What would happen if computers never got any faster?

Are you suggesting that processor speed is solely a function of clock speed?

The final products of those amazing programs that show up late in the platform's lifetime are indeed running on the same hardware, but aren't those programs often developed using faster computers of later periods?

For instance, Donkey Kong Country does run on an unmodified SNES purchased on its launch day, but its creation shouldn't have been possible were it not for the Silicon Graphics workstations used to create the art, which was most likely vastly faster than the development hardware used to create the earliest SNES games. Many amazing pieces of code involve pre-rendering or other various forms of precomputation that are extremely computationally expensive but the final result will run on a low-powered machine.

What we're seeing on the BBC Micro, MegaDrive/Genesis or other evergreen demo platforms is not "what would happen if computers never got any faster," rather it's more like "what would happen if only the computer running the final product never got any faster." We still need faster, better hardware.

I can't speak to the services side of your comment, but my professional experience is in games.

I worked as part of a team that once backported a game from the Xbox 360 to the PlayStation 2 (512 to 24 megabytes of RAM, much slower CPU, much more limited 'shaders' if you can call VU code 'shaders', etc). The PS2 had 32 megabytes of RAM, but by Sony submission requirements you weren't allowed to touch the bottom 8mb of that. And a lot of the remaining 24mb would be taken up by your program itself, leaving little space in memory for model data, sound, etc. But we did it.

From that perspective, it seems to me like there's really very little in Breath of the Wild that couldn't have been done back on the GameCube, if somebody had really wanted to. You just use lower detail models and textures, and maybe adjust the way you stream the world into memory from disk.

Similarly, Death Stranding could probably have been made on the original PlayStation (if you didn't care about network features; you'd have to wait for the later PS2 models if you wanted those). And similar for Kingdom Hearts 3.

Sure you would have had lower numbers of triangles and less fancy shaders and lower-resolution textures. But the games themselves? The stories and logic and mechanics and experiences? I feel like they'd all be pretty doable on lower-spec hardware, if an experienced team had a mind to try.

I guess my point is just that if computers stopped getting faster, you'd still have newer and better and more intricate games being released. Faster computers are absolutely not required for that. They're really only required if you want ray tracing and higher polygon counts and physically based lighting and similar.

The performance increases from using C these days really come from it forcing you to avoid abstraction rather than access to the hardware. If you imagine the amount of indirection a Python program has just to add two numbers, that's why C is "fast". Compilers are clever, but they generally don't bother and aren't really allowed to look too far away from a given expression or function i.e. Extracting very high level information about even integers still requires manual annotation - GCC and LLVM will happily propagate parity through an expression but declaring an invariant about an integer inside a struct is not possible even with extensions AFAICS

The issue we have, now, however isn't that your code (or any code, ideally) is slow but that the depth of the tree from your library call down to the missile launching is too deep. There's just too much crap in between the important stuff.

I largely agree, with the exception that there are some aesthetic details that just weren't possible to capture the same way. A good example to me is the difference between wind waker and Breath of the wild. Wind waker is a beautiful game, and shows that there is absolutely enough power in the gamecube to make cell shaded art games. But when you pull the bow back for the first time in breath of the wild, and the corners of the screen go out of focus, and you peer between the cell shaded blades of grass at the beautifully animated boar you are trying to hit, it is a much different subjective experience.