Sure, I might own the hardware

Not for long. The goal seems to be to make RAM, flash memory, and GPU’s so expensive that most consumers will need to purchase low-powered client devices and subscribe to cloud computing business models. It’s a handful of companies who are cornering the markets, controlling the supply, and seeking rents.

I’ve heard people make those complaints in comments on the internet, but I got my Powkidsu RGB10MAX and never had any issues. I mean, some demanding Saturn/Dreamcast/N64 games drop the occasional frame but that’s just from pushing the hardware to its limit, nothing to do with the roms.

I would recommend finding YouTube reviews for a specific device. There’s a whole community of people out there who can set the expectations for performance of different emulators, often picking out some of the harder games to emulate for each system. Eventually you will get to a point where there are trade-offs: do I want to upscale the resolution at 30FPS or drop the resolution and get a solid 60FPS?

Even a cheap mini PC is going to be much more expensive. Still a great option, especially if you also want to do PC things, but not what OP is looking for. For just having a TV box that plays games, ARM is hard to beat. And most of those YouTubers also can tell you how to put a variety of other operating systems and your own roms on if you prefer, but I’m not assuming OP has the skill or will to do so.

It’s also possible to just buy android TV boxes that are pre-configured to do this.

I used to closely follow the retro handheld scene. So if OP wants to go down that route, they should check out the RetroGameCorps YouTube channel to get a feel for what kind of devices are available today. But he has occasionally covered those TV boxes too, and being android there’s often a lot of software and hardware overlap with those handhelds. It’s sketchy for sure, but for like $90 you can get a device when all those benefits you mentioned but already pre-configured to work as a console, with minimal mouse/keyboard input required. And tens of thousands of roms without needing to worry about where or how to get them, viruses (as long as you don’t cross with any other devices lol), or getting letters from your ISP for pirating.

As silly as this is, licensing was the straw for me.

In high school, I built my first desktop and pirated Windows XP. In college, i built a PC for both my wife and myself and purchased two Windows 7 licenses really cheap with a student discount. In 2019, my PC died so I built a new one, re-used the license, and saved a lot of the old parts. In 2020 I got my wife a new PC (barely managed to buy the parts as the pandemic was starting).

So as the pandemic was in full force, I had enough functioning spare parts to make one gaming PC that would have been mid-tier 6 years prior. I put it in our unfinished basement and planned to mostly use it for playing videos or music while I worked out, maybe do some light stuff like personal email or web browsing or light gaming- since I started working remote full-time I didn’t want to spend much time in my office when I wasn’t working anymore.

So I had to choose an OS for it. Pirate Windows? Buy Windows? At that point I was constantly running into issues with Windows on our machines. Updates forcing themselves on us. My wife’s machine has upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 8 on its own somehow and was pretty terrible until she moved to Windows 10. I had tons of driver issues with the audio interface I used for music production. Windows had been getting slower and less responsive and had been rough on the older hardware. So I installed Mint Cinnamon.

There’s still a lot of things that are frustrating and annoying. More advanced things that almost no one would ever want to do are way easier, while simple everyday tasks make you jump through hoops. Installing programs from the default repository is great, but good fucking luck if what you want isn’t there. But it performs way better, is way more customizable, doesn’t have the spyware. Works way better with my audio interface.

Eventually I got an OrangePi and set it up as a Pi-Hole with Debian. I got a steam deck and love it. My wife got a laptop with Windows 11 and hated it so much I set it up to dual-boot Mint Cinnamon too.

It’s classic rent seeking. We will own nothing, just lease a low-powered client device from our phone carrier or ISP and do everything in the cloud with AI.

That seems to be the plan from these megacorps anyways.

I played a decent number of games this year, and a lot of games that have huge fan bases. God of War 2018, Bloodborne (my first ever soulslike), Baldur’s Gate 3, Disco Elysium, and more. But the one that keeps gnawing at me is Subnautica

I remember when it was in early access I watched Markiplier play it, and it piqued my interest enough that it was the first time I ever bought anything in early access. Which is very unusual for me (I think the only other time I’ve done that was Hades, which was also great). I played through as much of the game as there was at the time, or at least as I could find. Which was still mostly in the safe shallows, no deep areas. Still out in a dozen hours or so and was satisfied given the price so I moved on.

