Console price increases
Game Pass/PSN price increases
$80+ Nintendo games
Micron axing consumer RAM sales
Nvidia cutting consumer GPU production
Gee, I wonder why…
- Aging generation of console hardware
- Prices higher than ever, including at launch
This is a pretty fucking easy one to crack, fellas.
Well yes, but also tariffs and the rising cost of components, such as memory are going to play into this. It’s only going to get more expensive.
À complete mystery. We probably need more AI.
That and diminishing returns on new consoles.
“Oh no, I won’t be able to play- wait, no, the game will be on both consoles.”
I don’t Believe it has anything to do with the age of the hardware. The PS5 and especially the PS5 Pro are very capable machines. And PlayStation had an amazing sale this black Friday. I just think people literally don’t have money to spend on something like that right now.
I mean, they’re pretty good, but they’ve also been out for a while. I think that a lot of the people that want and can afford it have been buying it over the past couple years. Most people don’t tend to wait several years to get new consoles. I do, but even I’ve had my series s since early 2023. The tariffs can’t be helping.
Capitalism loves using supply and demand to justify anything… up until it’s time to lower the price to adapt to low demand.
also other than Nintendo a serious lack of exclusives/zero console sellers.
the PS5 has what? maybe 15 exclusives? less? whats’ the point? There’s nothing out on the PS5 that makes me say “I need to own this console” especially when many of their “exclusives” are now available on PC. I just wish they gave us Bloodborne.
I’ve owned every Playstation console with the exception of the PS5. I even had the PSP and the Vita which I adored. but yeah the PS5 is the first playstation console where I’ve said I don’t need to own it.
the PS5 has what? maybe 15 exclusives? less? whats’ the point? There’s nothing out on the PS5 that makes me say “I need to own this console” especially when many of their “exclusives” are now available on PC.
Last time I booted up my PS5, I was teaching my son how to play Minecraft on PC. I was going to hop into the world he had made on my PC from the PS5…and that’s when I discovered Sony locks out all network multiplayer behind PSN, even just over LAN.
At this point, I might just sell the fucking thing. My PC (5800X3D/7900XTX/32GB) can run PS3 games just fine via RPCS3 with a Dualsense controller, and that’s 99% of the reason I paid for PSN. But even then, playing PS3 games on the PS5 is just streaming from rackmounted PS3 hardware based in some Sony datacenter. So I’m not even sure why I still have it. I don’t play on it enough these days to justify paying nearly $30/mo for PSN when I can just get PS exclusives on Steam and buy cheap PS3 games on eBay to rip and play on my PC.
The PS5 has incredibly capable hardware, but it’s so locked down that it’s impossible to enjoy anything about it without paying for PSN.
I am very much on Team PC for video games, but the fact that consoles are a closed, locked-down system — something I typically think of as a drawback — can be a real strength for some game applications.
If you want to play a competitive multiplayer video game on a level footing, you don’t want people modifying the software on their system to give them an advantage. There are all sorts of companies with intrusive anticheat software on PC trying doing a half-assed job trying to make an open system work like a closed one. The console guys have more-or-less solved this.
And then there’s the hardware aspect. There is an entire industry on the PC selling “gamer” hardware that aims to give a player some degree of an edge. Higher resolution monitors with faster refresh rates driven by rendering hardware that can render more frames. Mice that report their position more-frequently. Hardware with extra buttons to invoke macros. A lot of that industry is built around figuring out ways to inject pay-to-win into competitive multiplayer video games.
I’m pretty sure that the great majority of video game players do not really want pay-to-win in the competitive multiplayer video games that they play. Consoles simply do a much better job there.
Now, if you take competitive multiplayer out of the mix, then suddenly the open hardware and software situation on the PC becomes an advantage. You can mod games to add features and content and provide a more-immersive experience. It means that I can play all sorts of older games and have a experience that improves over time when doing so.
But a lot of people do want to play competitive multiplayer games, and unless something major changes, consoles have a major area where they are simply better-suited to gaming.
Two ways that it might change:
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If single player gaming displaces competitive multiplayer. My guess is that single player games with sophisticated video game AI will tend to increasingly encroach on that, though not overnight. Multiplayer saw one huge boost in the past two decades or so, which was widespread, high-bandwidth low-latency network access. But I think that that’s probably a one-off. I can’t think of any huge future multiplayer-specific improvements like that that will come along. And I can imagine a lot of future improvements to video game AI.
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If PCs get some sort of locked down trusted computing environment, probably with its own memory and processor, that runs alongside the open emvironment. Basically, part of a console in a PC.
But absent one of those, I think that there are going to be gaming areas where the console excels that the PC does not.
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I usually like nintendo type systems and would scrounge together money for one for me and my wife to play together when they released one. We aren’t even trying for the switch 2. The from launch 80 dollar game releases, paired with baked in upgrade costs for games we already have and subscriptions for everything in between; it’s as a whole not worth it.
