Star letter

Listening to episode 442 of the PC Pro podcast, in which Darien Graham-Smith talked about a £1,000+ Nvidia graphics card, I was reminded how frustrating the mainstream gaming world can be. The drive for higher resolutions, a greater number of frames per second and other graphical effects are all great, but I wish games developers would spend as much time on original game play – or, if possible, more.

I’m in my 40s, so I’m lucky enough to have witnessed the entire life of video gaming to date, from the early arcades and first-generation home computers, through to the latest and greatest that 2018 has to offer. I didn’t care too much about the graphics when I was a kid, but I can’t help feeling I had more fun and enjoyed what I had more than my kids do today.

It’s no surprise to me that the biggest games of recent times, Minecraft and Fortnite, don’t depend on cutting edge-graphics but have instead used innovation to attract and keep their players coming back. Is that why so many of us are returning to retro gaming, where we can play games that are fun rather than visually stunning?

Maybe there’s a bigger problem here than just games development, with the perpetual, seemingly annual obsession with releasing new hardware across the tech industry. It seems to be having the opposite effect to what the manufacturers will have wanted, with many people keeping their wallets closed and waiting for true innovation rather than just another annual incremental update. Michael Webster

PC Pro editor-in-chief Tim Danton replies: I think both can co-exist: to be fair to Nvidia, the advent of real-time ray tracing justifies the term gamechanger, for once! That said, some of the most successful recent games eschew fancy graphics in favour of strategy and innovation simply because they’re designed for the screens of a mobile phone.