Fubarberry

Some newer monitors can support stuff like HDMI-CEC, HDCP (aka DRM to prevent copying video feeds), and EDID handshakes. Your motherboard, especially if it’s older, is probably getting hung up trying to resolve these during boot.

You can go into the monitor’s settings and try disabling extra features like HDMI-CEC, upgrade your motherboard bios, switch to display port (or display port->HDMI cable), or try disabiling legacy boot. There’s probably some other stuff to try, but that should give you somewhere to start.

You can also gather more info, like if it happens with other HDMI monitors (specifically newer monitors only or all HDMI).

Also, AAA is struggling with games being too large. Every game is so expensive and has so many years of development that it’s hard for a studio to survive a flop without a major publisher. But the major publishers are pushing for studios to pursue games that have a really high flop rate (live-service, competitive shooters/etc). Additionally because every game has so much money invested in it, the studios are scared to try anything too different or unique, resulting in the games having a bland “design-by-committee” and not offering anything meaningfully different from what’s already out there. Features are intentionally held back so that the game will have content to drip-feed the players later, resulting in lacking content at launch.

I really think the AAA industry needs to downside, split up many AAA studios into multiple AA projects.

You would think this would encourage better optimized software, but I doubt devs will actually do that. Most modern code practices are about ensuring that code is more easily maintained, often at the cost of performance. Breaking “clean code” rules can easily make programs run 10-25x faster, but will be much harder to maintain.

We also seeing a lot of vibe coding now, which mixes clean code practices (which are well documents online) with messier, less well planned code.

I’ve also read speculation that selling it at a loss could contribute to antitrust lawsuits against them. Basically if they sell gaming PCs below cost, and the gaming PCs incentivize Steam use over other platforms, there would be an argument that Valve was using their 30% sales cut to sell hardware others can’t compete against, to further cement their monopoly. This would be partially countered by the open nature of the device, but not fully since it would still “steer” common users towards steam over other platforms.

This isn’t an issue for console makers because there are multiple competing consoles with valid market share.