Playing the Games We Have

I don't think I'm wearing rose-coloured glasses when I say the industry is in a really cynical, exploitative state. The status quo now is that AAA games are no longer released finished and have a micro-transaction system baked in from day one, leaning on seasonal content and battle passes to keep the money flowing long after launch. Multiplayer games launch with servers that can't handle the initial load and then die out quickly. Highguard lasted 45 days, one of 52 games that have already been shut down in 2026 alone. And games are no longer optimized because (similar to web dev) game devs assume gamers are using beefy machines with huge amounts of free space. Unreal Engine 5 alone has become shorthand for stutter and slowdown no matter what you're running it on. Also? RAM and GPUs are becoming genuinely unaffordable, with memory prices climbing as much as 89% in a single year as AI data centers eat up the world's DRAM supply. Microsoft and Sony have been raising console prices in…