Don’t worry. Not much later and you won’t be able to buy any kind of console or even a PC at all. You will only get “terminals” that are basically paper weights without the necessary subscriptions.
“You will own nothing and be happy” won’t stop at games, movies and music. Better hope your 20€ basic office PC subscription won’t become 50. Oh, and surly you’d love it if we baked some ads into “your computer”. What? You want to play games? Better pay even more to rent 1/100 of some graphics card in some server room. Aren’t we nice? That card costs like 10,000 bucks, surly paying 50 a month is a steal, no?
Just think about all the fucked up shit you could do to screw people over like this. How much money you could squeeze out of them…
Thinclients. time is a circle
im not 100% caught up with the nintendo situation, but this sounds very similar to:
- have a switch 2
- games cost 80 dollars
- you had 4 games yesterday and bought another one used
- nintendo accuses you of piracy and bricks your device
- you have 0 games and no console today
If it’s any consolation, there will always be people like me making open source games, free for the public. Though I’m only focused on PC games.
It’s 2026, I own a PC using parts up to a decade old. Its worth less than 2 weeks of minimum wage. All the games are digital, I just got 15 of them for under £80 and can backup the installer to an external drive.
I can even get a refund a few weeks later if I don’t like one of the games.
It’s 2017, I’m using a state-of-the-art PC with a Ryzen 1700X and DDR4 RAM.
It’s 2025, I’m upgrading my obsolete PC to a Ryzen 5700X3D to get a little more life out of it on the cheap, sticking with DDR4 RAM instead of upgrading to DDR5.
It’s 2033, I’m using my PC with a Ryzen 5700X3D and DRR4 RAM that is now much faster than anything that can be bought in the current market at anything approaching a reasonable price. I am desperately hoping the capacitors on my 16-year-old motherboard continue to hold out.
I am desperately hoping the capacitors on my 16-year-old motherboard continue to hold out.
please don’t give me new financial nightmares. I’m already poor.
(In reality, I have another AM4 motherboard I could use in a pinch. It would just be inconvenient because it’s micro-ATX instead of mini-ITX and I’d have to shift my home server to something even older.)
(Also, motherboards are the one component that isn’t really going up in price.)
You could also just replace the capacitors. Normally it’s not worth doing because the time investment isn’t worth the cost of another motherboard but these days you never know what they’re going to do with pricing.
PC repair shops are back in business! Repairing motherboards worth nothing because it’s the only way to use the RAM which is worth £7500
ok. but my financial nightmares. I have this laptop and can’t afford something new. I wanted to pay for a deposit for a house before the tech industry collapsed.
You can get laptops for under £200 at CEX here. Sometimes under £100. They will still run UT1999 at 60FPS. Probably 144FPS if it supports outputting that high over what ever port it has for an external display.
We are going retro!
Aren’t motherboards fairly cheap in comparison? If it gets bad enough they may still be making DDR4 motherboards in 2033…
They each cost 80 dollars
Plus 5 dollars a year subscription each. And you still have to pay the rest of the year for the game that Sony took away.
But seriously, how hard is it just not to buy?
It’s not like sony/or any company automatically takes it off from our credit card, though they would really like to.“Just don’t buy it” works great in a world where you dont have to pay for every meager comfort you can find.
And thats why those prices will keep on getting higher and higher. People are still willing to pay for those.
They keep getting higher because the people selling them keep raising the prices. Do not discount their contribution by solely attributing blame to the consumer.
They have remarkably little control over markets, despite what your microeconomics 101 class might tell you.
Of course they raise the prices and a single individuals contribution is completely non existent on the market.
But still the most simple solution remains. We might argue that one has to buy food, so they are forced, but luxury goods can very easily be left in the store. Of course it will have absolutely no effect on the overall market, just on their own wallet.
Yes, we can not buy entertainment and simply buy essentials. We can only go to work, come home, eat, and sleep.
