Do they know most of their customers have budget and they can’t just spend entirety of it for gaming stuff?
There are also their potential customers that will gated by those huge cost for entry-level gaming setup.
Also for those who don’t even have budget, why the hell they gonna participate on those out of reach game ecosystem?
Looking at my own gaming expenses, I’ve definitely stopped buying as much as I did say 10 years ago. To me it seems like the value of what you get for your money has fallen. I can afford it, but why should I? On one side, the corporations are actively trying to lock down everything and make it clear I’m just a guest in their theme park and on the other, they’re offering investment safe sequels and remakes of past successes. I’m also kinda tired of Sony’s “AAA cinematic gaming experiences”.
I may also be getting too old cause all excitement of GTA VI fell through the floor once I learned I can’t own a copy without the explicit approval of either console maker. So fuck that…
Honestly, the value for money in the gaming industry is the best its ever been outside of AAA and consoles.
Market spending correlates this, more money than ever is being spent but its focussed on indies, AAA sales have been dropping and big studios are losing money, deservedly.
Yup, I do this as well. Most of my gaming expenses go towards PC games now.
Honestly the cheapest place to be in gaming is PC even with current prices. I could go to my local thrift store and buy a cheap ass laptop for 50 bucks and play and buy a couple really solid games on steam or GOG for another 50. Would that laptop be great? Probably not but you could do it and there’s also the bonus that if you do upgrade to a proper computer all your games still work.
Maybe a decent refurbished gaming laptop for slightly more than $9 hundred dollars or so but yeah, I rather would buy refurbished or used
Finding old gems is difficult, but yep, even with $50 laptop you technically have a lifetime (and 10 times over) worth of old video games available. Graphics and game design was atrocious though.
PC also has uncountable choice of affordable games thanks to the indie scene booming. AAA is dying and Im here for it
It’s the K-shaped economy.
25% stopped buying. 50% are buying and dealing with things as best they can. And the last 25% are rolling in it and paying exorbitant prices to show off and balancing out the losses.
I literally own two ps4s and two copies of a game my SO and I wanted to play together, but neither of us have an active PS+. We would both have to resub just to play it together in the same room. It ended up being cheaper just to buy two copies again on Steam to play it together on PC/laptop. There’s no reason to own a console anymore. Their convenience is completely gone.
took a little longer than expected
People aren’t having kids. Without kids who will play the video-games?
There’s more kids than ever before
Turns out, fucking over your customers is bad for buisness. Who could have guessed?
Not Sony or MS.
I won’t purchase another system because I don’t want to deal with 1) constant downloads- new games, game updates, system updates, data collection 2) logging in all the time 3) not owning a physical copy of a game.
They complicated the fuck out of doing basic things on their systems and I want no part of it. What have they done to keep the consumer interested in their systems?
Microtransactions, ads, no offline modes, you don’t own your own games any more… well they topped all of it with the new console. You buy games that are just empty boxes. Might be a slip of paper in there letting you rent it for $80 flat fee, but they’ll take that game back any time they damn well please.
NOW BEG FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT PEASANT.
They’ve never taken a game back. Everyone is causing a fear that doesn’t exist. I only buy digital, never had a problem.
Did we forget Nintendo shut down their entire store just to open a new one?
This is either a blatant lie or unfathomable ignorance.
Ubisoft has done just that and so have several others. It’s the entire reason for the stop killing games movement.
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
Theres no way you are a “gamer” and have never heard of it.
Exclusives.
Legit the only reason.
I guess it’s also “easier” in a “It just works*” kind of way. Like you can have a pretty good expectation to how well a game will run on your system, and no fiddling with settings, or drivers, etc.
This is a big point for the steam deck and similar handhelds. There’s now a benchmark PC platform.
I’d rather wait for the ps5 emulator(s)
OMG! It’s almost like constantly raising prices just isn’t working out!
It doesn’t matter how expensive RAM gets, what the market is doing, how much AI is driving up component prices, or whether the market is bullish or bearish. At some point, consumers reach a breaking point. When a product becomes too expensive, people stop buying it. They don’t particularly care why it’s expensive. They care whether it’s worth the asking price, and whether they can justify spending that much money on it.
And that’s the problem Sony and Microsoft seem to be running into. Between rising console prices, increasingly expensive games, subscription price hikes, and a growing number of anti-consumer practices, they’ve made gaming an increasingly expensive hobby while giving consumers fewer reasons to feel good about spending their money.
What’s worse is that these companies have spent years alienating a significant portion of their own fan bases. Aggressive monetization, digital ownership concerns, restrictive ecosystems, and the push toward subscriptions have steadily eroded consumer goodwill. You can only squeeze your customers so much before they start questioning whether they want to remain customers at all.
At the end of the day, consumers aren’t obligated to buy a PlayStation or an Xbox just because they bought one last generation. They can stick with their existing hardware, buy fewer games, switch platforms, or walk away from gaming altogether.
You can’t price your way to endless growth, especially when you’re simultaneously giving your customers more reasons not to buy your products. Eventually, the market pushes back. And frankly, it’s hardly surprising that we’re seeing that happen now.
Gaming is not an expensive hobby at all if you stick to good games. The best game in the world runs on a Pentium 2 with 64MB of RAM.
