Congratulations to PCs for winning the console wars :3

As a PC gamer concerned about game preservation: good. Consoles are just walled hardware fiefdoms.

FAFO

"Computers that are just for games, that you can't do anything else on... And we say what games, and also for lots of them you have to keep paying us to play them... And you can't have any physical ownership of them anymore".

This is called demand destruction.

And the PC master race wins the blood war

Maybe most people who would want to buy said systems can't afford 1600 dollars for one when they can't even afford groceries and gas? Huh, just maybe.

(Used pricing from GameStop)

I looked at buying a ps5 for the first time since it came out a couple weeks ago because I really wanted to play LOTR War in the North again.

Its twice as expensive as it was when it came out.

I just went home and grabbed my old ps2.

Its absolutely insane that this console is so expensive right now.

It is also the last PS I would get because I want physical discs.

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.

I hardly ever use my Sony Netflix box anymore.

Mostly because I stopped buying from them digitally because they won't refund a game if you've downloaded a single solitary bit of data, and now they won't sell physical copies so...

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?

Wait, can they still be peasants if they're becoming marginal?

I can get a fairly good gaming PC for a thousand dollars why would I pay $900 for a games console that's basically worse in every way?

Play box, x-station 400, who cares

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?

Turns out, fucking over your customers is bad for buisness. Who could have guessed?

I wonder how gta will affect those numbers, and how those numbers will affect the pc release.

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.

Gee, I wonder why!