In 2024 i recommended it to my wife, who loves marine biology and base building games. She, in turn loved the game and I watched her play through it. I got to see all of the deep areas. After watching her play it and the DLC I got the itch to go back to it, so I started a new file in late 2024.

By mid-January 2025 I was about halfway through that file. My wife visiting her friend in another city, so I had the house to myself, I think I took some PTO too. Single-digit temperatures Farenheit outside. My wife had taken our only car, so I was loaded up with plenty of weed, drinks, food, and snacks. So I had a few days to focus and finish that first file. I had such a great time I did something else I almost never do: I immediately started a new file to play it again. While I had so much fun, I also learned so much and had so many ideas of what I could have done better. Better places to build based, exploring in a different order, knowing all the great spots to farm resources and get blueprints and everything.

So I played through again. The soundtrack is phenomenal synthwave that perfectly suits the game, but by the time I had built my cyclops and was ready to plunge down into the depths I was also ready for a new soundtrack. I put on one of my favorite albums, which is also one of the most appropriate: Oceanic, by Isis.

I strongly recommend this to anyone who likes Isis or Subnautica. Just absolutely sublime. It’s like peanut butter and chocolate.

AI has slop is a problem, and Shovelware has been a problem for decades, basically as long as videogames have existed.

However, a LOT of these cheap and obscure games on steam have more innocuous explanations, with that explanation often being “the dev doesn’t really care about making money”. Perception, for example, is a student project that was released for free and I wouldn’t pay much for anyways, but it was a fun way to spend a couple of hours.

Or when I was in a band, one of the other members was a developer by trade who, as a hobby, connects with a couple of his other friends to develop game that he released on steam. I recorded and produced an EP for that band and we released it for free and we certainly spent more money buying drinks at the bars we played than we were ever paid for playing. I think his game was similar: they charged money for it to cover some of their costs, but he certainly never left his day job.

Or Mind Over Magnet, which was the project of the YouTuber GamerMakersToolkit. The whole thing was a multi-year project where the guy made videos covering the game development process and culminated in the release of the game. The actual business model was based on the video content, while the game itself was just a side piece that was probably profitable, but I doubt made enough profit for him to survive on for years.

I would not call PE a “bubble”. It’s not something people are just tossing money into because there are nebulous promises and the numbers are going up. PE is involved in EVERYTHING - restaurants, housing, tech, manufacturing, finance, marketing. It’s not an industry, just a way of investing that bypasses pretty much all of the safeguards and regulations societies have put in place for public trading. And I don’t expect it to “pop”. Either it continues, and all of the wealth continues to be concentrated towards the top, or the populace manages to take enough power back to get legislation, regulation, and enforcement to add transparency and rules to private equity.

I don’t know if any whole games, but a lot of games have boss battles or segments that are in 2nd person. Where the perspective is from the target, and you can see the character you are controlling through their eyes.

Off the top of my head, this boss fight from Ratchet and Clank 3 comes to mind.

It’s hard to do this for extended periods for a few reasons. Part of why this is reduced to boss fights so that if you have sections with dozens of enemies, whose perspective do you take? What happens when that enemy dies, or if that enemy needs to suck under cover or go down a stairwell or look down at their weapon to reload?

Even for boss fights, it only works if the boss’s behavior is controlled pretty strictly, like in that Ratchet and Clank example.

You could kind of make an argument about sections where you view your character through some sort of diagetic device, like a security camera. Technically you could count Lakitu from several Mario games in that sense.

Talking about this is giving me ideas though, especially for stealth games. Something that lets you see through the enemy’s eyes and make sure that you do NOT appear in their line of site could be really neat. Maybe.

Eh I think Fallout 4 is the only one that would really work with.

You could have maybe argued for Oblivion, but I think they made the right call in re-making it. (I know Bethesda calls it a “re-master”, but imo when you start re-doing models, NPC behaviors, and voice lines that crosses the threshold into “re-make”).

I think Fallout 3 would really benefit from the same re-make treatment Oblivion got. Morrowind too.

