re talking about value - the amount of playtime I’ve gotten out of games with simpler graphics and unique ideas blows the billions spent by the industry out of the water.
Depending on where you draw the line, mine looks similar:
- EU4 - >800 hours
- Cities Skylines - ~180 hours
- Magic: Arena - >100 hours
- Crusader Kings 2 - ~100 hours
After that it depends on the length of the game. I normally just play through the campaign on most games once (except the above, which have lots of replay value), so looking at playtime isn’t particularly interesting IMO. The ratio of games with interesting playtime (i.e. I probably rolled credits) between indie and AAA is easily 2:1, if not something way higher like 5:1 or even 10:1, but again, that really depends on where you draw the line. If we look at 100% completion, I have 22 indie games and zero AAA games, because I rarely find AAA games to be worth going after achievements in. If I sort by achievement completion, the top two AAA games are Yakuza games (I love that series), and that’s after scrolling through dozens of indies, many of which have a fair amount of achievements (i.e. you need to do more than just roll credits).
So yeah, AAA games really don’t interest me. If you compare the amount I’ve spent on indie vs AAA games, it would be a huge difference since I pretty much only play older AAA games if I get them on sale, and that’s mostly so I can talk about them w/ friends…
The limit on Moore’s Law has been more to the economic side than actually packing transistors in.
The reason why those economic limits exist is because we’re reaching the limit of what’s physically possible. Fabs are still squeezing more transistors into less space, for now, but the cost per transistor hasn’t fallen for some time, IIRC about 10nm thereabouts is still the most economical node. Things just get difficult and exponentially fickle the smaller you get, and at some point there’s going to be a wall. Of note currently we’re talking more about things like backside power delivery than actually shrinking anything. Die-on-die packaging and stuff.
Long story short: Node shrinks aren’t the low-hanging fruit any more. Haven’t been since the end of planar transistors (if it had been possible to just shrink back then they wouldn’t have engineered FinFETs) but it’s really been taking up speed with the start of the EUV era. Finer and finer pitches don’t really matter if you have to have more and more lithography/etching/coating steps because the structures you’re building are getting more and more involved in the z axis, every additional step costs additional machine time. On the upside, newer production lines could spit out older nodes at pretty much printing press speed.
I want smaller games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less, and I’m not kidding.
I agree. Wholeheartedly. I think it’s just so obvious how quality dramatically takes off when the people creating it feel safe, sound, and economically stable. Financial Security (UBI) drives creativity probably more than anything else. It’s a huge win!
My biggest gripe with big tech is how governments of the world encourage their worst behaviours. Governments and businesses have failed to maintain their own level of expertise and understanding of technology.
Today everything relies on tech but all the solutions are outsourced and rely on “guidance” and free hand outs from vendors like Microsoft. This has caused situations where billions are poured into digital transformation efforts with fuck all to show for it but administrative headaches, ballooning costs and security breaches.
I’m so tired of silicon valley frat boys being the leaders of our industry. We need to go back to an engineer and ideas led industry. Focused on solving problems and making lives better. Not making bullshit unsustainable business monopolies with a huge pile of money. Right now big tech is the embodiment of all of capitalisms worst qualities.
P.s. apologies if my comment is a bit simplistic and vague. didn’t want to write a 10 page rant but still wanted to say my 2c about the state of things.
Meta isn’t the only VR space. Resontite VR plays like VR chat meets Gary’s mod, and supports most equipment you can hook up. It is not perfect but there are frequent updates trying to address the issues, same as any platform.
Meta is the only VR space for anyone not able/willing to spend as much on a VR headset as a mid range desktop (especially when that VR headset might not even function without the addition of a mid range desktop), and for people who want VR and a vague semblence of privacy there isn’t really any affordable headset at all.
Resontite doesn’t require a headset. It runs in desktop just as well… You just don’t get body tracking.
I would love to have a VR headset that didn’t require a damn account with a 3rd party just to use it. I don’t need an account for my monitor or my mouse. Plus when I bought the thing, it was just Oculus, then meta bought it and promised nothing would change, before requiring a meta account to use the fucking thing.
That unfortunately is the consequence of letting a company have a monopoly. The US govt should’ve opposed that, and should’ve forced them to sell it. They own such a huge share of the entire VR market right now it’s unbelievable, and Pico by byte dance isn’t legally able to be sold on the USA
It does not have a monopoly, there are other headsets
We still don’t have the capability to play games in full native 4K 144 Hertz.
And we really don’t need that. Gameplay is still more important than game resolution. Most gamers don’t even have hardware that would allow that type of resolution.
I remember when running counter strike at 30fps on a 480p monitor meant you had a good computer.
Modern graphics are amazing, but they’re simply not required to have a good gaming experience.
