Why such low expectations? Why not modern materials with good shading and smooth looking object edges (see spoiler), POM, modern post processing etc. but relatively small environments with few objects and not too many different materials? That shouldn't require significantly more computing power either. In Alien: Isolation you can currently get several hundred fps in UHD. Especially when you add DLSS to the game.
Path tracing performance scales by triangle count more than instance count, and image quality (noise) basically scales light count, you aren't going to resolve super crisp raster friendly details at the native resolution and you shouldn't spend your perf on a ton of close together thin tris chamfering edges. I would guess decal performance would also scale poorly, more arbitrary info to look up for a given ray hit sounds expensive, but I'm not really educated enough to say with confidence.
It's not always straight forward to play games for the Windows 95/98/2000 era on modern Windows, e.g.f. Fallout 3 and New Vegas can be quite hit of miss outside of a full virtualised environment - and I keep an old Windows 98 VM for such cases - but I do wonder how well some of the more aggressive DRM implementations will work on Windows 14. These are often predicated on access to some kernel functions that are gradually being eroded with each new version of Windows as technical threat vectors are removed.
Multiplayer games will be updated to handle this, and Singlepayer games are either cracked to remove their protection or have mods for that, or would be intergrated into a service like GOG to off them with no protection.
I’m sure publishers consider that to be a bug, not a feature.
For the games that make it GoG, assuming you don't mind buying things twice, or hoping a crack doesn't contain malware, those are options.
Not really. That's a good thing for them, as their games can continue to bring in some level of revenue even later on, as they still remain playable, as otherwise they'd get nothing.
Summing up:
Oh GaaS is definitely where they want to go. Or a game-buffet (Gamepass). Every corp wants predictable revenue streams, and a subscription model enables that consistency far better than product sales that could hit or miss.
Not all of us old timers cherish it. Honestly, I'm at the point in my life that I'm totally fine being 90% digital and plenty of that on subscriptions. Partly because I'm getting old and already have too much crap in my house. But mostly because of the ease of access combined with the total lack of actual archival quality games released on disc. I mean, it's cool if you have your favorite game on disc, but if you have to download an update that's larger than the initial install, what good does it do you.
There is a difference between revering discs and not liking games as a service always online stuff. Discs are not neccesary for games to be single player dedicated experiences that are not designed in the most board room monetization happy way live service games are designed
I was mostly talking about the buffet model. Gaas, though? I actually don't care about that either. I'm not going to play most of them, but there are enough compelling experiences available without them that I don't see their existence as a problem.
It seems like they have already hit a point of market saturation though
The issue with gamepass and subscription like services imo is that all your money invested goes down the drain once you stop paying. I don't think that is a very good deal for those of us who don't play every single game on the service once and move on. I pick up games in interested in and generally keep them for as long as I wish for a flat rate without having to worry about whether or not I can keep up payments to keep the privilege of gaming as a hobby
