Yes, the unimaginable corporate greed of American game publishers that feeds endless layoffs, brain drains, mergers, and shutdowns is also to blame— but what about overseas, where employees are valued more highly? These markets are more resistant to "development poisoning," and even so, we can see a clear trend towards the behemoths of the games industry: Not the developers, not the publishers, but the hardware suppliers.
Monster Hunter Wilds has collected 47,000 negative reviews on Steam today— 46.5% of the 101,000 total reviews. Out of all of the complaints, from the boring walking-and-talking missions to the lack of a cat cooking cutscene, the overwhelming issue with the game is that it just doesn't run. And I don't mean that it doesn't run well— in many cases, it doesn't function at all.
The problem, supposedly, is that they need new graphics cards. That would be the obvious solution. Would be, because it isn't. From Xbox Series X to PS5 Pro, the game struggles to maintain a 60 frames per second benchmark on "performance" settings; even players who went out of their way to buy a streaming-level GPU are seemingly unable to play the game that they paid for, at least when it comes to performance.
Cities Skylines 2 had an infamously poor launch towards the end of 2023. Once again, performance was at the core of the problem. Later, in 2024, a post from CEO Mariina Hallikainen on the official Paradox Forums stated that "we have been struggling to get Cities: Skylines II to the necessary level of optimization for a console release" [link]. Just a few months after that statement, another forum post followed up with the admission that "unfortunately, we have not yet met the stability and performance targets we set for the console release... we are now unable to meet an October release window" [link]. It's now March of 2025, and the console release does not seem to be making any progress. Pre-orders for console versions of the game are still open, however, and players have begun asking for their money back— you can see that just by going to the pre-order pages for these games on their respective platforms.
So, in a practical sense, who is to blame here? We could point at the developers, but I'm sure that no development employee wants to see their hard work go to waste. We could point at the publishers, who push developers to crunch and get games out the door as quickly as possible. Again, though, publishers don't benefit from games being poorly optimized. We could point to the vague notion of "optimization" itself, for being an impossible benchmark, for relying on misinformation about games development, and so on. Or, instead, I would point out that there is one group of people who actively benefit from games running badly. A group so fundamental to the games industry that without their influence, no games studio would even exist.
What sells graphics cards?
It's their necessity in computer graphics, of course. There are a lot of use cases in fields like 3D animation and video editing, among others. Huge companies make constant use of them. They're valuable in all sorts of ways. From a consumer perspective, though, the number of people who want to buy a GPU for those reasons is relatively low. Nvidia might get away with selling GPUs to contracting businesses for a long time, but they can't do that forever. Eventually, the bottom line comes back to the consumer. And so, an issue arises: How do you sell a military-grade GPU to an average computer user? How do you kill so many birds when you only have a limited number of stones?
First, you crush the industry.
Games need graphics. It's just a simple fact. Even text adventure games require computational power, the ability to map digits and letters onto the screen in fixed locations. During the fifth and sixth generation of video game consoles (the PS1 and PS2 era), games were overwhelmingly limited by the hardware they ran on. The PS2, especially, was incedibly fickle with what games could run on it and how well they could be optimized for the hardware. There's a certain resemblance to that era that we see in the current industry: Games running slow, even at low resolutions, being bottlenecked by the machinery they exist to be played on.
The landscape of the industry, on the other hand, doesn't resemble that era at all. We are constantly under assault from hardware companies trying to sell us on the Next Big Thing: motion controls in the seventh generation, then cryptocurrency, then VR, then machine learning, then NFTs (repackaged cryptocurrency) and AI (repackaged machine learning). Now, with the AI bubble just starting to burst, we can see that there are no more tricks left. Hardware has nothing to sell us anymore. Budget builds are more popular than ever. Consoles are a shortcut to being able to play just about anything, no matter how ugly and choppy they need to become.
And even so, the games are being made with the expectation that there will be more. That's the promise. That's the guarantee, from the hardware to the firmware to the software, that the industry will continue to exist. Games Will Look Better Next Year. Graphics Will Be Bigger Next Year. Ignore the fact that VR is a dying industry and that motion controls were thrown out with the bathwater. Overlook the fact that cryptocurrency tech bro bullshit is destroying the United States government. The games industry is here! It is real! And there will be a bigger console.
There will be more GPUs that can support bigger games.
There will be a spending economy that will let consumers keep buying them.
The PS6 Pro will let you play Monster Hunter Wilds at 4K 60fps. The future-tech Xbox of your wildest imagination will be the first console ever to receive Cities Skylines 2. And on, and on, and on. Lies, and lies, and lies.
There is no Next Generation of Games Hardware.
What does exist is a loaded gun, aimed at the heads of every developer as they march into an unprecedented economic black hole that seems to be eating through the entire world. Because, of course, if all of us just Wait, then the games industry will get better. If everyone Waits, technology will break through its shackles and discover some new application that will make Nvidia infinite money. And that will sustain the industry, won't it? Just a few companies making infinite money. How hard could it be?
It's never coming, and it has never been coming. The games that run like shit now will probably run like shit well into the future, because we don't live in an industry where infinite growth is or has ever been possible.
Hardware is dead. Long live the software industry.