Stardust Reverie Collection

something that seems to have happened in the AAA games industry, from my limited armchair op-ed viewpoint, is that the industry doesn’t seem to have ever grown out of masturbating over ever-increasing realism and high-fidelity graphics for the sake of it, even though we probably hit the threshold at which the average player would actually care about realism long ago, and the industry is actively dragging itself down over it. we need to expend absurd hardware resources just to show we Can and that we’re Capable in the current industry and that we aren’t graphically—technologically—behind the competition. fuck development costs, fuck the user’s storage space, fuck our developers, fuck sustainability

i remember seeing a post about how back in the day the games industry used to like touting graphics because the jump up from an atari 2600 to an nes, or the nes to the snes, were significant, so it was an easy win to say "buy our game, it looks so much better" with better resolutions, colours, etc

fast forward to today where texture resolutions are reaching ridiculous levels and the graphics cards required to run everything and hard drives to store everything are well beyond the reach of most people, but the industry hasn't stopped trying to go for that easy win, couple with the fact capitalism is reaching it's end point where workers don't get paid enough money to buy anything, profits stop increasing, and companies are fervently trying to keep that line going up by any means necessary, and you have executives pushing for higher graphical fidelity hoping it will equate to increased sales

not helped by the hoards of capital g Gamers who get into arguments about graphics, and winge about games not looking "better" than games from the past (even if it's just one fucking year ago)

this is exactly what i was getting at—it’s an ever-increasing arms race that’s still managing to sustain itself well beyond anything that should’ve ever been reasonable. but it is sustaining itself, because the industry has successfully duped Gamers into drinking their kool aid

every time i hear about the fact that sonic the hedgehog was based, in part, on Then-Future-President Bill Fucking Clinton, i feel like my brain short circuits

i simply refuse to believe this on principle

if it helps, sonic is based, in part, on a version of bill clinton that Does Not Exist. an idea, a persona, the presentation he put forward of himself. additionally, decades later, after A Fucking Presidency, we have a lot of context about who the hell bill clinton actually is that they just did not at the time, especially a culture removed, i’d imagine.

sonic is not based on Literal Bill Clinton and everything he represents. he is based on a perceived figment of the man; a phantasm, which was then taken and forged into something entirely unrecognizable.

sonic would claim no heritage with the man and would probably spit in his face if they were to meet. not out of denial, but out of principle.

i love how we can just tell you were in writer mode with this response

fogppdofpsf that’s oddly flattering :3

something that seems to have happened in the AAA games industry, from my limited armchair op-ed viewpoint, is that the industry doesn’t seem to have ever grown out of masturbating over ever-increasing realism and high-fidelity graphics for the sake of it, even though we probably hit the threshold at which the average player would actually care about realism long ago, and the industry is actively dragging itself down over it. we need to expend absurd hardware resources just to show we Can and that we’re Capable in the current industry and that we aren’t graphically—technologically—behind the competition. fuck development costs, fuck the user’s storage space, fuck our developers, fuck sustainability