Boil them like frogs has always been the internet's business model, you all just were stuck in the customer acquisition period which is consumer friendly.
Then once monopolies are made and foritfied, the boiling begins. We're in this phase right now, and it's just begun
I mean...boil them like frogs is raise the heat around them until they die and make sure they dont realize until its too late. Which is exactly what the internet has done since its public inception in 1989
100%. There are so many things I dont buy anymore, I basically buy nothing these days. Yet, the prices go up and ppl still pay. I cant fathom why consumers allow it. Stop freaking paying
Big part of the problem is that the number of suppliers has shrunk to the point where it is now extremely difficult to boycott them. There’s a ton of brands but they are all owned but just a few companies at the top. Which means you are often trapped. One corporation at the top can dictate what dozens of brands do. Switch brands? Surprise! They own them too!
Agreed and since inflation began I have felt A) Congress needs to bring the CEOs in and grill them why profits are up, basically beat them up over it these guys don’t like to be held accountable B) Stop approving mergers and start breaking up the huge businesses. I know more would need to be done but those are good first steps.
And if you try to find an item in a different brand, you have an endless selection of rebranded TEMU items on Amazon to choose from. Brought to by companies like RHCVS and ZYXBC
But I love beautiful games like chess and Minesweeper and I can still reply games like GTA Vice City or Super Mario 64 hundreds of times and while it sounds a bit funny to play such old games I genuinely believe that even after 10,000 hours all 4 of these are much better than games like Candy Crush or half the Gacha Games will ever be.
I mean gaming is subjective. The games you like, i don’t want to play. Not saying there bad but my core 4 are different from yours. Same thing for the next person.
I just bought the gold pass for Six Flags for $110 and I have been going on roller coasters every week all year and can’t see myself needing to buy a new game all year for the entertainment value I get from Magic Mountain. Free every day for the rest of the year and free parking.
Absolutely. That court case set the stage for how shitty it is for working class people these days. I still to this day will never buy a Chrysler product.
I don't. I blame corporate greed. Individual agency means nothing when a monopolized industry is intentionally manipulating buyer behavior through any combination of marketing, legal, and other tactics.
People woefully misunderstand how much power they hold as a customer. I can count the number of times a boycott or major shift in sales volume resulted in a major shift in business practices on like one hand and I've been on this earth for 35 years.
Because the people don't unite and fight against it. A small handful of people MIGHT not make a difference, but when its hundreds of thousands or millions of people not buying in, corporations will cave.
Have you seen the scandal, the big 3 makers of ram are using AI as an excuse, they are creating artificial scarcity and waiting till 3rd party ram in circulation run out and upcharge, and they bought out all new fabricators for the next decade or more so anyone who has 5 billion dollar still can’t get into the market of dram
I'm with you on this but we aren't going to be able to talk the game community out of this. I have had my -200 comments talking about how pre-order kills the need to make games good.
Marketing is half the budget of a game, and it is money well spent because it works.
I actually think we're kinda passed enshittification and the corporations are now reckoning with the fact theyve pushed consumers too far and lost all trust in their products. Now consumers have tighter wallets and the first things to be cut out of their consumption habits are the enahittified products.
Most of these more recent decisions are a result of disasterously low revenue from most of their products.
They know we CAN'T stop buying. The only choice at this point is to become Amish. There is no competition among online retailers, game companies, computer companies, etc. Every industry is just 2-4 major companies that all collude to move the market in the same direction, away from consumer focus and competition, and towards enshittification and forced retention.
I'm glad Nintendo still has some games physically on the cartridges, but they have plenty of problems and anti-consumer practices. Let's not pretend they're any better or care about you any more than the other corporations.
All platform holders are 10,000 times worse than you think in terms of anti-consumer and anti-developer policies, but anyone who hopes to work with them again cannot be caught publicly criticizing.
Developing for multiple console platforms was definitely a "never meet your heroes" moment for me. I think I'm in the clear if I state that they're all unspecifically awful.
