How Is It Going

Ah, the classic Nvidia business strategy presented through Gru's plan meme! First panel: "Let's release the 5000 series with zero performance gains!" *confident face* Second panel: "Then update drivers to deliberately cripple older cards!" *still confident* Third panel: "Cause crashes across our entire GPU lineup!" *wait, what?* Fourth panel: *realizes* "CAUSE CRASHES ACROSS OUR ENTIRE GPU LINEUP?!" *horrified face* Nothing says "we're passionate about gaming" quite like sabotaging your own hardware ecosystem! At this point, gamers are just Stockholm syndrome victims with RGB lighting.

Remember when games were actually games and not elaborate schemes to empty your wallet? The Vince McMahon reaction meme perfectly captures the unicorn that is a quality game in 2023. First, it's free? Mild interest. Could run on a potato from 2017? Now we're talking. No microtransactions? Holy crap, that's rare. But great replayability too?! That's like finding a bug-free production release – theoretically possible but I'll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, modern AAA studios are shipping 200GB games that require a NASA supercomputer and still ask you to pay $4.99 for a slightly different colored hat. The gaming industry really took "monetize everything" a bit too literally.

Back in the day, game devs were out here coding ENTIRE ROLLERCOASTER TYCOONS in Assembly language like absolute psychopaths, fitting shooters into 97KB (yes, KILOBYTES), and somehow making games run on potatoes while also having bodies that could bench press a small car. They were built different, both literally and figuratively. Fast forward to now and we've got AAA studios crying about how they can't fix bugs because someone's allegedly stealing breast milk (?!), shipping 50GB games that require another 50GB day-one patch, telling you to buy a NASA-grade PC just so their unoptimized mess doesn't crash every 5 minutes, and blaming YOU—the player—for their always-online singleplayer game being broken. The devolution is REAL and it's SPECTACULAR in the worst way possible. We went from "I made this masterpiece fit on a floppy disk" to "Sorry, the game is 200GB and still doesn't work, also here's $70 worth of microtransactions." The bar went from the moon straight to the Earth's core.

The EXISTENTIAL CRISIS of staring at two buttons labeled "Ray Tracing" and "Path Tracing" and having ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE what unholy difference exists between them! 💦 Meanwhile, your GPU is SCREAMING in the background as you toggle between settings that might as well be labeled "Make Computer Hot" and "Make Computer SLIGHTLY HOTTER." The audacity of game developers to assume we know what these rendering techniques do beyond "pretty graphics go brrr" is just... *chef's kiss* MAGNIFICENT.

Finally, a VR headset where you can't see Half-Life 3 not existing. Valve's strategy is brilliant - build hardware to distract us from the games they'll never finish. It's like putting on noise-cancelling headphones so you can't hear the community begging for sequels. Truly innovative.

Console gamers sobbing because they can't play a 20-year-old title without paying for yet another remaster, while PC gamers casually run ancient games on cutting-edge hardware like it's no big deal. The true irony? Console makers talk about "ecosystem" while Steam is over here actually preserving gaming history. Your $3000 graphics card running Morrowind at 400 FPS with mods is peak gaming culture.