this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2026
395 points (99.3% liked)
Technology
80859 readers
3408 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
So that kind of means that the high-end AAA PC market will crash in the next years, right? No new GPUs, production stop for existing GPUs and rising prices for GPU & RAM in combination with inflation and a bad economy ensure that many people can't afford a gaming computer. And that a lot of those younger gamers can't afford to start this hobby.
And that means a shrinking audience for games, which need all this GPU power. If you're an AAA publisher, it kind of looks crazy to invest multiple millions into a game that you can't be sure that your audience will be able to afford to play
I think it'll have the opposite effect. Knowing the hardware won't change in the next year, they don't have to worry about making it compatible with the new cards. They can focus on building upon what they already have.
And as someone that helped pick out a fantastic PC for my little cousin in dec last year, she paid ~500$ for pretty decent hardware, and so far, she hasn't found a game in my library her PC can't handle. Including "wh40k Space Marine 2"
There's plenty of hardware for younger people that want to get into the hobby. You don't always need the absolute latest.
No not really. AMD is still producing cards. Most people play on older or used cards anyways. Maybe like don't make Crysis level Graphics but other than that one year of less GPU releases won't kill gaming. Once the AI bubble bursts NVDIA might have lost a lot of edge over AMD in the gaming market and they'll scramble to get back
AMD hasn't stopped making consumer GPUs yet.
OpenAI owns a good chunk of AMD and AMD definitely also want their share of the AI pie.
I wouldn't look at AMD as some savior that wouldn't ditch consumers for big AI.
Don’t worry, you can Stream It From the CLOUD™️ for the low low price of 6x what a GPU would cost you over 5 years.
yea you can wait in a queue to play your unmodded single player experience game
Unless you lose your income, then all your subscription computer, games and data vanish in a puff of profit. But not to worry, you can buy a backup for... no sorry, you don't have enough money because storage is unaffordable. So say goodbye to it all.
“dont you have phones?”
Yes, but think about the money in mobile and console gaming.... PC gaming was niche even before that and we represent very small percentage of the overall gaming industry. Nobody gives a fuck about us since some time already. Now they just show it to us in daylight.
That's a fact. PC gaming vs consoles is to gaming as Linux vs Winblows is to Computers. It has grown over the years, as has Linux desktop, but not enough to make or break an industry.
It's a weird world we're living in.
It’s not as niche as it used to be. In the last 10 years it’s grown quite a bit compared to what it was 20 years ago when bad pc ports were the norm. Due to AI, I guess console gaming will go back to being the main way people game again.
I agree with you that niche is not the correct word here, but comparing the market share to console and mobile we are like 20-25% of the gamers. That is relatively small in my opinion.
All games will be streamed, with a subscription
Retroarch disagrees. I don’t need your newfangled enshittified slop. I have megaman X and wine.
Any sub 500 dollar gpu can play any game that’s not ray traced unreal engine 5 slop. Lots of games to choose from the last 40+ years. The only limiting factor is ram prices sadly.
Just stop playing games, and they will have no hold over you.
Or code your own, it's simple to code a simple game.
In a million years, I couldn’t code The Last of Us Part 3. I’m at their mercy
Damn, I was hoping people would be happy with 2006 style flash coding.
It's been twenty years, and I still haven't beat Peasant's Quest...
Shhh! Don't give them any ideas!
They’ve already been pushing this for like a decade now. GeForce now has been a thing since like 2015.
This is true. And services like Xbox Game Pass, ugh. I mean, it sounds nice in theory being able to play anything that's on the subscription. But at the same time, you don't own anything! Seems any and all companies are driving consumers in that direction...
Way too late. This has been a talking point for a while. The AI bubble will burst but that doesn‘t mean they‘ll just return to their roots. Those new data centers need a use case and they need a good reason to keep building more.
I guess the silver lining is that this plan B won‘t work out either so we‘ll have to see. But until then we better take good care of our current hardware. It will probably have to last a good while longer.
Cloud computing is the real endgame. The big tech bros want to price consumers out of the PC hardware market (GPUs, RAM, NVMe, etc.) so they can offer a cloud solution via subscription model.
E.g.: https://www.sdxcentral.com/control-plane/jeff-bezos-wants-you-to-rent-cloud-space-instead-of-buying-pcs-for-gamers-thats-truly-terrible/
Annoying bastard. As if destroying mom-and-pop stores and malls weren't enough.
I don't know that they want to, but as economic inequality increases it will happen. Without a middle class, there's not much of a market for high-end bleeding edge gaming PCs
These Chinese are catching up very quickly on GPUs, RAM, etc.
This would be a massive own goal for the existing incumbents.
If the end game is cloud, they will tariff the shit out of these. For exemple i bought slimeVR hard ware, from Europe 280€, from china (190€ + tarif 66€) from China coming from US 240€
Yeah, luckily in Australia, we are getting Chinese stuff without massive tariffs.
I see BYD cars everywhere.
Definitely a shrinking audience for AAA games, but I don’t think it will be too bad gamers overall. Consoles will keep marching forward, as will Valve with the Steam Deck and Steam Machine.
I think the highest of the high end graphics stuff has long since hit diminishing returns. You can do a hell of a lot with yesterday’s hardware and less-than-bleeding-edge process nodes for newer hardware. Consoles have never used bleeding edge GPUs and they’ve always done fine with sales (across the whole market, if not always individually). I think we’re highly unlikely to see a repeat of the 1983 gaming crash.
They do fine in sales because the consoles sold at loss and they make money on game sales.
Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo would love to stop producing consoles and start selling you monthly service via a thin client. They just need a ready to go platform for it to gain enough mass first.
Nintendo has never sold their consoles at a loss. They sell them at a small profit which then grows to a larger profit as the cost of making them decreases.
What happened in 1983?
Home video game sales peaked at $3.2 billion then fell to $100 million, a drop of nearly 97%. This collapse, largely blamed on Atari shoving out low quality games, lasted for 2 years until Nintendo released the NES in North America.
Wow 97% is a lot. Interesting info tho thanks
It wiped out everything State side. Thats why Nintendo was able to come in to begin with. Really interesting if you like gaming history. Its pretty much why 90s kids love Mario and didnt grow up playing something else.