Nah. I’m sure SD had a similar development time, we’re just aware of it at this point, so it feels “delayed”.
It’ll be done when it’s done. Declaring it a lost cause just because the solo Dev hasn’t whipped it up in a year or two is misguided, to say the least.
That doesn’t feel too surprising. There’s nothing really new to buy in terms of hardware; likely everyone who wanted a specific console now has one. And others like myself are waiting: I want a Switch 2 OLED, but that’s not available yet.
And there’s also the fact that many game releases now suck, with no real must-have titles for console to boost sales right now. And new physical titles are expensive.
It’s just a dip caused by a combination of factors. If GTA VI releases next november, the chart is going to look like a rocket taking off.
PlayStation 1 had only just come to America a month or two prior, and the n64 wouldn’t exist for another year. Basically, it was just arcade games that were popular at that point, some snes games, and some ps1 games in Japan.
Imagine “gaming” being just donkey kong, street fighter, mario, and contra, and a ps1 cost $300 usd.
“Gaming” then was about as popular as virtual reality now.
Good, maybe now prices for them will finally come back down to reality. $500 for a switch is bonkers and $800 for an Xbox of any variety is outright criminal.
They’re too greedy to let things go at cost now, they know parents and fans will get it anyway. Look at parking alone for disney world, like $175.
Greed has ruined companies. Nintendo won’t sell bubble bobble for NES, I have to find a used cartridge or do without. They don’t sell nor support it. So I use a rom and they cry about that. They don’t get it both ways, fuck Nintendo. I’ll never stop seeding/sharing my massive rom collection, switch games included.
The funny thing about Disney, and believe me, I don’t want to defend them here, is that they’ve found ways to admit and fit far more people into the park as demand rose for a thing that inherently has fixed supply. More or less the same thing is happening with GPUs and memory right now as AI demand is sucking up so much supply and they can’t be produced any faster. The supply can’t increase, so the prices go up. They have to. Nintendo and Sony both know they stand to make more money after the fact if they sell you a cheaper console, but they can’t lose $200 per unit either, or there’s very little chance they make a profit on it ever.
Unless you have insider information/proof, this is just speculation and I don’t believe it based on their past greedy little money grabs. They’re going to milk it until everyone has one. There are people who have multiple switch 1s, different switches for certain games, colors, modded ones, customized ones. The list goes on. The goal is to extract money from your account to theirs any way possible.
I mean, $7/month just to backup your games. Why is there no local way to copy a fucking file?
As far as Disney, don’t care. Unless there is armed security guarding your shit, $175 is just extortion.
Insider information of what? Increases for memory and GPUs are covered by basically every news outlet that covers tech right now. That $7 to copy a file is exactly why they’d want to get a Switch into your home for cheaper if they could. You get multiple Switches in the same home by making it accessibly priced, and Nintendo knows that. Walled gardens suck, and that’s where their money is made. Right now, Nintendo is absorbing some extra costs above and beyond where they expected (like tariffs) by charging more for accessories rather than raising the price of the base unit, but there’s a good chance they lose their stomach for keeping the Switch 2 price where it is as we run into more of these supply issues.
As far as Disney, don’t care. Unless there is armed security guarding your shit, $175 is just extortion.
Even ignoring the fact that cars and parking them is about the least efficient use of land you can have, the only alternative is that they keep prices low but then there’s a lottery or a waiting list to get in. No secret as to why prices just went up.
We all want things to cost less, but as adults, there are realities to acknowledge as to why they can’t. I never said they’re not making profit on their hardware, but their actions (announcing prices and then raising them above their competitors after tariffs were revealed) indicate that their margins are probably not very high; marketing one price and then changing it is a tangible expense that companies don’t like to do if they don’t have to. This report that we’re commenting on shows that even being the only new console this year is not enough to make it a hot holiday item.
Consoles are normally sold at a loss if I remember correctly. Companies tend to bet on people buying enough games to make up the difference, because generally people do. Most people aren’t sitting on a console with only 3 or 4 games for it.
Switch 2 has a much healthier margin than Switch. Nintendo is actually making money on the hardware this time. They don’t have the lineup or the services to justify the hardware being a loss leader and won’t until probably 2027.
Here’s to hoping the Steam Machine is $799 or less.
The principal of supply and demand still applies, they will cut prices up until the point they either go out of business or they find a sufficient number of buyers.
Companies like Nvidia, Micron and Samsung are currently chasing massive profits off enterprise customers, but will come crawling back to consumers once the AI bubble bursts (assuming they survive the resulting market collapse).
As an example, if Nvidia can turn one TSMC wafter into one AI accelerator that they can sell for $40K, or into ~5 RTX 5090s they can sell for $2K/ea - they will sell as many of the $40K cards as they can, and only use failed wafers to try and satiate RTX 5090 demand.
But if there are no more AI customers, they will be forced to drop prices in order to shift more volume. If they can’t drop prices further due to wafer costs, then they will pass up wafer allocations from TSMC.
If TSMC sees too many wafers free up - they will be forced to drop prices to all customers (AMD, Apple etc.) to try and pick up the slack. They in turn will need to drop prices in order to try and increase sales volumes.
This will have a downwards pressure on prices and a “return to the mean” moment for tech prices. It will just be a painful couple of years until we get to that point, and honestly with the way things are currently going - it will be the least of our worries.
You think prices will fall now that there are giant new capable data centers everywhere? AAA Gaming will become synonymous with cloud gaming and the hardware to run games at home won‘t be produced anymore. They’ll build even more data centers instead. It‘s a much more useful business model to establish tech feudalism for the overly rich.
Data centres aren’t run by hardware manufacturers. When Nvidia/Micron/Samsung run out of enterprise corporations to bilge funds out of, they will return back to selling to consumers.
