Is the second major gaming crash coming soon?

I pretty much agree with all you said.

I also agree with Jeff in that it doesn't feel like the 9th gen has started yet. I don't think we've yet seen the Xbox Series X or PlayStation 5 stretch their wings at all. (I don't consider the Switch 9th gen, I consider it Nintendo's late 8th gen replacement for the failed Wii U.) The 9th gen was dealt a bad hand regarding the whole pandemic aspect and how that affected hardware supply and studio development schedules. Hard to deny that reality.

But this industry is also at the point of diminishing returns when it comes to graphics. To really push the XSX and PS5 to their limits takes very, very expensive pixel work. More and more publishers are becoming gun shy about dumping millions into a AAA project that might not break even, let alone profit. Who can blame them when you look at the highest revenue grossing games of 2021:

vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games_of_2021

None of the top 10 games there are AAA console exclusives rocking crazy next gen graphics. Not hardly. Instead publishers making the most money, are doing so by perfecting the art of mobile monetization. And let me tell you, there are far far more mobile casual players willing to blow loads of cash on micro transactions, then there are hardcore players willing to spend $500+ on a console and $70 per game. If you're a publicly traded publisher, it becomes harder and harder to justify to your shareholders why you should spend millions on a AAA game with short legs, instead of a million on a mobile game that could make millions in long legged monetization. It could stand to reason that consoles are the dinosaurs of the video game industry, and are facing inevitable extinction. Trust me, I didn't enjoy typing that any more than you did reading it. It wouldn't surprise me to see Microsoft's Xbox department eventually turning into a streaming VR game service company. Sony's gaming division not producing a PS6, but instead turning towards PC game development of Sony's IPs. And Nintendo partnering with a smartphone company to produce a Nintendo phone with exclusive Nintendo game apps. I hope none of that happens, but if it did in ten years that wouldn't surprise me.

I don't see 2023 being the year that the XSX and PS5 rise and shine. Reliable market forecasts show 2023 to be global recession at best. Maybe 2025 will be a banner year for XSX and PS5 though. Hope so! I legitimately feel bad for folks that jumped on PS5 early hoping for the next gen of great graphics and killer exclusives. Meanwhile the PS4 just wants to die but Sony can't let it.

Cheaper/easier means more copy/paste, more homogeneous looking games. The Unity effect.


If future graphics can beat the "wow" rush of going from NES to Dreamcast in one decade... that'd be a helluva trick.


To an extent. I don't see much in the way of SCUBA sims, mech sims, air combat sims, and such from the indie sector. But yeah if you want action-platformers, adventure/VN, and metroidvanias indies' got your back.


The biggest hindrance will be lack of disposable income to drive gaming sales. The next few years are not looking to be kind to the wallets of average joe gamer.

Some interesting points anayo, though you're taking us in multiple directions. I'll touch on a few points:

>I wonder if AI might give us “NES to Dreamcast within 10 years” levels of progress again.

With AI help possibly. In order to produce ultra realistic graphics, or graphics that look like a true living painting (like say the image you linked above), currently that requires extreme processing power and massive investment of human resources. It may come to pass that AI can accomplish these tasks procedurally, but it would still take massive processing power. The likes of which would put the rendering into "the cloud" and the output delivered to players via real-time streaming. Yes we're talking about "cloud gaming" or whatever the idiotic marketing term is these days.

>Nvidia graphics cards can already use DLSS to add detail that isn’t actually there to lower-res gameplay.

It adds detail, but the net effect is more like 20x anisotropic filtering. From what I've seen it's not adding new lighting effects or spatial particle disbursement. It's not adding ray tracing or more accurate volumetric shadowing. It's basically just taking what's there and sharpening up the image. I'm not saying DLSS won't make a blurry game look nicer. Just saying it's not recreating the graphics in a creative new way or anything dramatic.

>There was a recent article where a guy won 1st place in a state fair art contest by submitting an image generated by the AI

I wonder what AI image generating platform he used. A few years ago I wondered if somebody would do this; use an image generating program then have the output put onto canvas via a "painting printer". There is a market for this I'm sure.

>could one day see games with content in them which human designers never specifically came up with.
>What would that do to a game's replay value?

