Actually, I have bad news for you… prices are likely going to go up from the AI bubble plus the upcoming RAM shortage.
gointhefridge@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
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.
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Prices are not going to come down. If they could get a Switch 2 in your home for $300, they would. The component parts are too expensive.
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 day ago
X (doubt)
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.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
thermal_shock@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Unless you have insider information/proof, this is just speculation and I don’t believe it based on their past greedy little money grabs.
gointhefridge@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
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.
Rooster326@programming.dev 1 day ago
The Steam Machine is just about the only “Console” that can not be a loss leader. It’s just a PC.
If it’s too good of a deal - people will just buy them for offices.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I was looking at getting a Switch 2 MicroSD card for a gift and shit’s bonkers, yo.
I get they changed the standard for the Switch 2, but $300 for 1TB?
CmdrShepard49@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Prices won’t fall, not until the AI bubble bursts and the related industries shift focus back to consumer-level goods.
At best, you could hope prices remain steady for a few years and real-world incomes slowly rise to match this new normal.
Rooster326@programming.dev 1 day ago
And how is this going to happen when nobody has any money?
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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 either 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.
CosmoNova@lemmy.world 1 day ago
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.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
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.