Lol no they won’t. Consumer buying power keeps diminishing as a % of the overall market. Businesses just sell to each other and everyone outside of mass ownership is being turned into a surf for feudalism 2.0 (now with digital circus slop).
Comment on Steam Deck Sales Reportedly Plunge 80% After Price Hikes
HeyJoe@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Good, more of this everywhere please. If nothing sells the prices gotta tank eventually.
eldebryn@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
iamthetot@piefed.ca 3 weeks ago
Feudalism never really went away, just got rebranded.
Carl@anarchist.nexus 3 weeks ago
I actually fear the opposite is true. The long term plan is to force everyone towards cheap dumb terminal systems, (imagine something like a Chromebook) so they can then rent processing power for individual tasks.
For example, Nvidia GeForce Now. You can play a AAA game on max settings on a piece of garbage laptop. Hell, you can even play it on an iPad. All you need to do is rent the processing power from Nvidia, and now you have the power of an RTX 5080 on all of your streaming-capable devices for only a few bucks a day. Easy, right?
But now imagine that for basically all of your computing. Need to edit a video? Oh that’ll be $30 a month to access Premier Pro’s cloud editing, where you stream the program from a server. Need Photoshop? Lucky for you, Adobe has a cloud package where you can stream your Photoshop sessions directly from Adobe’s servers. Only $40 per month. Need to do basically anything besides browse the internet? Might as well memorize your credit card number, because you’ll be needing it a lot.
Software-as-a-service is a blight and is inherently anti-consumer… But it is also where basically every large software company (and most small companies) are going nowadays. And renting processing power is simply SAAS taken to its logical conclusion.
HeyJoe@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I agree completely. Thats why it needs to fail now and fast. If it collapses fast enough there may not be enough time to push the alternative. Stuff like that needs to be a slow adoption for it to work. If the plan is to obvious people will reject it for multiple reasons. I dont think they will have enough money to waste to prop that plan up. Thats just my opinion though, and I hope it’s at least somewhat correct.
rtxn@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Technically true, but saying that “nothing sells” is fucking wild. The prices are astronomical because the components driving up the price (specifically memory and storage) are being vacuumed up by AI.
deliriousdreams@fedia.io 3 weeks ago
They will just stop making stuff consumers want to buy and keep making the crap that AI firms want so they can ride that wave as far as it will go.
We know this because the collective buying power of US consumers isn't propping up the stock market anymore. AI firms are.