I fear wishful thinking, gaming consumers (demand) don’t wield such power over supply.
The format doesn’t work as well but lemmy try …
Perhaps …
This is a better version imo. These companies are going to kill consumerism of the PC market soon enough. It will take some time, like 20 years or so I imagine given the current landscape and old inventory, but these are the starting steps.
IMHO it’s already dead.
Nobody’s made RAM actually targeting the specs in the standards for years; the sticks ship with built-in overclocking settings for one or the other proprietary system, and the boards expect the sticks to already be on their Qualified Vendor List to actually work right. The interface between the RAM and the motherboard is ceasing to be a legitimate extension point.
There’s two people who make CPUs, not to any spec but to work with their own other chips that need to already be on the board, which are then driven by firmware software basically supplied by the CPU makers. When the CPU makers update their base firmware bundles, the board makers skin and ship it. In the distant past, one could slot competing CPUs from different vendors into the same board, and they would execute BIOS software fundamentally under the control of the board makers. The interface between the CPU and the board has long since ceased to be a legitimate extension point.
The real remaining extension point is PCIe, and since its dominant use is to attach exactly one ever-widening GPU from one of two (or perhaps now three! How spoiled for choice we are!) manufacturers, each year fewer slots are provided. The target customer only needs one, and it needs as much physical clearance as humanly possible. A case will have 7 or 8 slots on the back and a board will provide two slots to plug anything in, one to actually use and one to be able to claim that there’s more than one slot. And each year there’s less stuff to put in there (who buys sound cards?) and more stuff (fast networking, wifi, fancy USB) is integrated into the board.
And all these components have started to acquire fancy molded plastic and metal casings, to the point where it’s not clear why they need a separate enclosure around them.
So the net result is you obtain one fancy shrouded box from Lenovo, or you purchase two fancy shrouded boxes and plug them together, and you call the result a “PC”. And then on the software side it’s a terminal for a Microsoft account, which you use to run a client for fetching from Steam, which you use to load client software for talking to live services. And now the people orchestrating all this are wondering why they bother actually mailing you the boxes.
This is very deeply not personal computing.
Yes, everything will be a subscription service effectively killing foss & PCs.
Soon we will be illegally trading old PC hardware amongst ourselves until it eventually fails (which is only a few decades for the newer chips), hunted & persecuted by the matacorps.
I went surfing twice today.
Yeah. It’s more like this. If gamers had this kind of power things would not get worse every year.
where is his ding dong
yeah, dafuq is this censorship!
It really takes away a lot of the gravity the meme is trying to portray, the implication of physical violence isn’t enough.
On an AI company farm forced to draw lewd anime girls along with his fellow shlongians.
Yeah… allow me to doubt those gamers…
Are those gamers the same that whine about FC26 being a copy-paste of FC25 and then proceed to buy it full price?
Or the same whinning about the last COD being ai slop in a review after 358 hours of gameplay?
Or those saying “I won’t buy another pokemon game ever after the last shit they released” just to then buy the new shit they make?
A few gamers will boycot, but most of them are going to keep buying everything from their favourite series non-stop because, apparently, they can’t live without it.
Yea most gamers are just sheep. They will linstall anything the most convenient way possible and not even use the 2hr refund window on steam even if they don’t like the game
My head canon: Most gamers are children: their parents who have no interest in their kids’ hobbies buy the “biggest game” to show their affection.
The average age of people who play video games is 36-41. Most are not children.
Yea I think the average is at least over 18 either way which is no longer a child. Hell at 16 you’re no child either, you’re a teen, and despite them not being too bright they at least can’t be fooled to think holding a controller in from of a screen = playing
The issue is people are dumb, not age…
Whenever I see people playing anything with Vanguard anti-cheat I cringe my soul out.
Same with Denuvo games.
Just because something works on our computers doesn’t mean we should install it. We have to stand up for those in poorer countries that can’t afford good PC’s by refusing to run unoptimized garble… But alas that will never happen, will it…
In regards to DRM and other privacy concerns we have to stand up for our digital rights to freedom. Our PC’s should be ours but that is less and less normalized today… Our phones are no longer ours already…
Most people are children (western countries have weird age pyramids but that’s nothing compared to Asia), that’s my reasoning. I’m very suprised I’m wrong.
But the adults have the power to tell the kids to go to their room so the adults can play. Also, up to a certain age, you can just let them hold a controller and they think they are playing (or don’t even understand that anyone is playing and just think holding controllers is something fun to do while watching some things).
I wasn’t in those statistics (open seas) until i was 24.
I’m pretty sure my cousin (6 y.o) looks like a 46 y.o to the credit card firms because he plays on his father’s phone.
There are way too many people lining up to fellate Gabe for this to be accurate.
People might get pissed off when DRM is buggy enough for them to notice, but most gamers don’t realise that they don’t actually own a single game in their Steam library.
I take some sense of ownership over my Steam library in that I can and will immediately pirate the game with the DRM stripped out if Valve ever decides to revoke my access to it.
