Hi, this is a quick post I make to talk about something I keep seeing online everywhere.
A lot of people say that the price increases will force developers to optimize and to work with what hardware they have to make good games and stop using AI gen and DLSS tech as an excuse for poor optimization.
The big problem is that nobody thinks about those people that don’t have the hardware right now.
Those people that were waiting for a discount to buy a PS5 or a PC and now they’re left stranded.
Current-gen consoles are getting really hard to find and a lot of people have been left out, stuck on old-gen and old-games.
playing old-games is not a bad thing but you may have missed the fact that even old consoles are getting reaaally pricey thanks to scalpers and speculators of the market.
This is madness people. Fight AI, don’t embrace it!
Which would you rather have as the dominant platform. Consoles, or cloud gaming?
Because if “market conditions” kill consoles, they will shrink PC gaming hardware sales too, and I don’t want a world where devs target cloud gaming first.
I’m not trying to defend consoles and their predatory practices, but you can’t separate them out. If subsidized console hardware is too pricey to sell, then PC gaming components will absolutely atrophy too.
First, I wasn’t saying it would be market conditions doing it. Honestly I’d love to see all the companies eat the shit they’ve already stepped in.
Preferably it would be people wising up and realizing that they are factually bad compared to PCs. Demand would (in this good timeline) drop to zero overnight and kill them off immediately.
Not sure why you’re so sure that cloud would be the next winner either. Until network speeds get above the speed of light, as long as real time games exist, cloud gaming will never be very popular. It’ll be at best the “gaming you have at home” meme.
The delay will always be too much for any serious game where real time input and reactions are core components.
So I don’t see cloud gaming ever getting huge.
And even in your version, if PCs do take a hit (they already are with the RAMpocalypse), it’s still a smaller hit than being defunct.
But overall the main point is no technology should ever be locked down to one company. If your hardware only plays games allowed by one company, then you’ve got yourself a piece of shit. Period.
Because, in aggregate, gamers are stupid consumers.
I hate to be so blunt, but they have, repeatedly and demonstrably, made uninformed purchases. They buy bad games on launch day, complain, then turn around and do it again. They buy hardware known to be a lemon. Heck, they’ll hardly even look at AMD or Intel GPUs now simply because there’s isn’t a minimum amount of effort made to shop around.
They are going to just buy the cloud gaming subscriptions if that’s all that’s financially viable, and it’s what’s popular in their YouTube feeds or Discord channels or whatever.
Keep in mind that I’m talking about the bulk market. Sure, plenty of us will turn our nose up. But the R&D required to develop consumer hardware requires volume, so updates will get slimmer with less money in the pool. It’s already happened with the AMD 9000 GPUs (as shrinking sales could not justify a big-die 7900 successor).
The average gamer and consumer will never wise up, especially with social media keeping them stupid.