Comment on Valve has raised Steam Deck prices in the US
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 hours agoIt’ll be a few years of pain, but once the bubble pops, we can start to return to normalcy. Take good care of the hardware you have in the meantime.
Comment on Valve has raised Steam Deck prices in the US
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 3 hours agoIt’ll be a few years of pain, but once the bubble pops, we can start to return to normalcy. Take good care of the hardware you have in the meantime.
PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca 2 hours ago
I don’t want to crush people’s optimism (I’m also envious of your viewpoint), but what makes you think any of this will pop and return to normalcy?
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
We’re in this place because AI companies are buying up all the supply, and in order to do that, they have to pay higher than market rates to buy what’s left of the supply available. That means their break-even point is now higher than it would be in a rational economy, and they’re already not profitable. That’s a bubble. It doesn’t matter if it’s tulip bulbs, a business with “dot com” on the end of its name, or a home that no one lives in; if you’re expecting to make money off of the next greater fool, it will pop.
But let’s say it doesn’t. The other way to meet the supply-demand curve and make money off of consumers like you and I who want to buy hardware at prices that we can afford is to increase production so that there’s more supply. If this is the new normal (it’s not), the component producers can increase their manufacturing capacity, and in a handful of years (pessimistically about a decade to build those sorts of factories, which would be brutal if true), they’ll have enough throughput to meet everyone’s demand. And I don’t think those producers are looking to scale up because they also don’t believe this is the new normal. If they believed that, then they’re leaving future profits on the table by not scaling up production to meet demand.