Video games "predictions" that haven't aged well

[Pacing Tape]

All games on GOG are DRM free and you can just dl the offline installer and put it on a flashdrive.



View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_fLowozCrE

I don't like CDPR very much anymore, but GOG is undeniably fantastic and as far as I can tell the only mainstream non-DRM launcher. It's also got loads of older games that come preloaded with patches that allow them to run on newer Windows versions with significantly less issue.

 

[Boxerdog]

I don't like CDPR very much anymore, but GOG is undeniably fantastic and as far as I can tell the only mainstream non-DRM launcher. It's also got loads of older games that come preloaded with patches that allow them to run on newer Windows versions with significantly less issue.

CDRP Literally only made 1 good game (witcher 1), but I support them Simply because of their opposition to drm and the tech tentacles over everything.
It sucks that they will curate what games are kosher or not over politics and dumb shit, their "curation" its pretty arbitrable but those ones i just get it straight from the developer. Ideally all games would come straight from the developers website but if i had to choose between steam and gog on windows i would pick gog for stuff i want to share/keep it form being modified.

Their curation is a joke, I don't know what kinda of brain damaged pole thought DESU vns and animu menus was acceptable to show up when filtering for RPGs



On topic This used to be memed as if it was supposed to be the "best" version of re4 before it got landlocked to latin america. People really thought it was gonna be awesome.


View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBh-vBFeegs

I had gamers friends of mine who actually believed that OUYA would kill home consoles from bigger companies. While I expected it to be another failure, I never expected it to be THAT awful that it can't even play SNES emulators properly.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dC8h3kntQ0

 

[Rams969]

Virtual reality was always supposed to be the real future of gaming and humanity in the XXI century, people in the 90s thought that in a few years we were all going to be hooked in our virtual reality sets without controllers, televisions or screens, you could saw this predictions in movies like the The Lawnmower Man or Matrix, the virtual world taking over the real one seemed inevitable.

Decades later is just a niche thing a few people have but is not widespread at all, the mayority just play in their computer or consoles. Maybe in a few decades Virtual Reality may become totally widespread like the 90s predicted, but I don't think at least in this century, if technology keeps advancing at this pace.

 

[Vetusomaru]

"The ps3 has no games"
While it was true at some point the ps3 had by far the best exclusives of that gen including demons and Fat Princess

The only PS3 exclusives I like are Odin's Sphere remaster and Dragon's Crown. And still Atlus hasn't ported them to Switch and Steam.

 

[Vetusomaru]

Playstation will be dead in 2 years!!!! -Dec 11, 1997​

This usenet thread is proof that while times change, the basics of internet discourse are timeless.

Spoiler

View attachment 58783

Reminds me the "PCs will replace consoles" I was hearing a lot from PC magazines journos at late '90s and early 2000s.

 

[Vetusomaru]

Decades later is just a niche thing a few people have but is not widespread at all, the mayority just play in their computer or consoles.

Not exactly niche but yeah, it's mostly used for gaming. And still as a gimmick gaming toy to show off and play for a while and later get dust at a corner. Also don't forget that virtual reality gaming is also a thing the last 10-15 years at theme parks and arcades that mostly attracts kids and still they'll only play with them a few times and then get bored with it and never play with them again.

Speaking for computers, it's ironic that the majority of VR chat users don't even use VR accessories, especially since it's not a requirement (thankfully). And don't forget Zuckerberg's colossal fiasco with Facebook Metaverse that was mocked by everyone except journalist shills.

 

[Rams969]

Not exactly niche but yeah, it's mostly used for gaming. And still as a gimmick gaming toy to show off and play for a while and later get dust at a corner. Also don't forget that virtual reality gaming is also a thing the last 10-15 years at theme parks and arcades that mostly attracts kids and still they'll only play with them a few times and then get bored with it and never play with them again.

Virtual reality seems very cool, but the requirements to play with it are just too much for some people because you need a lot of money just to get everthing you need, then you need to have a big empty space to play and not trip over your stuff and you have to remember that playing VR is a very stresing physical exercise wich is not very appealing to do when you just want to relax after work. At the end of the day playing in a computer or a TV is much more comfortable for the mayority of people, I would love to try it one day but sometimes you just wanna sit down and have fun.

Speaking for computers, it's ironic that the majority of VR chat users don't even use VR accessories, especially since it's not a requirement (thankfully). And don't forget Zuckerberg's colossal fiasco with Facebook Metaverse that was mocked by everyone except journalist shills.

