It’s more of a shower thought about my personal experience than anything, but hear me out.
Since when we firmly believe that whenever AAA PC game releases - it should run smoothly on each and every mediocre PC?
I remember the day of TES Morrowind launch - my PC had hard time even starting the damn thing, not even speaking about actually playing it. Game was huge blast and it required decent PC. And only few had a system capable of running the game smoothly. And everyone was pretty much okay with that.
When Assassins creed 1 launched - me and the boys accepted as a fact that out PCs literally can’t handle this game (~8 fps slideshow experience). And we couldn’t try it for years, just because none of us had powerful enough system. And somehow we still were okay with that, because we though “this game is technological miracle, of course our mid-level PC aren’t suitable for such a thing”.
When Witcher 2 released - my PC managed to produce around 17 fps avg. And I accepted that, because I knew the game had outstanding graphics and my PC was… not outstanding. (Completed the game anyway cus it was sooooo good).
When Witcher 3 launched - I literally went to bank, got brand new credit card and bought a new fucking PC to play the game. Because I knew it was game of dreams and my PC would cry for mercy if I tried to play W3 on it.
Also, keep in mind that it is relatively new standard about “PC game = 2k|60 FPS minimum”.
In old times nobody counted FPS, and probably a lot of us gamers completed most games at ~40 fps or something, but we just didn’t consider such a thing and didn’t bother.
Highest resolution was most of the time full hd and it was actually not affordable a lot of times, and we manually lowered resolution to 1280 × 720, just to afford nice gaming experience.
Now, suddenly we expect games to show “4k|100 FPS”, while rocking 3 y.o. graphics card.
Or honestly wonder when AAA games with most advanced graphics with calculated rays, volumetric particles and shit - do not work on each and every PC.
Speaking about technologies - anybody remember how PhysX worked on most systems at launch? It was a disaster for majority of players, but again - we accepted that, because we knew the technology demands bleeding edge hardware.
(One of) The biggest PC game(s) of all time was World of Warcraft, which almost explicitly beat its competitors because it focused on gameplay instead of graphics, and could run on dogshit for the longest time.
This also goes for the Sims, Diablo, Doom, Roller Coaster Tycoon, even browser games like Club penguin. Making your AAA game run well on low settings was a very successful move. Whether the same applies today is different, but you’re trying to point out precedent that doesn’t exist.