this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2026
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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.
How long is that going to work though? Today's slop is not going to unslop in 5 years, and it seems like every big name game publisher is exclusively doing slop now. Especially the optimization issue won't go away, and it looks like the times where you could just wait for a generation or two of more powerful hardware are over, too - hardware might be getting more powerful, but the performance per dollar isn't improving because the performance is only improving incrementally and I don't see hardware prices going down to what was normal pre-Covid.
Still plenty of indie devs making good games. Really, you could just work through all the good games made up to this point and be fine for the rest of your life.
Otoh, if what you really care about is the social connection you get from playing games and talking about them with other people, you can just take up gardening or community service or pole dancing to get that.
You have to understand the capitalism, it is doing slop because slop is what sells to people
You will need to shift your monies away from big name game publishers to smaller ones that make content that you prefer thereby encouraging them to make more non-slop
But I've been saying it for years even before AI, call of duty 29 and fifa 56 etc are all cash cows
There is no incentive to improve if what you're doing works
I have enough unplayed games for years. And I haven't even bought all games that interest me on my wishlist.
So to answer your question: I think it will work long enough till AI either implodes or is big enough that the state forces you to connect your brain implant to it.
Theoretically, we could see the PC gaming market come to resemble that of eastern Europe in the past, where everybody has very minimal or outdated hardware and the indie scene builds games with this in mind.
That's pretty dire, but I prefer it over cloud subscriptions becoming the norm for gaming and other compute heavy tasks.
We'll just mod the old games.
There are options that don't involve buying. Open source games exist.
I'm talking about the hardware. "not buying" that and getting away with it is quite a bit harder than for software.
Cheaper hardware also exists, raspberry pi can run loads of games. Could even run old flash games on it.
Pis (Pi's? Pi-s?) are cool, but it seems like overkill in this case. A second-hand thinkpad should be accessible enough, both cost-wise and difficulty-wise.
Yeah that also works. Still want to make a briefcase pi some day. Power everything by USB and stick a few powerbanks in there so it would run for days. It's also easier to fix any broken part compared to a laptop. Made with some padding and it should be reasonably impact resistant too.
Oh yeah, that sounds awesome. Kinda like something out of a spy movie or something.
Which games are slop nowadays?
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: