I think the “patient gamer” model could be the way through don’t buy new shit and encourage your friends to play older games too. Hardware can be not great and the games are cheap.
That only works if you already own the hardware and/or the majority does NOT do that model. The moment most people jump on board, the cost of old hardware will skyrocket too.
Except even if the majority DOES adopt this model:
- that will make repairing old hardware more profitable, so supply will rise to meet demand at least a bit (and is also objectively a good thing)
- a lot of old hardware isn’t compatible with Win11+ and unless Microsoft is visited by the Three Ghosts of Software or the long-anticipated Year Of The Linux Desktop arrives, so that’s one moat you can take advantage of (I assume you, a Lemmy user, are more likely to try Linux than an average person would, or are using it already)
- if the price still goes up, manufacturers will step in to take advantage
- at some point, the new slop business model won’t have enough customers to sustain itself
If you buy them off Steam you don’t actually own the game. You own a license to play the game, and that license is non-transferable and can be revoked. Doesn’t matter if it’s on your hard drive.
The future of PC gaming is the community support of vintage games that you loved.
The future of consoles is amatuer AI taxidermy remakes of your childhood memories. A distorted uncanny-valley resemblence of a game you once held dear, stuffed to the brim with synthetic fluff and hung on a generic skeleton twisted and bent to roughly resemble a once vibrant and living thing.
SO RIGHt
Also with microtransactions
I wish I had more than one upvote for this.
The console wars are over. Xbox is being spun down.
Xbox is going to be a subscription game console service, like stadia was.
Microsoft is going to use the “free” compute cycles when their AI slopcenters aren’t at full utilization to run Xbox games.
At least we’ll always have the classics. Download, play, and seed emulated games folks.
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Where did it all go wrong?
When we stopped publicly executing politicians and millionaires (there were no billionaires yet at the time).
Elon Musk is on the path to become a trillionaire.
For Americans the answer to ‘where did we go wrong’ is normally Reagan.
More in general, our biggest problem is that we let billionaires buy our politicians and didn’t riot. (Eat the rich, when?)
same people that got reagan elected got nixon elected
Regan was so bad John Carpenter made a movie about it
Seeing shit get worse and worse every year has thr goblinest mask of all callin’ like:

Buy old PC, play Minecraft, be happy.
Team Fortress 2 is still populated.
Also use Prism Launcher or PolyMC to play all the modpaci you can dream of.
Also uzdoom/gzdoom and all the Doom II mods you can download
Prism launcher -> new instance -> modrinth -> fabulously optimized
To get a vanilla experience with all of the best performance mods preloaded
When you blamed the SJWs and Anita Sarkeesian.
Did I miss the part where Anita demanded for Bezos to hang?
She did not say that, but I saw things being said like this during gamergate:
I’m bet microtransactions are due to Anita, she probably said something like “difficult games are sexist, unlocks should be paid”, then developers followed suit.
Others think horny gachaslop with decent-ish gameplay at first invalidates the argument, that microtransactions are bad.
In my mind, the current timeline always starts with 2013 and the death of Aaron Swartz. You could argue it was his prosecution that started it, but his death was the moment it began to become clear. Maybe he saw where we were heading. He was being over-prosecuted. Almost everyone who wasn’t part of the establishment came to that conclusion.
He represented everything that the new digital age could be: self-educated, a lover of learning, a humanist, an activist. A common man fighting for the common people. Everything he did was to spread information and protect our ability to learn, grow, and fight against injustice.
Maybe he had a Howard Beale moment with someone when his plea deal was rejected. Maybe he saw where we were heading and knew that he would never be able to fight it again. They had done everything to make an example of him…to make it impossible for him to enact change. All he really did was find ways to use the system to share information and help people.
I know, this was about PC gaming, but everything in this current dystopia ties back to this loss for me.
Such a tragic story.
Offline games will stay existing, even if the AAA studios won’t create those.
But fuck em.
There’s already more amazing games than you or I could possibly play in a lifetime. If they only make shitty games, I’ll just play old games. I’ve been gaming on a retro handheld and honestly there’s so many amazing games I missed.
Indy devs are also killing it in the multiplayer space with silly and charming co-op experiences. I played a lot of Peak and Motor Town with friends lately and both are just so fun.
I LOVE MOTOR TOWN
It’s such a good game!
I am Impressed with the wheel support. Even on Linux my dfgt worked perfectly and the feedback is better than some dedicated racing games.
Well hold on there, son. You just need to take up a hobby. Have you ever considered working with your hands, sawing up wood, drilling screw holes, learning to balance chains and then build a guillotine? Work proactively - damnit.
Mines more like 15 years or more lol
OOP is wrong about one thing: They’re not happy.
They will exploit you right up until the point where you commit crime. So steal and pirate your way to liberation.
I’m making a lo-fi, offline, singleplayer card game designed to be completely moddable in every way so people can add custom characters, enemies, features just by putting JSON into the userdata folder.
Some of us are trying!
Magic the Fappering?
Well that’s the joy, I’ll build it so you can just draw tits and penises in.











