nuclear hot take: cutting edge hardware and software developers are in a reverse arms-race that literally no one else on the planet cares about except other people who work in tech. no one cares that the S23 can support a framerate 1 sextillionth of a percent faster than the S22, or that the newest version of android....i cant even think of a fake reason to give a shit about an android update for its own sake. software "improvement" justifies the need for hardware "improvement" to keep up, and the promise of hardware "improvement" justifies the need for software "improvement", because they can, and i guess no one who works in tech has ever seen Jurrasic Park. Nobody else on the planet wants this, but it keeps a few thousand people employed and extremely well-paid, and makes a handful of people obscenely wealthy. and they are so well-siloed in their little tech enclaves that they dont realize that their entire jobs are pointlessly making the world worse and more expensive for everyone else. or how much the rest of the world hates them
Video game graphics never needed to get better than the PS3. Phones were doing fine in 2015. The focus needs to shift on how to maintain the same standards with increasingly affordable and sustainable products not continuing to make everything more power guzzling and expensive to produce to make it more powerful.
before the DNF leak and back when i was bugging 3DR developers because i wanted to pitch an article to someone, i had the lead level designer for DNF (Charlie Weiderhold) tell me that the joy of the late 90's/early 00's was the approximation of reality and that's an idea that has stayed with me since. stylized realities will always look better then grey and brown 'photoreal' bullshit
I think a lot about how the majority of the people with the time to yell at game developers on twitter and reddit are like, younger than twenty.
