Hardware

That is ultimately neither here nor there, but if we're all going to have to accept that there will never be a fire-and-forget, max-everything-out user-level hardware spec ever again the least manufacturers could do is prioritize the insane, wildly expensive new prosumer segment not catching on actual fire if you look at it sideways.

See, this is what I see is the entire problem.

Just like the US Auto industry... and many others...

Everything is shifting toward being based on what used to be the high end luxury market... that is now the new 'normal', only barely maintainable as 'normal' via exploding levels of just actual literal personal and corporate balance sheet debt and cratering credit scores, rising systemic risk from corporate finance overleveraging.

The result is that affordability is out the window, massively mismatched with the mainstay of your consumer base, and video games go back to a state they were in in roughly the 80s and 90s... where you basically need to be pretty well off to experience the new hotness...

But also, simultaneously: Affordable, basic options... don't really exist anymore.

The older used high end stuff that still kinda works just price matches with the newer low end stuff that is unreliable for other reasons (planned obsolesence)... untill it dies of old age or supply runs out, even on the used market.

Gaming companies do literally everything they can to make it difficult or unappealing for you to just go play an old video game.

MtX, Live Services, Always Online game that just expires and then hey go fuck yourself, even if you wanted to host your own servers as a dedicated fanbase, fuck you, no network or server code for you, maybe you can spend a decade reverse engineering it, oh right and all your microtransactions? Poof, gone, game is unplayable, all that shit you paid for evaporated too.

There is going to be a giant rift between the few indie studios that manage to get enough funding to put together something fairly small scale but actually novel ... and then a few massive AAAAA games that require fucking supercomputers and a networth in the tens of millions afford to purchase and run.

No more middle.

The gaming landscape is going to bifrucate along with the rest of the increasing unstable wealth disparity divide in society generally.

We are no longer in the 'things generally get better and cheaper' phase, we are in the corporate neofeudalism phase where you are either a serf or a master... but always, still a consumer.

The fact that CP2077 is itself the inflexion point of this transition is so ironic it literally causes me physical pain.

... thank you for coming to my TED~~talk~~rant, lol.