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This downfall is in part due to unreal becoming the de facto AAA engine when its an horrendously optimized engine. We start to see a reversal of this in some studio but its going to take a long time to reverse the last 5-10 years

My current theory is that Epic didn't anticipate 60fps remaining the standard, because most Unreal Engine games on earlier console generations were 30fps and no one minded.

The other theory I think is that making UE5 so accessible ended up inviting a lot of devs who don't employ actual graphics engine coders. In previous generations when a big company used Unreal, they'd at least have somebody who knew how to rip out the parts of UE they didn't need.

Just remember: 1. as long as there are people, they'll always want to play 2. as long as imagination and critical thinking continue to operate, we can devise an infinite number of ways to play Everything else is just clutter on the road and the question of the current system's sustainability.

can always pivot into: - visual novels - print&play tabletop - _Rogue_-likes

Chris also likely right here, btw -- any tangible benefit to smaller-scale games is not automatic but would depend on wider sea-changes in hardware. However, Nvidia's primary interest in no longer game hardware, so (shrug) a shakeup is inevitable, with all the fallout bsky.app/profile/papa...

You can see these patterns historically, too -- in past decades, huge swathes of players were NEVER able to afford latest consoles. They acquired taste for games via web games, downloadables, older consoles, and that's where many early "indie" audiences arose. Mobiles is muckier, of course.

The death of photorealism in games a.k.a. mainstream's rediscovery of art

It's always disheartening to be reminded that when A LOT of people talk about "videogames" they're literally only talking about stuff like GTA6 and the upper echelons of publishers who make games with six figure budgets. And of course you always have to second guess if that's the definition being..