Starfield is current gen. Fallout 76 and Elder Scrolls Online are kind of different beasts as live-servics games. The older Elder Scrolls games are so outdated and janky that I think they would either have to completely re-imagine them into functionally new games, or just do a quick port (maybe upscale the resolution and add a few QoL improvements to call it a “re-master”) in a cheap sort of “classics collection”.

I haven’t played the pre-Bethesda Fallout games, but they do look re-makeable. They’re also nowhere near as popular as the rest of Bethesda’s games so there may not be enough demand for them.

Of course, if there’s a lot more options for games by other studios and published by Bethesda, but I could spend all day picking through that library and evaluating lol.

The YouTube comments

Oh look: tons of comments explaining how this is a ridiculous product that shouldn’t exist.

And yet it’s going to sell and be profitable.

Re-releasing old games is a great thing. Keep everything available, give consumers options, increase the size of libraries for every platform. Enhanced resolutions and better load times. It’s a free upgrade if you already own the Anniversary edition on Switch.

Rather than asking why they are doing this, I think the real question should be why was this not a launch title months ago?

1. This is one of the most shower-related shower thoughts of all time. Kudos!

2. A lot of people clean their bathrooms regularly. CLR or generic knock-offs are great for mineral buildup on faucets, drains, handles, etc.

3. My local water company regularly takes the main treatment system offline for maintenance and switches to the backup system. I don’t know all the details but every time they do it the water is heavily chlorinated for a week or so, and this happens roughly every 6 months. So until I can afford to get a full-home filtration system installed, I bought a shower filter that goes between the water pipe and shower head. It needs changed every 6 months so I might as well clean everything while I’m at it.

Oh yeah I have as much respect for him as I can have for any other celebrity I’ve never met or interacted with at all. I just wanted to get ahead of anyone responding to me pointing out that he’s not particularly qualified on this subject.

The reason I referenced him at all was not because of his qualifications, but as a way of establishing how popular these conversations were on the internet at the time. In that sense, the fact that he’s not an AI or finance expert and doesn’t specialize in such content speaks to how widespread the topic was at the time.

The last one standing or the last one left holding the bag?

This can result in support for hardware and software being upwards of two to three YEARS out of date. Which for gamers for example is unacceptable and causes issues more often then not.

I think your perspective might be a bit biased towards your own bubble here. People are still buying Nintendo Switch’s. People are still buying Steam Decks.

I am getting close to 600 games in my Steam Library, but only 2 were released this year. Both were Indie games (Fragrance Point and Tower Wizard).

Ram is costing hundreds of dollars. GPU’s are costing thousands. Desktop gaming, heck desktop ownership in general, has been falling off. If people are still on x86, they are more likely to be on laptops.

For the average person, the idea that you need your OS to be updated every couple of weeks so that you can check your email and play Minecraft with your kids is insane.

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Kind of gross how this article seems to be trying at every turn to say, “no ai is actually good! It helped us catch the bad businessmen that happen to be in the AI industry!” By focusing on a tiny trading period on November 20th.

Because I remember casually watching Hank Green talk about this same thing more than a month earlier.

Hank Green isn’t a finance bro or an AI guy or even really a tech guy. He’s just a guy reacting to things that are trending, and I remember I had seen the main graphic he was talking about floating around the internet for a while before I watched the video. People have been calling AI a “bubble” for much longer.

I am old enough to remember the report that 95% of generative AI companies failed to see returns from using it. That was back in August.

I don’t like giving credit to “trading algorithms” for things that humans figured out a long time ago.

Once again, their marketing team uses the word “remaster” but the problem you’re complaining about is new assets.

The meme is specifically comparing these to PC Ports, so I’m limiting my scope to games that have PC versions. So no Nintendo games either for example.

And if there are lore changes then I would call that a “re-make” or “re-imagining”. Part of the problem is that marketing teams have just chosen to go rogue in terms of what to call what. “Re-master” itself is a term that came from the mastering process of the music industry, to differentiate from “remix” or “re-recording”, so I suppose you could argue that we need a better term overall for videogames. So this means I generally ignore whatever words they decided to slap onto the title screen and focus instead on what the changes actually are.