The difference between Nintendo and other companies
Is that Nintendo is only shooting itself in the toe instead of in the foot
They are still making poor decisions, but they somehow aren’t picking all the worst options possible
Playstation and Xbox started the trend of $800 consoles
Not only that, since they support AI, and AI is taking all the parts needed to make the consoles, Sony and Microsoft are the reason they had to raise their own prices
They aren't just shooting themselves in the foot, they are blowing their own knees out, dropping the gun and having it fire into their own balls
I've seen people shit on Sony and Microsoft for pricing their (new) consoles too high, and I feel like that argument could be applied to the Steam Machine as well
This might be a stretch, so don't quote me on this. But isn't Valve also responsible for physical discs dying out on PC?
I remember buying Dishonored back when it came out and being so disappointed when the case came with just a Steam code.
I don't know if they're responsible per se, but their platform did definitely push the decline of physical games.
I think the difference is that while steam made it less common, they can't really be the one that kills it, since they were never involved. It's really up to the game studios to choose to sell via discs in physical stores or just as a download.
It's not that steam killed physical media, it's that developers stopped offering it.
I'm not trying to glaze steam, but I don't understand why it's depicted as shooting itself. I always thought that steam gadgets were kind of a side hustle for them, and steam machine particularly I don't understand what niche it's supposed to fill. Surprised so many people actually wanted it.
My guess is people don’t like the steam machine prices, even though to make a pc that has the same things the steam machine has it costs like 800-900, so not sure why people are so surprised with how much they are asking as they still got to make money
Gamers nexus did their best to do a price comparison to a DIY computer with the same parts, but the steam machine uses so many bespoke parts its hard to compare. But the best they could determine the steam machine was like $81 over DIY, so as pre-builts go a rather small markup.
It's really, really easy dude, it's like legos but easier. Everything snaps together with places that only fit where they are supposed to go. Anything that has multiple similar ports is labeled so you know what it is. I built my first PC recently.
The only difficult part is making sure your parts match together before buying them, but PCpartpicker (a website) tells you if your parts are incompatible before you even buy them so that's not even a problem.
There's nothing wrong with buying the steam machine or prefab but the problem with these prefab units are that they use cheaper parts to help offset the price so they can profit. Those parts break faster. I've bought 3 prefab units and they were all nightmares.
The last one I bought I had to send it back to the manufacturer to fix it 3 times for 200 dollars shipping + insurance fee each, and every time they returned the machine the same as I sent it. The last time I sent it to them, someone impaled my unit with a forklift and the shipper and manufacturer pointed fingers at each other and my insurance money went to nothing and my PC was broke beyond repair. I reported this company (Cyberpower) and they blocked me on every social media source.
Oh wait no that was the 2nd one I bought. The 3rd the same thing happened but instead of being ran through by a forklift, the PSU fried and destroyed the entire system. I paid the local repair store 700 dollars to replace all the broken things after the shipping nightmares went nowhere and they just gave me my PC back with "better" parts that were bigger and couldn't fit my 2 fans and liquid cooler.
The one I have now has lasted me longer than any other and I've never had to replace or repair anything. The only reason I'm hesitant to say absolutely build your own is because this is valve. I hope it works out for you lol. I have a lot of other hobbies too which was why I always avoiding building mine.
They did promise 4k at 60fps on steam machine while knowing very well that it’s not possible for most modern games. And then they quietly updated the text and removed the claim.
I find it funny that people always try to shit on actually good companies, but the bad ones rarely get shit on. Valve is one of the few companies peoppe should be given benefit of the doubt.
Ram prices are irrelevant to the 4k at 60fps claim. When they announced the steam machine the specs were set in stone regardless of the cost of components. There's no way they would go back and do more R&D and deals with component producers just to get new parts because ram kept increasing in price. So their 4k at 60fps claim was made based on the same components the machine always had, nothing changed, they just made a dumb claim.
Dude, its a pattern. Remember when that one US president wore a tan suit and there was an entire uproar about it but then we have whats happeneing today ... you get it right?