Metaverse was really funny because it was a total downgrade of VR Chat but much more expensive and with ugly souless avatars without legs. Even Second Life was better than Metaverse at being a simulation of real life.
And most important, you can't be Kermit the Frog with two katanas smoking a blunt in Metaverse

 

[Vetusomaru]

Virtual reality seems very cool, but the requirements to play with it are just too much for some people because you need a lot of money just to get everthing you need, then you need to have a big empty space to play and not trip over your stuff

You remind me Xbox Kinect's advertisements with all them taking place on huge empty living rooms that only rich people can afford. Also Kinect was an overpriced Eye Toy, with Eye Toy being released during PS2 era, with it being bundled with Eye Toy Play at the same price with a regular PS2 game and with it being much easier to be used, which more responsible controls and much funnier gameplay. It's weird that Eye Toy didn't had a mainstream success despite being released by Sony.

 

[Alone]

Remember when they claimed that smartphone games are the future and that they would replace video games consoles?

No

 

[Vetusomaru]

Forbes: "Why Apple Could Kill The Nintendo DS"

Why Apple Could Kill The Nintendo DS

archived 27 Apr 2023 16:14:05 UTC

archive.is

AHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Here are the most downloaded iPhone games at 2008 that would kill DS:

Apple reveals most downloaded iPhone games of 2008

Apple has revealed the top ten most downloaded games on the iPhone for 2008, ...

arstechnica.com

No

smartphones will kill consoles - Google Search

Also there were many retards who claimed that Nintendo should start focusing at smartphones in order to survive.

 

[Gift of Denial]

Videogames would completely shed the baggage of being a complicated form of toy and would gradually settle into an artistic medium of its own making use of "historically unprecedented aesthetic forms" - I still believe this will become true, when civilization comes back from the grave, and in some cases it is true already: but "gaming" remains still inseparable from the dreadful idea of "entertainment".

 

[llillilll]

Videogames would completely shed the baggage of being a complicated form of toy and would gradually settle into an artistic medium of its own making use of "historically unprecedented aesthetic forms" - I still believe this will become true, when civilization comes back from the grave, and in some cases it is true already: but "gaming" remains still inseparable from the dreadful idea of "entertainment

Indie games are already in that path. Most games that were a hit lately such as Celeste, undertale and cuphead all were used as a medium in different ways. There are probably far more i don't remember because i don't play games anymore.

 

[Gift of Denial]

Indie games are already in that path. Most games that were a hit lately such as Celeste, undertale and cuphead all were used as a medium in different ways. There are probably far more i don't remember because i don't play games anymore.

Indie games are mostly too concerned at being throwbacks to games made a decade ago to be a sign of something new to come. I apologize if I come as a fatalist, I am not: videogames are one of the few things that doesn't feel on its last legs in current culture ever since the turn of the millennium.

 

[Jade]

Indie games are mostly too concerned at being throwbacks to games made a decade ago to be a sign of something new to come. I apologize if I come as a fatalist, I am not: videogames are one of the few things that doesn't feel on its last legs in current culture ever since the turn of the millennium.

Well, AAA games feel on their last legs atm but the video game industry itself feels like it's not only thriving but still has tons and tons of room to grow, yeah

 

[Gift of Denial]

Well, AAA games feel on their last legs atm but the video game industry itself feels like it's not only thriving but still has tons and tons of room to grow, yeah

Even if because there was a way (in Japan) for Hideo Kojima to get enough financing for his weird stranding game, be able to spend years developing, and on top of it be successful and appreciated by many people is proof enough for me that there's "more going on" in videogames than in, say, film.

And even if nothing else: people still really do care about videogames.

 

[Jade]

Even if because there was a way (in Japan) for Hideo Kojima to get enough financing for his weird stranding game, be able to spend years developing, and on top of it be successful and appreciated by many people is proof enough for me that there's "more going on" in videogames than in, say, film.

And even if nothing else: people still really do care about videogames.

I think the only reason Death Stranding even had 'mixed' reviews is because it was marketed wrong. It's a game meant to be enjoyed by a specific demographic, but it was marketed as a regular AAA release, so people who tried to play it like it was a normal AAA game hated it. But I've seen that years later many of the same people who trashed the game came back to it and started playing it a bit differently, and started to see the appeal.