Does this mean that things will 100% return to how they were in the ‘Before Times’? No, let’s be real - the surplus of under-used data centres will definitely result in a push towards cloud gaming, online experiences and the like - but in an ideal scenario we would end up with more choice and not less.
But again, this all hinges on the current AI bubble bursting in the near future - followed by a pretty bad recession/depression.
I don’t think its necessarily the prices that are the issue but what you’re getting for it. Games have historically not kept up with inflation and still cost less than what we were paying for SNES carts in the 90s, but now they’re the 15th sequel of some franchise and are only half finished so there isn’t much draw for customers.
We’re in the middle of the latest episode end-game-capitalism. Of course things are gonna be bad but nobody will blame the wealthy people because their job has become dependent of those same people.
Those are all physical devices though. I agree platform exclusives aren’t good for anyone but the companies but it does seem like most are moving away from that model with these newer generation consoles.
This will probably be a controversial take but physical media shouldn’t exist in 2025.
Ownership of games SHOULD exist and so should multiple competing store fronts. We need to normalise DRM free digital copies rather than ewaste blu-ray discs that’ll one day degrade and become useless.
Almost got me with that hotness but I wouldn't necessarily disagree. In a perfect world, we would just own digital copies free and clear of any remote tampering.
Trouble is, physical media is relevant now because companies can't nuke your access to it once their licensing deals expire, like they can with digital streaming services and storefronts. Even digital copies are physical, they have to sit on a hard drive somewhere, and even those degrade over time. So let's say we own the hard drive, that's great, but I still need to transfer it once the disk/flash dies. It's unquestionably more efficient than disc media tho.
I guess it’s not so much the discs I’m against (apart from the fact they do deteriorate faster than other types of storage) but the fact that there’s no option to retrieve and backup the data on said discs. Although saying that, most games require huge downloads to install anyway so is there even any benefit or security in ownership of physical media if it’s still useless without a significant download from a server than could theoretically cease to exist at any moment?
Well then I think your beef has nothing to do with the form of the media, but with DRM and lack of transferability. And I totally get the anxiety of having something and not wanting to lose access to it, but such is the nature of all games, movies, shows, books. Everything humans create has a shelf life and we're in a neverending fight against entropy.
I agree in principle but digital doesn’t come without drawbacks. It’s pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good. A service like Steam is a decent solution but that’s still a point of failure outside your direct control. A physical disc is simpler to keep track of in a lot of ways. If it gets damaged you lose one game, not potentially hundreds or thousands.
There’s nothing stopping you from having multiple backups of your own game installers though if the DRM free options are there. It’s not too unfeasible for people to have dedicated offline storage in the form of a NAS or even just an external drive. Yes this has the same waste implications as discs but they’re at least multipurpose and have a longer lifespan. Obviously we should never rely entirely on a server that’s out of our control for backups to our purchases.
That’s still physical media, though. Just one you “create” yourself. You could say “This isn’t a hunk of plastic, therefore I’m not contributing to e-waste”… but that only matters if you decide to throw away the game after making a copy.
Drives still fail eventually, just like disks and cards.
By that logic, no media exists (and also always exists) as it occupies a superposition of both being on and not being on physical media.
What the fuck are you talking about? It’s both digital media and physical media. They can not exist without each other. The only difference being that physical media bought in a store is permanently stored on its own medium… and considering we’re talking about permanent storage anyways… what difference would that make?
It’s pretty difficult to keep a .exe file accessible for 30+ years even if your intentions are good.
That’s not really true. GOG installers are the obvious option, but even many of the games on Steam don’t actually have DRM and can be backed up.
And if you really want to you can get cracked versions. For older games, there are compatibility projects like DDrawCompat and dxwrapper. The more popular games have extensive usability mods (support for higher resolutions, bugfixes, UI scaling) and really popular ones have modern engines such as Augustus for Caesar III (originally released in 1998).
For example you can run the Windows 95 version of Simcity 2000 Special Edition on Windows 10 (and I believe W11 works too) on a 1440p monitor:
Don’t get me wrong, I get the point of having physical copies (I have an extensive physical book library), but for video games, digital ownership (be it legal like with GOG or certain Steam games or using alternative approaches) is the way forward.
There is no digital store for DRM-free digital movies and TV shows, and I hate it. Hollywood’s crying about the implosion of its industry, but they’ve operated as a cartel that stands in the way of stuff like this for a long time.
I thought we were MAYBE heading that way in the days of iTunes but then the oh-so-convenient streaming came along and entirely killed the majority’s desire to actually own movies.
At least music is a medium that managed to transition to DRM-free digital storefronts, even if it is barely used.
I have mixed opinions on physical media but. I’m starting to agree with you on this point. In the past I’m all for having the option to buy it on disc/cartridge but when you have to install the game anyway and download a day one patch it kinda defeats the purpose of it. Also offline mode on consoles if just a joke at this point.
In the mean time, while we wait for IP law to fix itself over the course of decades, or probably just never: I have physical copies of most of my games.
… on an SD card, that I bought, formatted, and moved files onto.
Steam lets you make game backups, GOG releases are basically portable… make a backup, compress it, put it on a backup drive.
… and thats all without my pirate hat and pegleg on.
What if usb sticks lasted hundreds of years, were still the same price or cheaper, were faster to read and write, and you could buy games that shipped to you on them, that you could potentially also add patchers onto? Like they would always have the original version on them, but has enough space to periodically add updates on over the years, so that you could revisit them.
And they were made in a shape that wasn’t awkward. And had good label surfaces. Throw them in a drawer or display them in a stack somehow.
And you didn’t have to install the game on your pc, you could just run the drive as is.
This is something we could potentially have in the future, if companies stopped being such short sighted greedy bitches about everything.
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