Do they know most of their customers have budget and they can't just spend entirety of it for gaming stuff?

There are also their potential customers that will gated by those huge cost for entry-level gaming setup.

Also for those who don't even have budget, why the hell they gonna participate on those out of reach game ecosystem?

Honestly the cheapest place to be in gaming is PC even with current prices. I could go to my local thrift store and buy a cheap ass laptop for 50 bucks and play and buy a couple really solid games on steam or GOG for another 50. Would that laptop be great? Probably not but you could do it and there's also the bonus that if you do upgrade to a proper computer all your games still work.

It's the K-shaped economy.

25% stopped buying. 50% are buying and dealing with things as best they can. And the last 25% are rolling in it and paying exorbitant prices to show off and balancing out the losses.

took a little longer than expected

Looking at my own gaming expenses, I've definitely stopped buying as much as I did say 10 years ago. To me it seems like the value of what you get for your money has fallen. I can afford it, but why should I? On one side, the corporations are actively trying to lock down everything and make it clear I'm just a guest in their theme park and on the other, they're offering investment safe sequels and remakes of past successes. I'm also kinda tired of Sony's "AAA cinematic gaming experiences".

I may also be getting too old cause all excitement of GTA VI fell through the floor once I learned I can't own a copy without the explicit approval of either console maker. So fuck that...

Honestly, the value for money in the gaming industry is the best its ever been outside of AAA and consoles.

Market spending correlates this, more money than ever is being spent but its focussed on indies, AAA sales have been dropping and big studios are losing money, deservedly.

I'd rather wait for the ps5 emulator(s)

PC also has uncountable choice of affordable games thanks to the indie scene booming. AAA is dying and Im here for it

PC ends up being so much cheaper in the long run... Far better game prices and no subscription cancer

There's more kids than ever before

Yup, I do this as well. Most of my gaming expenses go towards PC games now.

Maybe a decent refurbished gaming laptop for slightly more than $9 hundred dollars or so but yeah, I rather would buy refurbished or used

And you can do a lot more with a PC, nevermind upgradability

Oh and the only games in the games library are ai slop vibe coded games that are unplayable carbon copies of each other

Man, Ubisoft sure did trailblaze for the industry. Including that part where it has already started dying before its competitors.

Don't forget you also don't own those 120$ games!

A laptop and a portable gaming handheld are two different classes of devices. The form factors alone are enough to make a laptop not a great portable gaming handheld.

That's infuriating. What game? If you don't mind me asking.

Sony has done it this year https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2026/06/26/purchased-studio-canal-content-removed-playstation-library

I guess technically it's movies and TV in this case, not games. But the precedent is there.

Steve Bannon ruined gaming.

No, I will not be taking further questions.

what would you say is an ideal budget for a mid range build these days? i know it’s prob the absolute worst time to build, but i really want a pc to break free from console life lol.

50 might be pushing it here, that is super old and low spec. Even an N150 laptop costs more. Can comfortably find 10th gen i5 desktops for under £200 though. Laptops seem to cost quite a bit more if I skim across CEX. I suspect being easier to store helps as they don't want to move them so quickly while desktops are taking up more space and they want to shift it faster.

Downside with those desktops is that its often full of proprietary HP or dell bullshit. But then laptops are even worse so I guess that is your choice. Still, CEX have got a 5 year warranty on second hand things which is pretty good.

Does CDDA still run on 64MB?

If me putting another 1000 hours into factorio is millennials killing gaming, I guess I will go and kill gaming.

Nuclear MLRS robot spiders. Railway artillery cannons. Flamethrower turrets. Industrialised warfare. Why would I leave? I just started a marathon deathworld run.

Only if you want brand new games and top spec hardware. I get free games every day, and I can play them on my old laptop, my dedicated handheld, or even my phone!

Clearly you don't have good enough games. When I first got Factorio I became nocturnal.

Spending might be down overall for the average person, but that doesn't necessarily mean no spending either. Could be moving to spend somewhere else, on things perceived to be better value for money.

Last AAA game I bought was shadow of mordor and it was discounted to £2.50 at the time. If I had paid £60 for that I would want a refund. It wasn't a bad game by any means but no where near enough playtime of value to be worth that price. Meanwhile Factorio or Rimworld release at much lower prices and keep their price for over a decade because people generally see them as being worth it even after all this time.