But thats a very boring existence, and offering that as an alternative instead of demanding change actively speaks very poorly of your opinion of people.
The world is increasingly monetized, and simply refusing to participate will not change that. It will just cut you off more and more from the world. Which is worse for everyone.
I do agree that would be rather boring existence, but there will always be low cost activities or even ways to lower the cost of already existing activities. Like in current context, simply buying later when theres a sale and not buying on release day.
But i am advocating for a change, through the only means people have in their control. We have no control over markets, we have no control over what the companies decide to do. It’s even arguable how much control we have over our government and in extensions how much control they are willing to exert over companies. But we can choose where we spend our money.
Yes, world is increasingly monetized. Refusing to participate in it will not have any effect, it requires active effort against it to change it and yes that does mean giving up some comforts, but on a bright side. Organizing rallies and looking for like minded individuals on a local level works rather well to bring people together or even just convincing people not to go along with the monetization.
And there’s an optional battle pass on top of that, plus separate purchasable cosmetics like an $80 Horse armor…. Wait a minute…
As that stuff gets more expensive, they’ll make it easier to get microloans.
And even though you don’t need to get the battle pass, it has items that are meta-defining and you can’t viably play in online multiplayer without them without getting crushed.
And micro transactions
It’s 2029 and nobody buys a PS6 because it sucks.
A power vacuum creates a new market.
All is well.
The new competitors are promptly acquired by Microsoft, and for some reason, Oracle.
They get folded into Xbox and bankrupted respectively.
Yeah let’s all sulk and be angry
I’m not sulking, and I’m not even angry at this stage.
I’m just saying that capitalism killed the free market like 70 years ago, and it has been doing a swan song at best ever since.
It will not save you without you doing something. Ditch consoles, go PC.
Don’t forget the:
“Battle Pass”
The cosmetic micro transactions
the online play subscription
The in-game store that opens before the main menu
The in-game adverts
The day 1 dlc
The companion app on your phone
The invitation to join them on social media
The discord server you need to join to find out of the servers are down
All your games are played by AI, you just get to watch.
I mean, Twitch seems to do well…
At least you don’t need to own the game to watch someone play it. There’s a world where streaming a game would count as copyright infringement.
ContentID for games, coming soon
Drink verification can
At this point that is a self inflicted wound. You don’t have to buy a ps6.
Sony are idiots, the whole concept of a console is now dead thanks to them, the whole advantage of a console over a PC is “it just works”. You plug it in, you turn it on, and you’re playing games. You don’t have to worry about whether or not the games will run on your system, you don’t have to worry about your device specs, it’ll work. If it doesn’t work, it wouldn’t be on the system. Easy.
Of course the sacrifice is that there’s much fewer choices due to the lack of indie games and mods.
But now the experience is identical to that on PC, you just download stuff off the internet, hopefully you have fast internet that isn’t pay by the megabyte. Since you’re going to have to do that anyway, now you might as well buy a PC and get all the extra games and features.
Not for another two amd a half years, at least.
I realize it was a typo, but at first I thought you were sneaking in some jab and AMD and I wasn’t able to get the joke.
Controllers are digital now too, you have you log in with your phone or something.
It’s like Jackbox but bad.
Stop, you’re giving them more ideas.
Razer did this. They had an update that required a login to use the extra features of your mouse. They had to walk it back.
This is the bright future that we all always waited for. Now that it’s here, let us commemorate our meagre contributions towards appeasing shareholder value, that which cannot be appeased.
If there’s one industry that I dont think will get bailed out its the video game industry. We just have to make sure there’s still space for indie developers and there will be a Renaissance.
Console G*mers getting that PC experience whether they want to or not.
It’s 2029. You’re still an idiot…
Look at this optimist who thinks any of us will make it to 2029.
The GameBoy Color I got in 1998 still works just fine (okay the speaker has been blown out since the Bush administration but…)
The only thing missing is that is costs 1200$ but it has no RAM. You have to supply your own. And the games are 100.