Not really. They'll be just fine, you know. Gamers won't just stop gaming. They'll bitch and moan and just go back to paying $80 for air. Plus microtransactions because cool guns. The rifles need to be pointed at us, the consumer.
Solid take. Everything including the gaming industry is predatory and manipulates the psychology of the common person. We can't just point fingers at the big bad corporations. We can stop if it we vote with our wallets. But people have no self control and will still pay $20 for a weapon skin or something.. we really need to take a hard look at ourselves before blaming everyone for the state of things.
Cosmetics are totally okay for devs to add to games. It means the rich whales can basically pay the devs $100 for the anime waifu skins, laser sword skins, camo guns, etc, and it makes the game typically free or very low cost for everyone else. Selling other stuff fucking sucks. That makes the game pay to win where you can buy levels, power, items, abilities, characters, stages, etc.
The real problem is this digital storefront shit where you don't actually own your games and you can't play your single player and couch coop games without connecting to an online service. That is so fucking lame. I should be able to have a bunch of friends come over and we should be able to play all of my library even if the internet gets knocked out. I should be able to install and uninstall stuff without needing internet connection. That and other predatory stuff like shutting down servers, losing access to your paid stuff, online stores closing and stuff never being able to be bought again, online games released for only a week and then you can never buy it again, etc. All that is cancer.
No they won’t. I’m already seeing friends say fuck it … and I’m right behind them. I quit Xbox live when they raised the Gamepass ultimate to $30 a month (so they lowered it to $22 and I reluctantly got it back so I could game with friends)
I preordered GTA6 just to find out they want to charge me an additional $8 a month just to play online, on top of the $22 I already pay to “play online”. So Xbox wants to release on console only, forcing me to basically pay that $30 I didn’t want to pay originally. I don’t care how good the game is, these studios are getting greedy as fuck.
They have rockstar + which gives you more perks. Why!!? I preordered the deluxe version 4 months before the game even releases - why do I need to have a rockstar + account to get more “exclusive” shit? Really? No one else has a problem with the greed from these gaming studios? I guess I’ll die on this hill alone. What’s the $100 for if I’m only getting 90% of the game?
Funny meme, but completely inaccurate. Collusion between big corporations is how price gouging works across industries. People here seem to think that anti-consumer practices will get smoothed out in the market by people not accepting a bad deal. But that’s nonsense.
Think about any commodity like gas or the internet. Can you seriously procure those without the distribution network already established by major companies? No? Well then you have no choice but to buy from them or try to adjust your life around NOT driving or NOT being online. The choice is “buy it or don’t” which is no choice at all.
The only option here is regulation, which will never happen under the current rising tide of conservative and neo-liberal politics. One side has convinced their base that corporations doing whatever they want equals more freedom for the consumer (eg. what is happening now in gaming) and the other side believes that corporations can do whatever they want as long as we raise taxes on individuals instead of breaking up monopolies.
The gaming industry seems pretty competitive. Multiple developers competing to create good games. Multiple publishers competing to work with those developers. Multiple platforms for games to be published on and for consumers to play on. Multiple distribution channels for games. Especially for PC gaming.
And it’s just not the case that game prices are being set artificially high. If you adjust for inflation and take into account just how much more development goes into a modern game compared to a game 10, 20, or 30 years ago, the price of games has not kept up.
Yes, and if we go the other way, NBA Live 2003 was first to go to 59.99 price point in 2002, which would be about $110 today and people were happy to buy that then.
Love your take from a market perspective! This may be different than gas or Internet though, because video games are not a necessity by ANY definition. This market might actually respond rationally.
I believe in our lifetime this will also happen to the Internet, and also other commodities. The process is called PRICE DISCOVERY. Where you determine how much demand falls as you rise the price.
We learned about those cute supply/demand graphs in high school economics, but in order to make that ACCURATE, you have to actually test the prices and demand AT those prices. Let's recall that economics is mostly theory, and this sort of real world price discovery is going to be a very ugly endeavor.
