Physically, demos and game development have advanced far beyond where they were at the beginning of the demoscene, but now people no longer come together. Game engines and devices have become accessible to everyone, and people are constantly inventing new things. For example, just look at the number of algorithms and new gameplay mechanics now compared to 10 years ago.
In 2012, I created a live coding platform and spent a lot of time thinking about why live coding didn’t become more popular than traditional coding. Live coding came about 10 years before React, which became reactive because you no longer had to press F5 every time you updated the HTML (I worked on the first version of React Webpack, which was doing server-side rendering).
Later, after going through a startup accelerator, the puzzle finally clicked for me. Companies and businesses began making serious money from video games, discovering lots of talent in the wild indie dev and demoscene space. The best talents were like raw gems and this eventually scaled into an industry.
Now, the best innovations are being patented and presented at SIGGRAPH and the game engine market is massive. Of course, amid all the flashiness and white-collar presence, it’s hard to spot the demosceners, but they’re behind every game. They’ve just been hired by corporations and their talent no longer expresses itself in the same way.
Unfortunately, companies provide very little support for the demoscene, which is why we don’t see the same explosive growth here as we do in games, graphics or AI.
I remember one case where a guy was hired to animate King Kong’s face for a movie and he spent two years hand-animating every single emotion. I wonder what kind of demos he might have created during that time if the corporation hadn’t hired him and forced him into repetitive work.
The market.
I don't really think it's fair to compare game engines with the demoscene. The demoscene is really about exploiting hardware to the fullest extent and that's not really an economic advantage when you get new GPUs every year that are 50% to 30% faster. now, creative hacks can increase performance several hundred percent, but is this sustainable for a product? probably not. certain hacks are very specific and that reduces your market. they’re usually non-portable, fragile, or locked to very specific architectures. That doesn’t scale across consoles, PC variants, or mobile. So in a market context, the value of raw ingenuity is absorbed into engine pipelines or middleware, not showcased in standalone demos.
Now that is to say a demo can't be portable, for instance I've run several older demos on my computer. I've also had instances where demos wouldn't run on my computer. Imagine if that was a game that I bought. Or imagine if it was anstracted to such a point that the feature is just not available dynamically. For instance of particle effect became 100 times less impressive.
yeah, companies wants little effort for bigger effect. They want maintainable code, etc. Clever hacks are not really welcome.
Now that PC's are so powerful, you look for algorithms optimisation. And although it requires a ton of cleverness as well, it's much more documented than obscure hacks. You learn that at school.