If this results in the AAA games industry dying and having a full reset in a couple years when this all blows over, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I don’t think indie games are going anywhere, so it’s not like we won’t have anything new to play, and AAA studios have just become so generally awful that there wouldn’t be any great loss there.

They will be able to survive it far better than indies. They already wish they could push users to subscription and cloud gaming models, and I suspect this will drive the most predatory of the lot (EA) into acquiring their own PC rental programs. It will be an opportunity for them to sell you a packaged experience at a monthly subscription price. The indies that will survive will be those whose games don’t really have high hardware requirements, but the fan base isn’t the same.

What?

Indie games can generally run on a potato, so they aren’t really affected by the hardware shortage.

And indie game devs aren’t being pressured to push out AI slop or be “made redundant” by someone more willing to sacrifice quality for speed.

90%+ of my gaming time is indie games in recent years. Very many of them are doing great. The coming market crash and recreation from AI over investment is going to affect all non-necessary spending, of course. But, even then, it’s a lot easier to justify a $5-20 game purchase when money is tight than $80+ for AAA games (not even counting hardware to run it!)

I literally don’t understand how you could possibly see how India are losing out here. Nobody needs to buy the slop big studios are putting out. If EA is pushing out shit, then just skip eating the shit sandwich, maybe?

Did I miss your point?

Indie games can generally run on a potato, so they aren’t really affected by the hardware shortage.

So …

The indies that will survive will be those whose games don’t really have high hardware requirements, but the fan base isn’t the same.

Did I miss your point?

Yes.