I don’t know if we’re there, but I would expect the game market to mature over time. If you think about it, it’s a little odd for every year to see a new product that everyone wants to switch to over all products made in the past. I mean, I don’t discard my chairs or my dinner plates to get new and better ones each year.

Many industries saw change as the result of the introduction of the microchip and Moore’s law. If your computing capabilities increased exponentially over time, if you could figure out how to leverage computation – and that is something that video games could definitely leverage – you could do a lot more every year.

For a long time, that translated directly to an increase in the rate of serial computation capacity, doubling about every year-and-a-half. The rapid rate of exponential increase that we had seen for decades fell off in the early 2000s, as I recall.

googles

Yeah:

https://preshing.com/images/integer-perf.png

A lot of the increases in performance that we’ve seen since then have been through improving parallel computation capacity, which isn’t quite as much of a “free” performance increase – it doesn’t apply to all problems, and for problems to which it does apply, it may take real work to make it apply.

The difference between a computer made in 1990 being used in 2000 is just larger than between a computer made in 2010 used in 2020.

Video games faced a lot of technical limitations that were being rapidly stripped away; for a long time, all a video game needed to do was to convert that new, free processing power into something interesting and it could outshine its predecessors.

I suppose that in theory, there could be some sort of new enabling technology that comes along that permits for a lot of new stuff on a continuing basis but that’s a big ask. Maybe virtual reality would have done it for video games – though I don’t know if that would have been a one-off or a continuous, exponential increase – but so far, I think that it’s fair to say that VR hasn’t really taken off in the way that some have hoped.

The shift to touch screens also created demand for games that were touch-screen friendly.

But input changes like that are rare. Lots of companies have tried it, and they haven’t really taken off – the mouse-and-keyboard on PCs has stayed pretty much the same for decades. Consoles – where a single console vendor can force an entire market to switch to a new input device, doesn’t have the collective action problem of PCs where it’s hard to get the entire industry to switch at once, so few game developers want to target a new platform with few users and create a chicken-and-egg problem between few games and few users with hardware – have seen small changes, like an increase in buttons and introduction of analog sticks and triggers.

And it’s not that touch screens are producing large, exponential changes in some industry-shattering way that open new doors to game developers in a given year that were closed to developers in past years. Maybe the shift to multi-touch screens, but again, not really an annual event.

We switched to solid-stage storage. That probably opens doors to make streaming media off the disk more-practical; with rotational media, to do that, one had to have a pretty good idea of what one needed to load in advance to order it on-disk. But again, one-and-done.