The RAM Shortage

[Moonface]

On the bright side, maybe the stagnation of hardware will finally force more developers to optimize their shit and get more out of less, which I feel like has become less of a thing compared to a few console generations ago.

Fair, although correct me if I'm wrong here, but I was thinking back to the PS3 era when I made my comment where that generation lasted longer than was usual for the time so developers were having to make more out of the hardware near the back end of the generation if they wanted to get the most out of their game.

[Dragon Lord]

I think the days of developers being innovative and learning to do more with less are long gone, my friend. As sad as it is, but the modern day ability for them to patch a game whenever they need to has made developers care less and less about shipping out a competent product. Not to say that every game dev does this, but obviously we see it a lot, especially with the large Western game devs who don't really seem to care if their games are broken, buggy piles of trash or not. *coughBethesdacough*

Also I think your example has more to do with how long it took developers to finally learn to optimize games on PS3 than anything. PS3 was notorious for being an absolute nightmare for developers because of its architecture and I think it just naturally took that long for devs to finally learn how to make games for it properly.

I would love to return to those days though, when there wasn't a race to have the most graphically 'ImMeRsIvE" game ever was the core focus of game development and game devs focused more on being creative, whimsical and interesting more than it was on just "muh shiny graphics!!!!" But I think that's going to continue to be an approach we only see in the indie development scene like it has been the last several years. Large devs are no longer interested in fun, but rather how many excuses they can find to increase that $70 to $80, then to $90, then to $100 (thanks GTAVI), etc. etc.

"We spent $100,000,000,000 making this characters nose hair hyper realistic, so we HAVE to charge $200 for the game!"

[Moonface]

Oh, I don't doubt that when it comes to just "patch it up later" that that will change. I'm thinking purely in terms of how in older generations, there would be developers who would find ways to get the most out of the hardware compared to nowadays where it's just "Well we could optimize and make it run well on hardware equivalent to a Switch 2, or we could just not give a shit and target only higher end hardware that can brute force 60fps" or something like that. A good example is whatever wizardry was done by id Software to have Doom Eternal run on a Switch 1, while other developers would claim their game couldn't run decently on it yet weren't even as intensive for the system as Doom Eternal was.

Also good point on the indies. Aside from their aim being passion over money (not that game developers lack passion, but rather they have to answer to money due to massive overheads, publishers and shareholders) they're always going to be working with less so will always aim to get the most out of it. Although, another factor is their games are much smaller and easier to refine, whereas AAA games have been getting bigger and bigger and thus harder to spend time on things that could be optimized when they're not likely smaller tasks like they were in the past. If nothing else indies definitely have an advantage of being far from the graphical/hardware ceiling compared to AAA games so there's still a lot of mobility for that scene.