There are a few very obvious things about me. I’m built like a barn door, I have a bulbous head, and I obviously love video games. My nerdiness drips from every pore. You see me coming and think: that human fridge with a watermelon on top has 800 hours in Oblivion (and that would be an underestimation). It’s also very obvious that I’m super old, and have, as such, seen a lot of moments in video games. 16-bit to 3D, floppy disk to CD, the Game Boy – goddamn, that’s good – Advance. It has been a space replete with innovation and change. Not all of it good, but nothing compared to the current moment.
For those who don’t follow the news, Microsoft has been buying up studios with no clear plan for what to do with them – and now is shedding them hard as AI is becoming the new sexy toy. They own tons of studios, some absolute darlings as well – Obsidian, who made the beloved Fallout: New Vegas, widely believed to be the best Fallout in the series, which is something. Being a game in the Fallout series guarantees you’re probably going to be onto a winner. Being the best game in the Fallout series would be exceptional. They also absorbed a lot of the talent from the troubled but brilliant Troika Studios. A lot of people go straight to Double Fine and Rare, but I’m really worried about my precious baby Troika 2.
Sony has announced the death of physical media and thus ownership. This caused a bit of a furore on the internet, which was promptly ignored. I don’t know if they are a little traumatised from Sony Music’s division, but these guys have always had weird proprietary hardware. The saintly PSP used a weird, plastic-cased optical disc thingy called UMDs (they – to be coarse – look cyberpunk as flip), and the memory cards were the same proprietary cards they used in their cameras, at a time when SD cards were common. What is probably a bigger issue is that the PlayStation 5 is the first console to go up in price – as the AI Boom™ gobbles up RAM and pushes consumer electronics further out of the reach of… well, the consumer. Even PC gamers are feeling it, as GPUs have gone from a niche component for enthusiast PC builders to the lifeblood of this very frustrating, very nonsensical moment of capitalist mania. Don’t worry about owning your games, PlayStation fans – you won’t own your console, or anything else either.
So Microsoft’s killing studios, Sony’s killing ownership, and AI’s killing hardware… That doesn’t sound great? If you’re a big studio making AAA games that need heavy hardware and sell for a heavy price tag, yes, that sounds awful. A game like Balatro… Oh no, wait, Balatro is something else, innit!
Balatro is a 2D roguelike deck-builder game – and full disclosure, I don’t know what those words mean. What I do know is Balatro is lightweight, multiplatform, made by a single dev, and has sold TONS.
Indie games are by no means new. Even with the Xbox 360, Xbox Arcade was vital for bringing indie games mainstream attention. But that was different. That was indies being cute little toys for in between each Madden and COD release. Now indies might offer the main viable option for the continuation of video games as a living hobby.
I’m a bit of a tech optimist, and the return of video game development to indie devs churning games out of their bedrooms does appeal to me out of pure nostalgia and romanticism (to the point where I will gladly ignore the professionalisation of indie devs to talk about mythical bedroom game-churning), but this is really the only likely route forward for the hobby in the current moment.
For me, one of THE perfect video games is Super Mario Bros. 3. Released in 1988, nearly 40 years old at this point, probably using hardware that has 1/1000th of the computational power of a modern toaster. But it is absolutely brilliant in the classical sense. Wonderful sense of motion, of exploration, gorgeous design and aesthetics. There is nothing about the current moment that makes another Super Mario Bros. 3 less likely. The markets no longer have a clear route to reward big money in big video games. The disruptions are too big, the alternatives are too viable. Why worry about making an AAA game for a console when you can make an indie game for almost every mobile phone on the planet?
This is not a ‘feel-good’ proposition. The AI Boom™ has impacts on the availability of RAM through 2027 that we know of right now. If the frontier AI labs died tomorrow, the scarcity of basic components of modern computing wouldn’t recover immediately. All tech enthusiasts will be suffering. My love of running old ThinkPads with Linux will become a more mainstream proposition. Computing just isn’t going to look too sunny for a long time. But ultimately, people with a passion will find a way to create and share experiences. If the hardware shrinks, so will the development.
I mentioned my love for the Game Boy Advance at the start of this. It was exceptional because it took all the experience of people producing 16-bit games for the Super Nintendo — and plopped that experience directly onto a handheld equivalent. There were tons of devs that had just absolutely mastered 16-bit, and the GBA offered them a chance to bring that experience to bear against a backdrop of new, sexy, 3D CD-based systems.
Well, now we have all that experience, and more. And it might be the only path forward for the hobby, for producers and consumers.