Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrandish | Hacker News Reader

A couple years ago I opted out of the new game release rat race because I realized they're costing more and I'm getting less and I don't find recent AAA games any more fun than older games (and often quite a bit less fun). I was also just sick of all the bullshit like many games being released in a buggy state, content being held back for the inevitable DLC, and having to sign up for an online account on some publisher's site after buying the game from another online service.

I've switched to retro gaming and find I enjoy it more. For example, exploring 90s Japanese games that never saw wide release in the US. Recently I've found some real winners exploring the X360 and PS3 back catalog of indie games via emulation. I'd never seen many of these because they were only released on their respective online services. Of course, with the shutdown of those stores, these titles would be lost to time were it not for the preservation and emulation communities archiving them. This is why I'm a fan of publishers like GOG who're at least making an effort toward perpetual availability.

As games push the limits of gambling ratio addiction mechanics, social and psychological coercion, sunk cost fallacy, and a host of other tactics as best exemplified by pay to win games made by machine zone aand others,

Games are getting definitively worse. You are a revenue stream, not a customer or a person to app Al to in any way but the most lazy and base ways possible.

Each successive graphic generation places additional production cost to build models and world's, arguably to the artistic detriment of any game: first, since there is so much labor, corners are cut and artistic vision can't be applied everywhere to an army of graphic artists, many outsourced. Second, the overall production costs, much like movie production, makes producers conservative and cookie cutter in pursuit of a reliable return on investment.

The emulation community is preserving not just games, but an entirely different culture of gaming.

Perhaps AI can help with better mass generation of artistic assets, but really an AI is a mass averager of it's inputs: artistic vision is fundamentally a deviation from a norm, and large AI models are anything but

for better or for worse, gaming has gone mainstream. there are now a lot of dollars chasing easy wins. even a computer graphics enthusiast, it is really sad to see that they have optimized for incredible rendering pipelines and utterly forgettable assets, mechanics, and stories.

but if you rewind your render quality expectations by about ten years, there are still great games being made for way under $100mm. I'll plug two of my current favorites:

* factorio ($20). if you don't already know what it is, I can't really summarize it here. the entire team is < 10 people, but it's rare example of engineering excellence combined with a carefully curated user experience. I try to get all the devs and PMs I work with to read their blog.

* zero k (free). a bit more wacky, but one of the best rts of all time. they also have an interesting dev blog, and for a nice cherry on top, it's open source. some feature requests on the forums get the reply "great idea, I look forward to your PR", which I find pretty funny.

I think the creative sweet spot is somewhere around the playstation 2, maybe a midpoint between PS1 and PS2, especially if the gross hardware speed takes optimization work out of the picture.

Modern games are wrestling with a lot of uncanny valley stuff still. They've improved a lot from the polar Express movie, but it's still an issue.

I recall the recent ads for first descendant where a guy is clearly smoking, which I thought was some vaping thing in realtime, but the smoking is even worse. Probably cigarette companies shadow funding things there.

It's been pretty lightspeed how the days of google do no evil has went to the great woke purge after covid and now is no holds barred mamma sociopathy. It was like 5 years.

I get the MBA sociopathy has been bubbling under the surface and lots of scary movements around the borders, but it is scary what is going on with big tech.

What is the great woke purge?

You may not recall, but the rabble in Google for about a decade would publicly demonstrate against the company for being in China, or various diversity goals, or other fairly liberal things that typical capitalist companies really don't tolerate.

Then the post-COVID layoffs happened, and poof nobody does that anymore.

I don't necessarily oppose a lot of the agenda that the employee advocates were pushing for, it was the pitchfork mob tactics that went hand in hand with those people. And without those loud people, the companies have very rapidly pursued much more diabolical ends.

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