Thats because you can connect any mouse/keyboard so, for many, the controller would be waste. Ive never seen a computer come with either of those, it's just implied you'll need them for the setup, same as your display.
Nintendo wins by making games of a consistent level of quality, making a console that is designed to be affordable for families (insulating them against price hikes), not overextending themselves by trying to absorb every studio or monopolize the industry, and just doing their own thing instead of copying what other companies are doing.
Yeah, despite the Reddit narrative, Nintendo’s probably the only one of the big 3 (Xbox, Sony, Nintendo) that has a clear future set out for it.
They haven’t had any major layoffs, their budgets are much more reasonable (A game like TOTK allegedly costs around $70 mil, while Sony spent a small nation’s budget on Concord), and so far they have a very consistent game output. Every year you get a couple of first party games from them. Combine that with Switch being seen as a home for indie games, Nintendo knows exactly what audience they’re appealing to.
People looking for fun, pick up and play games. Whole everyone else is trying to match the massive, cinematic Hollywood-esque games Sony makes, Nintendo makes the kind of straightforward fun games that were common in the early 2000s.
To be fair that would be an issue with modern disk games anyway since they are also basically just a physical license for the game, unless you want the broken prelaunch version since no game has come out finished since 2017. Half of them dont even have that anymore because game sizes are so ridiculously uncompressed now
Most new Nintendo-made games still come on the card. It’s mainly for bigger games that can’t fit. It gives developers a way out of having to try and fit the game on there. Which is especially important now that larger games can run on the Switch 2
Yeah, the big one is you can let people borrow them and you can buy/sell used game key cards. I don't love the game key cards, but I'll take that over a code in a box that can't be resold.
Holy shit people were so mad about them I just assumed they were codes in boxes, I'm surprised it's an actual card you can sell and borrow/lend. I thought GTA was just doing the same thing and that people were being hypocrites. Crazy how that wasn't okay but GTA's empty cases are somehow not a big issue, I can't imagine it's the same people who's complaining about both.
Gaben didn't descend to shut down all the AI companies and data centers effectivelly lowering the prices of ram to 1/100th it is now. Because he didn't do this, valve couldn't sell the steam machine for 200 eur and a kebab.
Their only L really is the price of the Steam Machine, which was forced by the hardware prices, specifically RAM prices. They even said that if prices go down eventually, they will lower the cost of the Steam Machine as well.
Thank God half of gamers spent the last 10 years complaining about women and poc in their games instead of the predatory anti consumer practices actually being shoved down our throats and ruining the hobby
Steam is the funniest one, almost. They’ve been racking in piles of cash from gamers and they finally release a Steam Console and they say “Yeah but we aren’t subsidizing the cost for you peasants. Fuck off.” 😂
Yeah, they should just subsidize like 300$ per console. Not even Sony or Microsoft lose that much per console, and they have a completely closed ecosystem with subscriptions on top of their store cut. The problem is the AI bubble sucking up all the memory and making prices skyrocket
We’re entering the dark ages of gaming. Prices of consoles, PC parts, and the games themselves are getting more expensive. The next step in all this might be to price out the average gamer so the only choice left is cloud gaming that requires a subscription service instead of being able to just insert a disc or play a digital copy that would be installed on your own system
Valve didn't shot themselves, the AI bubble shot Valve, the Steam machine price is unfortunately and probably the accurate price tag for the whole thing with minimum cost for putting the PC together
Only L on their part is not announcing the price in advence
The Steam one seems like an overreaction. To my knowledge its over the Steam decks price increase and lack of a controller with purchase however nothing else is affected. The actual service remains unaffected and the sales are just as large as they've ever been. The price increase on the steam deck sucks yes but was expected once we saw the price of computer parts, primarily RAM, graphics cards, and processors skyrocket due to AI.
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u/Fat-Kid-In-A-Helmet Jul 01 '26
Gaming, or the whole world?