On Game Development and Powerful Computers
An aspect missing from a lot of the "powerful computers vs game development" conversation is like...
I would like to run games in a way that doesn't cause my room to hit 40C in summer. I don't know that we need >200W constant energy consumption in The Current Climate, let alone the 600W+ PC gaming typically approaches.
"Our job is so much easier now" is nice but making games with the tools available is "your job" while playing them is a hobby that is getting prohibitively expensive to keep up with year on year while wasting a collosal amount of energy - and by extension, fossil fuels.
I'm loving what better tools have meant for the industry in that sub-AAA space, the results speak for themselves, but it's kind of tiresome to see people just list the points that support their main view while neglecting that upsides for one group are usually a compromise for the rest.
If you sell 100k copies of a game, and the average player puts 10 hours into it, optimisations that save 10W make for a megawatt-hour of energy - that's quite a lot? Thousands of miles in a typical electric car. It's also less air-con to counter the extra heat produced, possibly less demand so weaker/cheaper/older GPUs can be used at less environmental cost.
I know these aren't the considerations that developers typically make, it's all too distributed and driven by how players choose to play, but thinking about it has been my job lately, and it's hard to appreciate how much damage our games are doing, entirely passively.