GTA6 release is going to be hilarious. people are gonna be piiiiiiiiiissed

The indie surge will continue, but for most AAA devs its just going to be investor pandering ultra high fidelity stuff. Which is kinda whatever for me personally?

The gamers I surround myself with were playing Slay the Spire 2 last week. I hope more people play indie games which don't have crazy system requirements.

Power gamers/multiplayer gamers who chase after AAA gaming and buying brand new games - I hope you guys consider looking beyond what the big companies are doing.

Good. Fuck off with high end graphics that need a new graphics card every fucking two months. Give me a good story and gameplay.

Optimization was a major topic at the show, with several panels dedicated to how creators can make games more efficiently.

This is long overdue.

Game optimization is not a lost art. It's time studios (and publishers) returned to prioritizing it during development.

The media has taught me to hate the words could, should, and would when used in headlines but this is probably true for once.

Could? Should. This is obvious. Only AAA execs don‘t realize it yet because they think cloud gaming will come to the rescue and be adapted on a major scale any minute. I am less optimistic. For AAA that is. This is the year of indie games… again.

This article is sensationalizing a non-issue. It reads like the author went to the convention with the story already written and then tried (and failed) to find people that supported the premise.

As someone who attended GDC for the full week this year, I can tell you that not a single conversation I had or panel I attended discussed the RAM shortage. I'm sure this topic arose in some circles, especially anything related to the timing or cost of next gen hardware. As a professional AAA game designer of 25 years and an occasional game director, this does not affect the way that the games themselves are made. Games on consoles already have their limitations, games on PC should always be (but not always are) optimized to work across a broad spectrum of hardware configurations, with the minimum spec being the lowest system possible without sacrificing playability.

Even people interviewed in the article are saying the same thing:

“Does this affect us? No,” Subotnick said. “We’re making games on as many platforms as we can to delight consumers. Could it impact us? Sure. If there’s less devices for people to get their hands on, then we potentially have less consumers to sell to. But right now, I’d argue that there are plenty of consumers with plenty of devices for us to sell these games to. Where it could impact us is, sure, we will have to make decisions around next-gen platforms when they tell us that it’s time to bring content to them. And if they are threatened to have a total addressable market that is viable from a business standpoint, sure that’s a business challenge. But right now all I’d be doing is speculating on a bunch of hypotheticals.”

The title is a little more dramatic than the body

in fact, the article is mostly more of a "yeah, this is something that we've seen before, more-or-less" take

but it is interesting to get some actual perspectives on impact from the developer side on what the likely changes are. It does also confirm that some studios are working on reducing the memory requirements for their upcoming games.

Indie games are more important than ever.

So something good might come from all this potentially?

If you target for the Steam Deck you will do just fine.

Because of some comments, I'd like to add:

"Optimization" isn't the same as "high fps". Optimization is a game of priorities. Take the demo scene: these programs may be 64KB in size (on disk) but are capable of choking a 5090 to death.

This may just mean we get even worse performing titles, because the "quadruple-A" guys don't give a fuck.

All video games in the future will be PINBALL. Pure mechanical games that don't need memory beyond keeping a single number (the score). 😤