Gameplay is still more important than game resolution
In your opinion*. You forgot that part. For lots of people, graphics are way more important because they want a beautiful and immersive experience. They are not wrong to want that. I respect that you feel the way you do, but I respect others who care more about graphics. I’ll even go so far as to say that I am of the same mind as you, I don’t care about the graphics much at all but there are some games where the graphics have truly wowed me, or the visual effects. For example two that come to mind, Ori and the will of the wisps, or No Man’s sky. Two very different games but absolutely crazy visual effects and graphics on high-end computers. Another game that I play a lot is World of Warcraft, gameplay is so damn fun but it’s hard to get any of my friends to play it because it’s so ugly, looks like a poorly rendered PS3 game. That horrible quality of graphics prevents people from even trying it
Most gamers don’t even have hardware that would allow that type of resolution.
This is because they refuse to innovate. Think of the DVD player. You think a DVD player costs a lot today? Of course not, there’s a million of them and no one wants them anymore. If they actually innovated and created drastic leaps and technology, then older technology would be cheaper. It’s not expensive to go out and get an RTX 2080, which is the graphics card I currently have. Is about 250 or $300 now, pretty damn solid card. If they actually innovated and kept pushing the limits, technology would accelerate faster. Instead they want the inverse of that. They want as slow growth in technology as feasibly possible, maximum amount of time to innovate, maximum amount of revenue, and maximized impact on the environment. All those carbon emissions and waste of graphics cards being thrown out
If graphics were with it, people would pay for it.
The fact of the matter is that exponential graphics capabilities requires an exponential input of developer and asset creator budget. Given that there is a ceiling on game prices, it isn’t worth it going for higher fidelity games when the market isn’t going to pay for it.
You can have the most realistic graphics in the world, pushing your AMViditel RTX 5095Ti Plus Platinum Ultra with 64TB VRAM to it’s absolute maximum, but if the gameplay sucks, you won’t have as much fun as you would with a pixel art indie game with lots of fun gameplay.
We are sorry. So sorry indeed man! We are sorry that because of a pandemic many people in the industry had to move to safe locations and realize how much better those places were so they’re not going back. We’re sorry to have inconvenienced your game play. But we’re working hard to get you to pay another salary’s worth on the next tumb raider! We promised so much many more transistors that the boob wobble will be endless! Thru AI, anything is possible!
it’s time for you to play PACMAN, as i did when i was young 😂
no AI, no GPU, no shitcoin: you just have to eat ghost, which is very strange in fact when you think about it 🤪Correction the ghosts are AI and based on how many times they killed me clearly a step above anything mainstream today (º ﾛ º๑).
Wait till the Y2K38 event occurs.
If only we had some way of working with a bigger integer…maybe we’d call it something like BigInteger…
Or just a u64. 64 bit computers are pretty standard nowadays.
I had heard that. Maybe I’ll get my hands on one someday. I hear Commodore makes one.
(I do wonder now if whatever variable is being used to denote time is signed or unsigned, because that would make a big difference, too.)
The C64 is 8 bit but has 64k of memory.
While the specification allows time_t to be basically whatever, in practice it’s a signed 32 bit int. Presumably to accommodate whatever came theoretically before the world was created on 1/1/1970.
OP, when you say AI is really really fucking things up, what do you have in mind? Setting aside the ludicrous things people say about AI, do you see it directly fucking something up? I’m just curious what is on your mind when you say that.
To me it’s seeing the Nvidia stock price in the same sort of range as Cisco stock prices were in the dot com bubble- I don’t have any confidence they’re going to reach the promised land of profitability this time either.
Nvidia is already profitable and has been for over a decade.
Pretty sure Cisco was too, the’re supplying hardware to the bubble. I think you misunderstood my point- I don’t think AI is going to be profitable in the long term, it’s probably very profitable to sell the hardware for that to people with investor money- their stock price reflects that.
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Just like always, it depends on how you define or redefine ai. For example, what used to be called ai has been very successful in photo processing. The same thing is going to happen: some portion or incarnation of the current generative ai will be successful, but it will be dismissed similar to “it’s just machine learning, not ai”
I have a lot of hope for Apple’s approach, where they are incorporating it as tools into specific capabilities, and prioritizing privacy. While there’s no direct profit, it should help sell a lot more devices with ever higher tech specs. I also like their “private cloud” model that has a lot of potential beyond private ai
That’s pretty much where I see the ending for a lot of this, there’s a wide variety of useful applications, but hard to capitalize on especially for things that are self contained and not phoning home to some server you need to maintain access to for billing purposes
People are simultaneously too poor and spending more on video games
https://www.statista.com/statistics/252457/consumer-spending-on-video-games-in-the-us/
