I am highly skeptical of that. There are plenty of hobbyists making new things in ancient environments. I just don't think Nvidia has ever been very competent at software engineering (drivers excepted as they're in a very different domain)
I mean, my point is there's no reason they should be overhauling it entirely (at the cost of performance) when they could just pay some competent Windows programmers to un-shit the existing Control Panel. Yeah its UI sucks but it's not going to make you drop frames for just having it open
The cost of having to have an account to get "easy" driver updates always seemed a bit high to begin with. I never really found its game optimization profiles to be useful either.
Got a little mixed up there, I recalled hearing that Larian already had plans for their next game after BG3 but my brain incorrectly autofilled Witcher as what that game was - that's not even the right developer. Silly brain.
Then that pretty much defeats the purpose of physical media, people will be out in droves angry that they can't play their new games offline or have to day 1 patch, etc
When you distribute physical copies of games to stores, I don't think it's really practical to prevent physical copies from getting taken inappropriately 100%
Elite:Dangerous is sad for its own reasons, too, and I have a similar count of hours logged. Glacial pace of development and a lack of strong game design / sense for balance. I'm still stunned by how much of a selling point the background simulation was, and how limited it actually is in practice (it did get some love over the years, but far too little too late IMO.)