I don't really see what difference trump dying would make to me tbh. Got enough money, don't really want to buy many things even though I can afford them.

I could afford a new gaming PC every year. But my RTX2070 is fine. I won't spend money without a good reason to and I don't really see many good reasons right now. I have pretty much anything I could reasonably.

Cutting my hours worked, that could be something to go for.

Is it... Is it Doom?

A console seemed like a stupid idea since forever. I never bought a new one, that would be a waste of money. Meanwhile game after game on sale for the pc.

And yet: I have 2 ps2's networked with harddrives, a modified ps3 and ps4, a couply of modified wii's and ds machines.

If it was more than $100 I wasnt buying. Several I got for free. We had our NES and SNES back in the day for about $20 (mid 90's).

What's to stop people from remaking the game and discontinuing support for the original? That happens in Apple's App Store.

There's a big Xbox shortage right now and it's been like this for months. Where it's difficult to find new Xboxes in stores outside of scalpers selling a handful of overpriced units. The listings I can find on my local Pricerunner site is almost 3 times what it cost back when it launched. It's surprising it hasn't dropped more than it has.

Do you want new or are you willing to cobble together used stuff? If new, $1k is probably about as low as you want to go, but you can definitely squeeze lower. If you’re interested in used stuff, it really depends on what kind performance you’re looking for. You can put together a computer that’s around ps5 performance for around $500 using an old office pc and like a Radeon 6700. I did something similar to kind of meet ps4 performance back in the day when I was a broke student.

Crazy to think the base lcd model was like $350 only 2-3 years ago. I know it's not valves fault but that is a huge jump in price.

Monster Hunter; we both already have World on PS4. Rise and its DLC was/is on sale for $10 so we just got that instead.

Two full games and their DLC for the cost of one month of PS+.

I find it weird tho, Xbox literally started 'cloud' gaming a few years ago and now there's games that can't be played on consoles. You need a subscription to cloud game instead of just using your console to run the game

Similar-ish story here. I set up a Minecraft server for the household and set up Minecraft on the Switch so my kid can play it. Turns out you have to have a fucking Nintendo subscription to play online in Minecraft on the goddamn Switch on my own server that's on my own local network in my own house.

Let's not even mention that you can't even add a custom server on the switch, you can only play preselected servers or Minecraft realms that you have to pay for. I had to do essentially DNS fuckery to make that work.

Fuck these companies.

Doom needs a toaster. No I meant Deus Ex.

As a PC gamer concerned about game preservation: good. Consoles are just walled hardware fiefdoms.

I looked at buying a ps5 for the first time since it came out a couple weeks ago because I really wanted to play LOTR War in the North again.

Its twice as expensive as it was when it came out.

I just went home and grabbed my old ps2.

Its absolutely insane that this console is so expensive right now.

It is also the last PS I would get because I want physical discs.

Congratulations to PCs for winning the console wars :3

Gee, I wonder why!

i was thinking maybe getting a pre built i saw something around 1100 usd on micro center cause i dont really know jack about building my own pc. i am fortunate to have buddies game share their huge ps libraries and steam libraries so selection of games is def not an issue. i just dont really know much about compatibility and which is good with what. but for performance wise i would LIKE solid 1440p gaming across the board, 60fps or higher works for me. do you think i should suck it up and build now or pre build and upgrade later?

I bought Minecraft for switch to play with my son. What a shit experience it was.

First off, it took like an hour of trial and error to even get the two of us playing in split screen. Then I realized that to render split screen the game had reduced the draw distance to like 1/4th of what it was on PC years ago. We dealt with it until we actually had a good area built up and the frame rate dropped to like 10fps. Then my wife accidentally let Minecraft update and it bricked split screen until I completely turned off the switches WiFi.

Recently purchased Java for PC, spent another hour getting couch co-op going on that and it's a completely different experience.

The ps5 that comes with a disc drive is useless, as the "physical" copies of games are just empty cases with redemption codes inside.

This is called demand destruction.

Haven't had a problem yet*

Wait seriously? No discs at all? For any games?

Wait, can they still be peasants if they're becoming marginal?

The majority as far as I know.

I strongly oppose this view: with my disc drive PS5 I am able to play games I bought second hand and games I borrowed from my local library