Gamer's obsession with graphics is ruining gaming.

im with ya there. im an indie dev who does work with mostly simple pixel graphics (because it is only me, i have no team at all) and some assholes do occasionally go "why does the game look bad?" and other similar things. also as someone who for the majority of their life had a not even decent computer, its simply not fair to go "Gamers buy high end computers, so we should exclusively make games with high end requirements." because like. people who only have the chromebook that their school gave them as part of a government grant exist, and they shouldn't be price gated out of a whole medium of art.

It's not so much gamers' obsession with graphics as it is companies not caring about optimization and compression, back in the day, they figured out how to fit Resident Evil 2 including the cinematics in a 64MB cartridge, nowadays storage is only an issue on the switch. 

wrote this before i realized you were just talking about storage. i agree with the last guy that only affects console but here's a contextual recollection of the state of game performance anyways ig.

I understand how you feel but at the same time the most it's affected me is in performance. I can play a game ~60FPS, if it's singleplayer or a relaxed coop session in a game like Schedule 1. Most of my performance is dictated by my CPU though, just because games don't optimize the way they used to

For 6 or 7 years i had a RX550 (50$ GPU like 5 years ago) + ??? cpu and was able to run most unoptimized games at a range of like 20-45FPS. Our standards have risen cause 1080p 60FPS is 1440p 144-165FPS now. Even competitive games lol potato users happily play at 720p(HD) as long as it gets them 140FPS in an optimized game but that's just because your reaction time in games is directly related to your FPS and screen's hz (slow info feed = slow reaction)

Yes these games have intense graphics models but they also have 10-20x more settings + console commands for the game's engine that you can use to bring it down. And that just leaves how CPU intensive the game is. This just means the issue is misplaced attention to detail

It will change soon because of recent computation leaps and only sooner if a AAA studio decides to take advantage of another AAA studio's poorly performing game and accidentally figure it out while cutting corners in graphics for once

Its mostly the 4k texture pack which are the "standards" resolution for today but mostly no one cares that much just put the game at 1080p no one complained about having 1080p graphics

of course more optimization would be nice but acting like it looks soulless is a stretch, it looks awesome

THIS is so true, I have friends who used to play all High in every game but I realized that, in single player games "better" graphics is always wanted because you want to be immersed as possible. I think with competitive games though, I would prefer "bad" or optimized graphics, for example Marvel Rivals, It runs UE5, and is HEAVILY optimized, while I understand that they are wanting to have a grip on the "Casual players", they should allow further lower graphics or cfg editing options, they patch methods which improve frames and frametimes but the average "casual" player wouldn't edit their cfg's at all so there is no need to "patch" it as everyone who does it will mostly be players that are much more competitive.

Absolutely agree.

what's crazy is that i spent loads of time when i was a kid wanting a beefy PC so i could run skyrim with an enb with loads of post-processing effects and hd textures like i saw in mod videos, but now i can do that i realised that the extra shaders are so distracting i stopped playing the game so i turned them off again (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.) honestly i dont think graphics have actually "improved" outside of being impressive on a technical level since, like 2015

You’re absolutely right — the obsession with ultra-high graphics often takes away from the soul of the game. It’s like developers focus more on showing off particle effects and 4K textures than on storytelling or innovative gameplay. Not to mention, it makes games ridiculously huge in size and hardware-demanding. I’ve had to upgrade my PC recently just to run some of these titles, and even then I had to use a bottleneck calculator to make sure my CPU and GPU wouldn’t slow each other down. Honestly, I’d take a smaller, more immersive game over a 125GB tech showcase any day.

Totally get your point—games keep ballooning in size for tiny graphical details, and it does feel like the soul of gaming gets lost. It reminds me how video games have been the real obsession of every youngster since childhood, especially with the PlayStation 2 era. As an active gaming streamer, I saw many gamers struggling to play PS 2 games on the PlayStation 2 console without a PCSX2 or AetherSX2 emulator. That’s where the playstation 2 bios came in, making it easy to enjoy classic games smoothly without all the modern bloat. Sometimes simpler is just better.