Petrikas@petrikas@mastodon.art

I had a similar thought going through my head not long ago.

If hardware becomes too expensive, we'll make and play simpler games, we'll optimize and simplify our software and modify our workflows.

It's not the paint brush that does the painting.

Dave Wilburn :donor:@DaveMWilburn@infosec.exchange

Recent discussions about self-hosting and coop services got me thinking...

How absurd is it that we're all expected to surrender our computing needs to for-profit hyperscalers and cloud service providers? How dare these oligarchs try to make us feel weak and incapable of providing for ourselves?

They want us to forget that three decades ago we collectively created one of the world's fastest supercomputers with distributed.net using nothing more than scavenged compute power from our idle PCs.

They want us to forget that most of us have drawers full of old-but-otherwise-servicable smartphones with performance specs meeting or exceeding that of low-tier cloud service provider VMs, which might be brought back to useful life using open source tech like @postmarketOS.

They want us to ignore open source tech like BOINC, web assembly, and @thekhronosgroup 's Vulkan and OpenCL that might allow us to safely run local and distributed compute.

They want us to assume we have no choice but to accept higher electricity bills and greater reliance on fossil fuels to drive oligarch-run computing, and to ignore how the explosion of rooftop solar and the rapid commercialization of sodium ion battery tech could shift our society's power dynamics, both literally and figuratively.

We are mighty.

#solarpunk

Dave Wilburn :donor:@DaveMWilburn@infosec.exchange

Replying to @petrikas@mastodon.art

@petrikas

I appreciate a good AAA game with excellent graphics made by a small army of talented devs and artists. When well-executed with great gameplay and story, it's a wonder to behold. I'm deep into another playthrough of Witcher 3 and I appreciate all of the well-orchestrated resources that were poured into it.

But I don't think whether a game is good and enjoyable hinges much on photo-realistic graphics or deep pockets of game studios. I've had just as much fun playing Owlboy, an indie game lovingly built by a small team that came out around the same time as Witcher 3 but with only a small fraction of the resources.

There's a weird uncanny valley effect where indie games with low poly or retro pixel art graphics from low budget indie shops can be great, and AAA games with teams and budgets approaching major Hollywood films can be great, but nothing in-between. Given a choice between improving gameplay and story versus improving graphics, the smart investment is almost always going to be the former.

Game studios are already hurting. The GenAI-driven GPU/memory/storage shortage is only going to make that worse. Smart game studios are going to find a way to make great games and tell compelling stories without the big blockbuster budgets or requiring their customers buy gaming rigs made from unobtanium.

Jul 6, 2026, 01:10 UTCen