Procedurally generated gameplay, and procedurally generated graphics, are nothing new. This idea and execution of the concept has been around since the '70s at least (see roguelikes). However, taking the concept to an extreme would be new. We already have novels, music, paintings and other media 100% created by AI generation. Is it possible for an FPS game's levels and enemies to be completely generated by AI on the fly? Yes, that's already been done in multiple fairly recent FPS titles. But what about an action-adventure or survival horror? I say it's possible and will happen eventually. We will eventually see dynamically created games that respond to the player's actions and whims. We will see games that 100% create the graphics, music, scenarios and all of that procedurally. Does that mean those games will be as good as human handmade games though? That is the real question. It's not a matter of "is it possible?" but rather "is it better?"

>was also that Google employee who got relieved of his job because he was convinced Google’s AI chatbot was sentient

That's a deep subject, and well worth discussing, but perhaps not in this thread. I'd be happy to discuss AI sentience and ethics with you guys in a dedicated thread though.

>I wondered if future video games would have NPCs that could react to my shenanigans

I say yes, yes we will have that. We already see that in dynamic combat AI behavior. Extrapolating that to emotional situational behavior is not an outlandish prospect.

>there’s a skyrim mod out right now where you can name yourself “xX_dragon_killer_420_69_Xx” and the NPCs will say it

I agree more games should use xVASynth 2. But again, voice synthesis technology has been around for decades. It's nothing new. It's just gotten a lot better recently.

>Maybe the next “NES to Dreamcast” leap won’t look the way anyone expects it to because it won’t be simply be an extrapolation of the >kind of progress we’ve already seen.

You make a good point there. Grognard gamers like me grew up in an era where graphics drove the medium's progress. In the 9th generation if we've truly reached the point of diminishing returns pixel saturation... the medium must look to another paradigm for continued evolution. The interweaving of advanced AI into all aspects of video game execution could very well be that paradigm. That is a fine point and I'm glad you brought it up. It's worth discussing further and in more detail.

But "can AI reinvent the video game medium" doesn't solve the crash that Xeogred was initially talking about. The issue the 9th generation of video gaming is facing now, is a lack of material resources, and a lack of disposable income from its demographic. People are by definition becoming poorer at an alarming rate. Economies are tumbling world over, currencies are devaluing, and reliable economic forecasters are indicating some tough years ahead. Tough like global recession at best tough. When the choice becomes "do I pay my rent or do I buy that new PS5 game" that's not a choice at all. I do think the global economy will recover again, and will recover strongly, but that may not be until 2025. This is why I don't see the 9th generation of gaming truly taking off, until midway through this decade or in its latter. When that time comes though, I think we'll see some amazing new ideas in this medium. And I agree, those ideas won't be amazing because of shiny pixels.

I focused so much on “Moore’s Law running out” cause I see that as the table leg most likely to break and cause a gaming “crash.” I put “crash” in quotation marks because I’m not sure the outcome would be a 1983 style crash. I’m thinking more like video games changing form into something that the members of HRG wouldn’t like very much. Like that time Nintendo went after casual gamers with the Wii. Or whatever Microsoft thought they were doing with their ridiculous “TV TV TV TV TV” Xbox One E3 presentation because smartphone games were exploding and they thought that home consoles wouldn’t be a thing anymore.

I think if the 2022 video game market did have a 1983 style crash, it would be due to a supply chain breakdown, like if China decided to take Taiwan back. But then a lot of other stuff would crash too and we’d have much bigger problems on our hands. I get the impression that people today really want new consoles even if they’re expensive and rent is going up. PS5 and Series X sell as soon as they’re on store shelves. Then many of those units get scalped for even more. (Somebody was buying all those $900 PS5s on eBay.) But actually manufacturing enough of them and getting them in people’s hands is straining the system. Somehow I see this as more of a symptom of chips getting harder and harder to make rather than other problems in the world.


He used Midjourney.


Here’s what I found about running Stable Diffusion on a PC:


It’s anyone’s guess how closely future PC’s will catch up to today’s “cloud”. But I do know the PS5 and Series X don’t have any silicon inside them for hardware-acclerated AI. I have a feeling that won’t be the case for the PS6 and the next XBOX.