I'm hoping the industry cools a bit on bleeding edge graphics because the diminishing returns are not worth the price of entry at this point. All of this is stacking on the industry at the same time:
- Hardware (Even consoles) is getting more expensive.
- Dev times are at crazy 5-8 year windows.
- Next gen games will look marginally better at best.
- Younger audiences are not interested in paying $70-90 per title to own AAA games to begin with.
- Interest rates are up meaning games need higher returns to justify capital investments.
- Longer game dev cycles means less industry experience shipping titles and fewer entry points for new talent. (This is why you don't get a bunch of Hideo Kojimas and Shigeru Miyamotos these days. Those guys got to cut their teeth on a bunch of 1 year dev cycles. All of this older talent will eventually retire.)
Studios are either going to shutdown or be forced to adopt AA / Indie style development. Technology improvements will need to be focused first and foremost on bringing the cost / time of development down rather than rendering each pine needle on a tree... We need to get back to 2-4 year dev cycles and there's going to be a lot of blood in the industry until they learn that.
Buy less cutting edge hardware.
You don't need a 5080. 5060 Ti will do. Or if you want the best of the best, pay up. Developers are not going to ignore the mass market.
On the low end you have the Switch 2 and Xbox Series S which are both $500 or below.
Yeah but if the people who could afford 5080s now have to buy 5060 Tis it means the 5060 Ti itself has also become unaffordable for some percentage of the budget market and most people have hardware in that class / budget range.
Fewer people with capable hardware = fewer sales = fewer AAA games.