On the other hand, this – and buying from a better company – is why I actively prefer GOG, even in cases when the price is higher. (But pssst, hey, Beyond a Steel Sky is $3.50 on GOG right now compared to Steam’s $35.) The fact I have to launch the Steam client to play a game I paid for is absurd, and I regret every purchase I made, like
Stardew ValleyTerraria, before I knew GOG existed. The main outstanding issue to me now is that GOG refuses to port its Galaxy client to Linux.I hope GOG will get big like steam. Only if people care about DRM.
Me too, but there’s a chicken egg problem of the studios not putting games there because it doesn’t have a big market share, and gamers not using it because it doesn’t have all the games.
Yeah, thats where it needs the support of gamers. But it’s not practical without big games and to buy indie games there, even I do care about my library of games in the same place.
GOG doesn’t have DRM. But for the same reason it doesn’t have regional pricing. And I ain’t spending that much on games. 🤷♂️
GoG does have regional pricing in some countries. It’s very limited but saying they don’t have it at all is false.
Regional pricing is a fucking scam driven by unstoppable greed.
Lol.
Lmao.
Privileged and ignorant take.
If you can sell your product to someone for X amount, it is pure greed to sell if for 10X to someone else.
It’s the other way around.
People from poor countries were not buying games because the prices were expensive compared to their income. For that regional pricing was introduced to combat piracy. Some revenue is better than no revenue.
The underlying scam is the concept of a “cost of living” that’s somehow different in different places, and a minimum wage that can be different for two people who nonetheless might be expected to buy the same thing.
Anything that touches this concept and tries to accommodate instead of destroy it is going to inherit its foolishness.
Steam games do not need DRM to be sold there - the publishers chose to have it if it exists. Many can be run from the .exe without going through Steam.
Most games on Steam are DRM-free and you can start them without a launcher (meaning Steam).
So you can buy a game, download it, copy game files, refund, keep playing.
Most? Try 4%.
OK, I stand corrected.
It seems that I’m just a fan of the DRM-free games.
I saw another source that claimed ~25% of the top-rated games are DRM-free, so it seems to be quite lopsided. And even moreso if you happen to like indie games I imagine
I happen to like Open source games the most, with some exceptions :D but OpenTTD is one of my most favourite games. I wish games were made open-source like decade after release.
* DRM free except for steam itself
The last two people are the same person.
They might be buying up hardware with AI as their excuse today, but tomorrow they will be indefinately renting you processing power that you’re unable to buy(because they cornered and manipulated the hardware market)
because they cornered and manipulated the hardware market
Makes me think of the ‘First Time?’ meme but with the housing market wearing the noose.
2x? Try 4x+ for fast DDR5
👌👍🤡
Publishers seeing this garbage.
Here I am, happy with my 10 yo desktop, playing games from my backlog, and teaching my kids to play Duck Tales and Dynablaster. Can’t wait for to introduce them to The Secret of Monkey Island and Sam and Max Hit the Road. From what I hear, most parents in my neighbourhood are doing something similar, so there’s little peer pressure to get the latest hardware to play the latest games.
My best friends’ kid’s favorite console is an old laptop with N64 and Playstation emulators on it i gave them a while back. They call all the old games ‘real’ <franchise name>
Like real Zelda, and real Mario cart.
Oh sure, its the gamers who are doing the beating huh?
I doubt ai companies are scared of us… but maybe they should be.
In a sane world this would be true, but unfortunately we live in a capitalist hell scape where its the exact opposite.
It could happen if the niche audience get to know about these things. How many streamers do you think they are aware of these topics? They only do stream on niche games with sponsors and free games from epic.
It’s usually not the idea itself, it’s the way it gets implemented 😅
2x
Yeah, you wish it was just 2x, more like 5x, especially for the RAM.
What are they gonna do? Complain online while proceeding to buy said game?
Uh… gamers are the so weak, they buy anything that’s shiny enough. Games by big studios pushing out shiny crap still make millions. Gamers can’t stop buying skins and will have wars about them too. EA, Blizzard, RockStar Games, Ubisoft, and many other companies are still huge companies because gamers barely care. Only once in a while do they massively reject large games.
Only about 1.2M EU gamers even cared to sign in the EU initiative to Stop Killing Games. There are 450M EU citizens. There are way more EU gamers than just 1.2M and the vast majority didn’t care enough to sign an initiative in their own interest.
RAM makers are safe. Gamers will just give in and pay 3k+ for a gaming rig with welded on RAM (or whatever shit it is crApple does to make their devices unupgradeable).
2x? I bought 32gb DDR5 for £100 just over a year ago. I just saw some “on offer” for £350.
I’m so happy I jumped ship and upgraded my 2 mains to 32GB one, two years ago.
I could probably live on 8, 16 would be totally ok but now I’m “future proof”. For some time I bet, at least on my linux. Windows 13 will probably need 64GB just to boot.
Kids only got 16 though 😰
Maybe we should shift piracy operations from digital games to physical shipping containers full of tasty RAM.
The booty is out there somewhere maties! 🏴☠️
AI companiesHardware companies are looking for their record profits and AI is just a useful excuse.Fuck nvidia.
