>Funny how today people compete who will waste more computing resources,

Have you seen the modern games lately? I don't even know how you think thus bunch of lines and giant pixels is relevant to today's photorealism. And no, memory protections aren't stupid -- people prefer their apps to not crash on out of memory event, and they prefer their system to not crash on app crash event. They have different priorities from you -- not retro-code aestheticism.

Also, modern games are being mostly run on GPUs. Spyware (Microsoft's or otherwise), isn't running there.

>in addition to just badly written

Again, I have to repeat myself. Shit is being written in accordance to the market conditions. Optimizing stuff to the degree it was done in the 80ies is expensive, making stuff not require update fixes is expensive. People aren't prepared to pay this much, but require very significant amount of content compared to what was the standard back then. Doom cost $30 (more like $70 dollars today, inflation adjusted), was made by several people, was made in a year. Today's people expect AAA content for $70, i.e. games that are made by many hundreds of people for 4-5 years (i.e. GTA 6). SNES games cost $70 BACK THEN, It's $140 today! Nobody would buy a single game for $140 today.

This retro-whining is getting annoying.

Where is it written in the post that it's good? Bloatware is the product of market conditions also. Lack of competition, due to the effects of companies becoming unimpeachable, quasi-monopolistic owners of basic infrastructure (i.e. Windows, Google, Apple), or of industry standards embedded in education (Adobe's creative suite). Also due to the rise of surveillance capitalism.

Me explaining to you different incentive structures between 80ies,90ies vs today, doesn't mean I want to say that what we have today is all good. No it's not all good. But some things are better, some are worse.

Games already cost hundreds of millions of dollars, with lots of complexity, not from optimization standpoint, but from the amount of stuff standpoint, and there just isn't enough customer willingness to overpay for optimizing everything to the 80ies standards. Что не понятно?

Another effect: in the 80ies and the early 90ies games were primarily for nerds with money and their kids. Especially the PC games in the 80ies, they were being made basically for the elite. Today they are a mass product. Of course something that has to have the mass appeal would be different from something that was made for dedicated group of early computer enthusiasts.

>not about being the expensive tech demos

They aren't tech demos, they have lots of content, but this content isn't for "games are art" crowd. There is a lot of indy artsy games today, but what they don't do for sure is any kind of optimization, and almost always use pre-made engines. There are some exceptions that go the "innovative from coding perspective" path, with custom engines, like Teardown, but these are even fewer.

>about fun

If it wasn't fun for the end users, it would't be made.

>pushed to sell new hardware.

You are insane if you actually think that. There is just a demand for improved graphical fidelity, and devs are pushed to utilize everything that gpu makers are releasing, or else they risk being stereotyped as "good game, but 2010s graphics".

Also this "game" is a tech demo. In the 80ies people were able to publish their tech demos as actual products, such were the times. It wasn't the case by the 1990s.

Today the threshold for publishing is much lower. Everyone can do it, and the cost of publishing is non-existent. Back then people had to produce physical media. So for a published product back then was an expectation that it would at least recoup the cost of media, which wasn't insignificant. It means they expected a demand for this this tech demo. And it isn't surprising -- everything was new, and you doing new shit like terrain exploration was a new exclusive experience, people were prepared to pay for. TODAY THE SITUATION IS DIFFERENT.

general observation -- good stuff happening / good period with lots of innovation / production / advances can't last forever in history. Things are unstable, shit degrades, evolves, changes, becomes worse, rises again, then falls, ceases to exist. This is how humanity works. It could be that we live in the golden age. Maybe the only good age for crazy trans autists.

>walking simulators

a legitimate genre, there is a demand for, otherwise it wouldn't be made. It has to have content for hours. This game has content for 10 minutes max.