Head In The Clouds

Gaming is weird, isn't it? At one and the same time it's too much and too little. Or maybe that's gamers.

In recent weeks, I've seen people complaining they have too many games to get through, that they're being offered too many games for free, that they've been tempted by deals on games that were too good to miss and now they have a backlog they'll never get through, that too many games are being released all at once, that too many games are being released, period, and that content drops for live service games come faster than they can keep up with them.

Over the same time-frame, I've seen people complaining there's nothing new worth playing, that all we ever get are retreads of old games, that nostalgia-driven retro-gaming is driving out creativity and innovation and that live-service games are stale and static thanks to content droughts.

Obviously, all of these things can be true at once but it's tiring to keep hearing about it. And feeling it. Because I'm suffering from the same mixed emotions about the hobby as everyone else. When the pipeline's flowing, I feel like I'm drowning; when it dries up I suffer from thirst.

All of it's self-imposed, of course. There's no excuse for any of it. Maybe Microsoft was simply acting out a duty of care when they announced XBox Live's new cloud gaming limits of 5, 10 and 15 hours a month. Perhaps they're trying to tell us we all play too many games already.

But, no. It won't be that. They'll be fine with us playing 'til our eyes bleed, provided we do it on our own machines and they don't have to pay for it. They don't care that we're addicted. They just don't want to be the ones running the crack house. 

The Ars Technica article article linked in the Aging Gamer post, which is weirdly the only place I've seen the news at all, it makes it quite clear that cloud gaming, like VR and AR before it, has signally failed to attract any kind of mass-market audience. As the piece points out, Google dropped their Stadia cloud gaming service a few years back and Amazon recently scaled down its Luna service significantly.

Luckily for me, NVidia's still in. My GeForce Now subscription that I took out a few months back has to be one of the best spending choices I've made. I use it every day and it works flawlessly. I hope NVidia don't decide it's too much trouble too because while it lasts, it's saving me a fortune and making my gaming life very much easier.

Backing out of the market for cloud gaming now might be a little premature, anyway. The concept could be on the cusp of fulfilling some of the promises made for it a few years ago, although the reasons why it could be beginning to take off are, ironically, the same as those making it less commercially attractive. 

Hardware costs aren't spiralling so much as sky-rocketing. The insatiable maws of the AI data centers scarf down every available chip, leaving nothing but scraps for everyone else. Running AAA games, at home or in the cloud, is getting expensive.

We could be there a while, too. I've seen estimates that it could take three years for enough new production facilities to come online to meet the unanticipated demand. Even that sounds... optimistic. Fanciful, even. Is there enough raw material available to feed the increased demand, always assuming the will to build these new factories was there?

Maybe it's the beginning of the end for gaming as we've grown up knowing it. Since the 1970s there's been an automatic assumption that kids want consoles in their homes to play their video games. Consoles became handhelds and PCs and all kinds of devices with odd and enigmatic names but no-one ever imagined the flow would end. All those kids grew up and had kids of their own and the family that plays together...

Sure, there've been times when commentators considered whether the latest console generation would be the last but only because they saw games migrating to different platforms and technologies, not because they thought the whole gaming carousel was going to grind to a halt. 

And of course it hasn't and it won't. Gaming's going nowhere. Or, rather, it's going somewhere. But where? And what's it going to look like, when it gets there?

Mobile gaming has been the big success of the last decade and more. It's still growing, too. But smartphones are just as vulnerable to the data center demand as consoles and PCs. It's nice to imagine that, when you can't afford a PC any more, you'll be able to hook your phone to your TV and carry on playing but chances are your phone won't be any cheaper to upgrade or replace than the rest of the tech you can no longer justify buying.

Of course, we all have to have a smartphone now, so if it comes to a choice, well it's no choice at all. But if the phones that can play the AAA games cost the same as the other devices that cost too much, will anyone outside of a self-elected elite be playing? And if AAA gaming becomes a luxury pastime, what kind of developers will that attract? Would you even want to play the games they made, if you could run them?

Oh, I do like a bit of wild, unsupported speculation, once in a while? Don't you? And since I don't do doom-scrolling, it's rare for me to get the opportunity.

I don't really imagine any of this is going to happen. Crappy old machines play most games pretty well and if there really comes a time when regular gamers are priced out of the new PC and Console market, there's going to be a huge boom in refurbished hardware. 

I mean, there's got to be a lot of it around, doesn't there? We're all hoarders when it comes to tech. 

From where I'm sitting I can see three no-longer-used PCs and an old laptop and there's another downstairs. That's after I took three more to the recycling center last year. And don't talk to me about graphics cards. I must have a dozen lying around, going all the way back to the early 2000s. 

I don't own any consoles but I just checked EBay and I could have a working PS4 for well under £100. Gemini tells me that would play Fortnite, Apex Legends and Minecraft as well as thousands of top-rated games from the twenty-teens. I could get by on that. If I had to.

So, yes, maybe a bit of belt-tightening might be in order for a while. And maybe game developers will have to scale down their ambitions and work inside some technical constraints if they want to keep hold of their mass-market appeal. But is that a bad thing? Aren't we always complaining about bloated budgets and broken deadlines and reach exceeding grasp?

Not that I want to go all misty-eyed about the good old days because god forbid but one thing that there was a lot of back in the 'eighties and nineties was innovation. Granted, it's always a lot easier to come up with something new when no-one's been there before you but even factoring that in, the things some people were able to do with a 48k memory, let alone half a gigabyte, were astonishing. 

We're not going back to measuring the footprints of our favorite games in kilobytes but does any game really need to take up hundreds of gigs on your SSD? Assuming you can still afford an SSD, of course. 

Let's take Valheim as an example. Kind of successful, Valheim. Okay, it had a great launch window, what with everyone being trapped at home back in 2021 but it's sold 12m-15m copies in five years, depending which source you believe. Not GTA6 numbers, sure, but solid.

Valheim is less than 5GB. Nearer 4GB in fact. It has low-quality graphics that somehow manage to look exactly right for what it needs. It's a good trick but quite a few games pull it off. Minecraft barely breaks 1GB in a standard installation and that one hasn't done too badly. Fortnite will run on a graphics card I could buy right now on EBay for under £25. 

Looks like we'll be able to carry on gaming after all, then. At least until all the old hardware dries up and breaks down. But that could take a while.

And maybe the games will get smarter and smaller and at least no worse than they are now. Might even be better. Who knows? 

Not to mention there might be fewer of them. Which could be a good thing. Over twenty thousand new games were released on Steam last year. We've almost passed that this year already. How many games can you play in a year? Maybe if there weren't so many, you wouldn't have that backlog...

All of the above is merely me, riffing on something I wasn't even planning to write about today. I was going to go over the latest video from Hotta about the upcoming content drop for Neverness to Everness and that got me started on how much content is too much and then the introduction turned into the post and here we are, or here I am, anyway, wondering if less really might not be more after all.

I'll get to that NTE video another time. It's... interesting. Interesting isn't always a compliment, is it? Meanwhile, I think I might play some video games. While I still can.