Re: Fare Thee Well, Anandtech

On Fri, 30 Aug 2024 15:21:24 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

If you're a long-time PC enthusiast like me, you're probably familiar
with the website Anandtech.

The owner sold it and ducked out about a decade ago, it was pretty
good while it lasted but nothing like that ever lasts after the
founder sells out, so maybe the real news is that it lasted a full 10
years under the same owner as Tom's Hardware.

I bought the PC I primarily game on in 2018, 4 years after I bought my
previous "beefy" gaming rig in 2014.  The 2014 rig is a music
production rig now, still going strong and so is this one.  And
honestly, the difference in games between the 2014 rig and the 2018
one was actually a bit disappointing, despite both specs being best of
breed at the time.  I can remember upgrades to gaming PCs bringing
exciting performance differences... in many cases it made the
difference between a game feeling fluid and worth playing versus a
slideshowy mess.

But I think those days are gone and what we're seeing now is a
reflection of that.  After technology plateaued to the point where
there were no longer exciting games, the industry went a little nuts
and decided to turn to politics as a way to get reactions out of
buyers and mask the fact that the games themselves mostly sucked.

There is an occasional gem here and there but for the most part unless
you need to play games at high resolutions for some reasons it's hard
to justify the current price of top-end gaming rigs when most new
games suck anyway, and anything less than top end doesn't offer a
compelling upgrade over a 6 year old PC.

With all of that taken into consideration it's easy for me to
understand how a site like Anandtech found it difficult to survive.