 

[imnotdeadyet]

The Chinese will dominate the market

This one is close to becoming true but not in the obvious soft power way. Tencent owns a slice of so many big video gaming corpos that they don't need to do anything. And they do dominate one gaming market, the biggest one revenue wise, the mobile market.

As for failed gaming predictions, remember when kinect was going to be the future of gaming? How every game was gonna require motion sensors? I'm glad that never caught on.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXN7vLPsDSM

 

[Jade]

This one is close to becoming true but not in the obvious soft power way. Tencent owns a slice of so many big video gaming corpos that they don't need to do anything. And they do dominate one gaming market, the biggest one revenue wise, the mobile market.

As for failed gaming predictions, remember when kinect was going to be the future of gaming? How every game was gonna require motion sensors? I'm glad that never caught on.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXN7vLPsDSM

I wonder if kinect is still as difficult to program for today as it was back then

 

[imnotdeadyet]

I wonder if kinect is still as difficult to program for today as it was back then

Probably. The only game that ended up sticking with the Kinect was Just Dance (2022!). Although unlike then, there's legitimate use for Kinect today, as cheap motion capture equipment with some custom drivers.

 

[InsufferableCynic]

- We will have smarter AI (It really doesn't lol, I think the NPC AI has peaked in 2000s and there's isn't really much improvement since then)

To be fair, this is mainly done on purpose rather than us hitting some limit with AI.

There's plenty that can be done already, with some effort. I am currently making a stealth game and having enemies increase their awareness level and change their patrol patterns when one of their squad mates disappears is pretty easy to do, and instantly circumvents the really monotonous "what was that? Must have been the wind!" gameplay of modern stealth games.

The current trend of braindead AI is more down to most gamers not being particularly interested in good games, and most game developers not being particularly interested in putting effort into their AI. At the end of the day your average player wants a power fantasy, so the AI has to be braindead to compensate (we definitely can't have AI that's more intelligent than the player).

As for the OP...

My big prediction isn't really a prediction. Instead, I have chosen something that used to be quite true and is now not true anymore, and yet everyone repeats it ad nauseum.

It's the old adage

"Consoles just work. PC Gaming is for nerds. I just want to put the disk in and play, rather than screwing around!".

I remember in the late 90s and early 2000s this rang very true. Installing games was an annoying process, especially since many of them would also require DirectX updates, and whether or not a particular game would run on a particular PC properly was an absolute crapshoot. Many games required having the disk in at all times as copy protection so a lot of the convenience of installing was gone. Playing multiplayer often required fucking around with IPX setups, making sure the right ports were opened, etc. Not to mention computers were extremely expensive - especially if you wanted 3D accelleration.

Meanwhile gaming on an N64 or a PS1 was very cheap for what you got, was relatively straightforward and was mostly a no-bullshit experience. Playing with friends was especially easy since you'd just invite them over and go into split screen mode. Young kids (as young as 5) understood you just slap the cartridge or disk in and you're essentially ready to play. As a result of this a lot of social games were console exclusives, which further incentivised people getting them because they wanted to do things like 4 player Mario Kart.

But now the convenience aspect has mostly flipped. Console gaming has lost virtually all of it's advantages - no more "put the disk in and play", because there will always be an 80GB day one update, and "putting the disk in and playing" is now the less convenient option compared to "double click the game in Steam". No more split screen because modern consoles can't handle it. Most games are multiplatform and have feature parity on every device. Modern consoles are extremely underpowered for what you get (the "subsidise the hardware" model is now considered obsolete, now they sell consoles at a profit, so they aren't as powerful for the money) so most games run at 30FPS (or less) which is often a miserable experience, many modern games have awful controls which can only be fixed on the PC version because most console games in 2023 still don't have rebindable controls, and modding games on PC has become so easy and there are so many amazing mods for so many games that consoles are desperately trying to adopt them.

If you bought a console in 1995, you made a good decision, depending on your use case. If you buy a console in 2023, you're just an idiot buying a bad product.

Reminds me the "PCs will replace consoles" I was hearing a lot from PC magazines journos at late '90s and early 2000s.

They have, people just underestimated the stupidity of gamers, so consoles are still around. A HTPC will always give you a better living room experience than a console, so their main use case (simple, TV-based game device) has been made obsolete.

Of course the person with a Jackson Pollock in the background has a trash opinion...