3rd ending: Retro gaming makes a massive comeback.
this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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If this happens, there's a good chance companies like Nintendo and Sony will double down on trying to erase emulation as an option. Anyone developing emulators will be targeted (even moreso than they already are), and ROM sites will be taken down making it harder for the average person to find games. Now is a great time to build up an offline ROM collection ahead of this potentially happening in a few years, even if storage is currently expensive.
I suspect people will just keep their existing equipment running for as long as possible, and secondhand equipment will be worth almost as much as it was when new.
This won't last forever.
I've been waiting for GPU prices to come back down to earth since 2019. I really hope you're right in a few more years.
In between the crypto scams and the AI hype, there was a brief moment of maybe a few months were GPU prices were affordable. Not good, but affordable enough so that normal people could buy them.
I think we're at the point where PCs are an afterthought in the GPU market, and have been for a long time.
Modders to the reacue, like always.
you can just use sodium + lithium + ferritecore and whatever other optimization mods you like for a much better speedup and no loss in quality at all
Yes, those are also examples of modders making improvements to games.
Or they use upscaling as a crutch even harder and we get narratives that include your character having frosted glass for eyes to make up for the blur.
I have said for a long time that I both want realistic video distortion in games instead of the usual color aberration and high-res fake pixel effects (like the stuff you see on fpv drone videos and unclassified military footage of a 420x zoom from the stratosphere and so on), and not want it, because it gives me a headache
Second Gaming Crash
Wait, what was the first gaming crash?
The Atarri one, except there were multiple smaller crashes in gaming history plus effects of the economy on the gaming market.
The mini-crashes include:
- American home computer bubble burst of 1983-84
- Some British game publishers go bankrupt, then immediately their former employees form new companies
- Game developers betting big on MMO style games, only for them to realize no one wants to rent their games
- Paid smartphone games falling out of favor due to pay2win slop
Oh, yeah, Atari would have been before my time, so don't feel so bad about not thinking of that one.
I figured it was in reference to the MMO craze dying down, but that felt more like a strong speed bump than a crash.
- The video game industry effectively collapsed entirely.
There were something like 14 major console systems on the market, all incompatible with each other. None had decent quality control for the games. At the same time home computers were starting to be a thing so the hobby money started going in that direction.
In sum that caused an effectively total collapse of the industry in the USA. It took until the late 80s for the market to start to recover when Nintendo released a new console. Notably, this console was not marketed as a game console – it was the Family Computer in Japan and the Nintendo Entertainment System (with a shell deliberately styled like a VCR) in the West.
Several major companies left the market (like Magnavox or Coleco) or were unable to compete when the market recovered (Atari).
Cloud gaming is effectively impossible due to little things like the speed of light. Sure, you could play Civilization via cloud but good fucking luck with competitive shooters.
It's so stupid. It's a solution looking for a problem.
I'm happy that Google Stadia died.
That and the US being such a large market while having some of the worst internet in the developed world. Last I read only ¼ of the network is fiber
Would be cool to play civ5 on a long term server.
I'm thinking something that emails you when its your turn too. Like playing chess over mail.
Isn't that a thing in freeciv, that open source version of civilization?
Civ over mail. Physical mail. Like those old mail chess games in the times before online chess (use https://lichess.org/ btw <3 ).
Move a scout, wait 3-5 days for the answer.
What if everyone is on the cloud in the shooter?
Everyone can suffer together, yay
We're just going to be demaking games incrementally as we scrounge older and older hardware for our mad max gaming PCs until we're playing a text adventure version of Minecraft on a green screen terminal.
Batman Lego just announced it was reducing ram recommendations to 16gb. Its a start
a lego game?? when I played lego games circa 2011 AD I didn't know what ram is
Reducing.. to 16GB?
It's over
If big corporation fail to improve their games graphics, then gamers will have to find other criterias to choose what games to buy, like gameplay and actual content.
If anything, it will leave more space for indie games. And larger productions will either stagnate on graphics or start producing more cartoonish content.
Can't see either of these happening in the near future, TBH. They just failed to make cloud gaming happen after pouring tons of resources into it, but I also just can't believe that companies that make severely unoptimized games are going to change their ways.
That said, most gaming is already on phones, and many of the popular multiplayer games are already running fine on very weak hardware.
If the future of games is barely interactive pay2win slop on smart phones, then I don't want games at all.
(Can someone recommend me non-freemium slop for Android? Any emulators not littered with ads?)
Threads about free or open-source Android games pop up on /all somewhat regularly, look through those.
Some game houses are actually optimizing their game but it's very few and can be counted on the fingers of a single mutilated hand
I know. The ones who would do it in response to hardware shortages are mostly already doing it anyway. The ones who don't, won't.