If I have to drop nearly $1k on a gaming platform the money is so much better spent on a PC anyway.
PC ends up being so much cheaper in the long run… Far better game prices and no subscription cancer
Especially since on PC apps like retro arch give you better access to backlogs that these companies aren’t even offering! You want to play PS2 games 4k upscale 60 fps? Can’t do that on PS5. You can surely do it on PC though.
Yeah, being a PC is also a plus, since it isn’t relegated to only being a gaming machine like consoles. Can actually use it for productivity to do things like 3d modeling, video editing, coding, etc.
Gooning…
👍
It’s the same theme everywhere. They build for some kind of non existent luxury market while buyers stretch themselves thin. Now no one has any money left and credit cards are maxed.
We’re not buying what’s being sold. So now what?
Now they blame millennials and gen z kids for ruining gaming
And then they switch to everything being a live service so instead of buying games you just have access to the “whole library” of games (for whatever payment tier you’re in) which they will change and remove games without warning and deleting all of your progress unless you pay them at least $20 a month for cloud saves
Oh and the only games in the games library are ai slop vibe coded games that are unplayable carbon copies of each other
If I bought one it would end up in the pile of gaming devices I don’t use. I have an RG35XXSP for GBA, GB,and GC, a Retroid Mini for PSP, Vita, NES, SNES, PSX, DC, and arcade, a Retroid Pocket Nova for PS2, GC, and N64, an AYN Odin 2 portal for Android games, PC games/streaming, a 5800X3D/7900XTX PC for 4K OLED gaming, and a 5700X3D/9070XT for 1440P widescreen gaming. I’m nearing 660 games on my steam/epic/gog libraries and I have 2TB of rom dumps for all of the retro systems. I’ve spent thousands of dollars to realize I don’t like gaming, I liked hanging out with my friends.
Good lesson to learn. You can possibly still sell all that shit and break even, the way prices are these days.
The handheld PC market is really becoming competition, huh?
Clearly this is because people are just tired of buying physical goods. They want digital consoles!
Honestly, almost every console runs on my PC. Why not just make Microsoft Xbox for Linux?
The hardware now is just an x64 or ARM platform built to a certain spec running a custom OS. Basically, a PC or a tablet or a Mac Mini.
When you look at it that way, the idea of these walled-garden publishers and marketplaces starts to make absolutely zero fucking sense.
The need for consoles is rapidly getting eroded. There’s no proprietary hardware, no special sauce, nothing that they can do that a moderately spec’d PC can’t do, and often for less money.
Where they still succeed is just being easy enough, that they more-or-less just work predictably with barely more effort than running the updates that it prompts the user to run. And they’re fucking all that up with stupid shit like Virtual Gamecards. It’s honestly impressive that Nintendo managed to be the straw that broke my fucking back, would’ve never seen that coming. At least I knew what I was signing up for with GamePass (and they knew exactly why I term’d it when I did).
Stadia tried it.
Ahead of its time, IMO. And honestly should not even have wireless. Might be usable in grandma’s house out in the middle of the woods (unless Grandma’s got a shit-ton of IoT stuff…or one cheap security camera), but just about anywhere else it’s far too unreliable.
The future will be even worse. Have you seen what people have been doing with AI the last couple of weeks. People have decompiled entire games using AI and made PS5 games run on PC natively. Something that took years by multiple devs takes a few days by a single dev with a Claude account. Sony and MS are definitely shitting their pants right now. Their solution will be cloud streaming only consoles.
Good thing there’s already more good games out than I could play if I lived another hundred years.
Yeah! Everything muat be digital and if someone still wants the box it can just have a paper with a code in it.
I mean who would like to play the single player game about 5 years later when the servers are down?
Right?
Lol
Can’t play games when hungry.
You’ve clearly never seen me ignore all my biological needs to play games for 14 straight hours.
Yeah, indicators are indicating. Things they don’t seem to talk about. Used car lots are empty while new car lots are full. The tourist restaurants no longer have waiting lists. Gaming is a luxury expense, as in we don’t need it to survive, while new game prices are higher than they’ve ever been. I’m willing to bet most if not all luxury spending is down.
Prices are high and companies decided shitty AI is better than good people. So jobs are getting scarcer or paying less.
In the words of my kids: we’re cooked fam.
Amateur!
Not just here but everywhere. Everyone (except those with too much) is holding tight to their wallet until trump dies and some stability comes back to the world.
These companies have said plainly that they don’t see prices returning to pre-pandemic levels even if the current economic crisis is resolved. Corpos are too greedy, and the people in power are even greedier.
Just another flavor of rent never goes down.
And yet somehow there are millions of people preordering GTA 6 for 100 bucks lol
its not even a choice for me. i have been unemployed for over 2 years now. since just before he got elected.
Lol as if one person can be the cause of all this
People have unfairly held US presidents responsible for the state of the economy in the past… But in this case Trump’s illegal tariffs and pointless war with Iran absolutely are the cause of current high prices, or at least huge contributing factors. Republicans are a disaster for the economy…
He’s both effect and cause, he wouldn’t be there if the USA didn’t have fundamental social problems, and if he didn’t exist, someone else could have been in his place causing different problems