Steam Deck can emulate Switch
Well let’s see, what’s on the market in the video game console vertical?
- Playstation 5, initially released in 2020 with 84 million units shipped. Still not an amazing software library, it’s been since the PS3 that I’ve heard of anything on Playstation that even made me want to go over to a friend’s house to play that with them.
- Xbox Series S and X, again released in 2020, only 24 million units sold between the two models, and I’m amazed that many people bought one given how many balls Microsoft’s gaming division has dropped since the 360, to include naming the consoles the “Series S and X” immediately after the “One S and One X”. They’ve all but announced they’re exiting the entertainment-capable software market entirely; it wouldn’t surprise me if they removed the ability to render knock knock jokes from TrueType fonts at this point.
- Switch 2, the only main console that came out this year, in 6 months it’s sold 10 million units pretty much entirely out of force of habit I think because we’re entering our third human generation of “You buy a Nintendo for children.” The library consists of $80 games, most of which are Switch games that run at higher resolution and frame rates. And they’ve been egregiously anti-consumer this generation, like, more than usual and that’s saying something. Oh, and doesn’t the console fall out from between the joycons now?
- Steam Deck, released in
20032023, has sold some 4 million units, it almost doesn’t count as it’s a gaming laptop with face buttons and joysticks instead of a keyboard, is also here.
For some context:
- Playstation 4 sold 117 million units
- Xbox One sold 58 million
- Switch sold 154 million
Prices are going up, fewer games are being made, “monetization” is getting more and more egregious, and again I wonder how many people are buying Nintendos for children out of sheer force of habit.
Steam Deck, released in 2003
🤔
Yeah, you know, they were trying to get Half Life 2 out as a launch title but the game was delayed?
You can stop hitting them. They’re already dead.
But seriously this was a great breakdown.
homer-simpson-“worst-so-far”-meme.jpg
US spending on video game consoles fell 27% last month, marking the worst November in two decades as tariffs and rising component costs pushed prices to record highs.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/05/trump-defends-toy-tariffs/83455040007/
Then Trump suggested children are capable of cutting back on a basic school supply: pencils.
“No, I’m not saying that,” Trump when asked whether Americans can expect to see empty store shelves in the future. “I’m just saying they don’t need to have 30 dolls. They can have three. They don’t need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.”
Nonetheless, Trump disputed that his comments should be interpreted as an acknowledgement that prices for Americans are going to increase as a result of his sweeping universal tariff on products imported to the United States.
“No. I think tariffs are going to be great for us because it’s going to make us rich,” Trump said.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0fEyMPhDk0
We’re going to become so rich we’re not going to know where to spend all that money.
We’re going to be so rich…maybe not 250 pencil rich though.
When he says us and we he means his cabal and himself
Other countries drag their leaders for less
Playstation still wants to play the bullshit exclusive game so I will never buy a playstation again. They are getting better, but I won’t support that behavior. Epic games can take a walk too.
Switch 2 is selling at a faster rate than Switch 1 did at this stage in its lifecycle. The OG Switch is on track to be the best selling console of all time.
I’d imagine that this is entirely happening because xbox has collapsed amongst Microsoft loudly conceding this console generation and heavily suggesting future support for their consoles will be limited. This is catastrophic in an era when many people buy digital copies of games and do not want to be locked in to a dead platform. I bought a 2nd hand Series S as a budget console but will only buy games for it on deep discount or if they have a low sticker price; the result of that has been that it has turned into a retro games platform for me to play SSX3 and the old Dead Or Alive games.
PS5 Pro is too expensive for limited gains while the market for the OG PS5 will be saturated by this point. I’d guess that the release of GTA6 will increase sales next year though.
Switch 2 was selling super well, but it was out competed by the PS5 (probably due to sales) and almost lost to the Nex Playground (probably due to cost again) according to news reports.
https://gamerant.com/video-game-hardware-consoles-sales-2025-switch-2-ps5-xbox/
That seems to be a sign that the console/games are priced too high.
Hellooooo Steam backlog
I’m doing my part by buying used xbox games on ebay. I was going to get a ps5 but… nah fuck that.
Well, yeah. The worst of the 2600 is more playable than the new crud.
In those figures, do they count standalone VR headsets as consoles? Cuz they basically are. May not be the same shape, but they do the same thing. And would fill the same role in christmas shopping regards. With the Quest 3s going down to 200 USD for black friday, I have to imagine there were some units sold there.
In the past I think they have, I remember the Quest 3 being a top selling console when it released.
The best I could find this year was this article, but I’m not sure if they’re just mentioning the VR headset sales in the same article.
https://www.thegamebusiness.com/p/ps5-ea-sports-fc-26-and-hogwarts
