NO ONE CAN AFFORD GAMES ANYMORE

Nobody can afford video games anymore. Yeah, guys, we're in some serious trouble. Gaming has been getting more expensive by the year, but right now it's about to get more expensive by the day. It already has the same components that I have in my PC right now. Cost twice as much as they did just two years ago.

Ram just rose by 200% in just the last two months. Is Ram having what GPUs had like four years ago? Is that what's happening? And I know some people are going to look at this and say, oh, well, this is a yes. Probably no.

These all these different components, they're used in just about everything. Handheld. I'm not as familiar with everything is going to get dragged up with all of this. What's happening right now is that A.I. is taking over the world. Who would have guessed?

And these data centers are doing everything they can to be able to keep up with this A.I. gold rush because everybody wants a piece of that money. Yeah. And that's pushed these guys to raid the consumer market for products. Yep. Buying up everything off the shelves before we even have a chance to get a thing happened causing scarcity and making prices skyrocket with No end in sight. Yep. The part that really bothers me with all of this is just how obvious this play is

These guys are just getting way too sloppy for me It's just it's starting to aggravate me at this point Like if you're gonna be a scammer you gotta try to hide it a little bit But these guys don't even want to bother hiding it anymore. No, they don't. They just, people just eat this shit, man. They let it happen. They're not trying to do anything to fix any of these issues. They're not scrambling to fix any of these supply issues. Instead, well, they're just,

they're milking it. They're keeping their production tight, they're raising the prices, and they're using AI as the best excuse possible for them to just continue to take advantage of regular people, to squeeze you harder than they ever have before. And they're doing it all with governments backing them. They're going to drag this out as long as they possibly can, because every single month that they keep these prices higher, they're just going to continue to rake in record profits.

I think that the companies probably want to produce more of them. It's just that you can't make a supply chain change that fast. I mean, just realistically, like, you can't do that.

But today, what I want to do...

And like, that's what happened with like the graphics cards, like, four or five years ago. it's not like look into it um the fact is that sometimes the markets can move so fast that these companies aren't able to adapt to them like another good example is cars like we've had the same issue with cars especially with like different uh you know I think it was semiconductors that were like some sort of chip set for cars where it was hard to even have buy new cars.

It's everything it's control brother. I think that you so I think that realistically it's probably both. I think that there is a degree of manufactured scarcity, but there's also a degree of just a realistic supply chain scaling logistics

reality.

I want to talk about those insanely high prices and who's causing them. I want to talk about how I think the games industry is using this moment to be able to manipulate us and how I think this entire thing might backfire on them in the most glorious of ways. This video was sponsored by Displate and right now they are running their biggest sale of the year. From now until

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channel because if there is one thing that I actually want to bring to this space, it is awareness. Most people feel helpless when they see these prices spike. They feel like they're being pushed out of their own hobby, like decisions are being made for them by people who don't even care about games in the first place, but the more you guys understand what's happening, the easier it is to see the pattern. And guys, navigating what's coming next is going to get very hard, very fast.

After the reveal of the steam machine, the first thing I saw was everyone arguing about the price. A lot of people were convinced it needed to be 500 or 700. It's going to be a thousand. I think it's going to be $1,099. That is my expectation. And I have bet five giveaways that if it is beyond plus minus $100 of that, I will give away five steam machines to the community.

That's where I'm at. Dollars at max and that valve should subsidize it to bring in more users, a whole different topic for another video, because steam does not need a loss leader to get more people through the door. But I took the time to actually dig into the potential hardware costs and ended up chiming in on Twitter, saying that Valve isn't posting the price

because they're hoping that things change. The AI bubble has pushed RAM to obscene levels. Almost 200% this year, people are saying it should be $500.

That's the price of RAM alone.

Five hundred dollars. Like who thought that was going to happen? Now, this is a bit hyperbolic. Sure, I was using the highest end hardware prices, but the more that I research this trend, the darker the picture became, not just for valves console, but just for gaming as a whole. Right now, we're seeing hardware prices skyrocket across the board.

All of its tracing back to rapid data center expansion, a tidal wave of investment that's been poured into a according to Stanford. The US has almost already spent 110 billion into private investment just in 2024. Global spending in generative AI is already up 600% between 2022. Oh my God, look at that graph.

Total investments of billions of dollars.

Jesus.

You in 2024 and in 2025, that number is estimated to hit $1.5 trillion. With that kind of money flying around, AI firms are expanding their data centers and buying up existing hardware at a pace that consumers simply cannot compete with. That demand alone is enough to be able to drive these prices through the roof. And that's before you even factor in scarcity. I feel like I'm losing my mind.

How many people have been ignoring this? We have seen companies and even the media try to blame these price hikes on tariffs. They've been doing it all year. We've covered it on this channel, but this isn't about trade policy. This is an increase. It's driven by raw demand for components and everyone is just letting these hardware companies

and these software companies spin whatever narrative they want, whatever narrative benefits them with almost no pushback at all. How has nobody questioned this? These hard... I think that the reason why is that, I mean, number one, tariffs are a more convenient thing for the media to use because they can blame that on Trump. So if you look at, like, this is the same thing with like the, like, I think eggs are a great comparison here the reason why the price of eggs was so high towards the end of Biden's presidency

is because there was an avian flu that went around and killed all the birds that's the main reason why it's not because of Biden it didn't go down because of Trump this was a third party thing that happened and both parties were trying to blame and then assign blame or avoid blame for this thing. Biden gave the birds the full-on purpose so maybe he did, I don't know, he could be a wizard. But the point that I'm making is that yes, I think that this is the same thing that happened with tariffs, is that media will never look at, because media is either trying to portray Trump as great or Trump as awful.

So because Trump is aligned with tariffs, you're not going to get any sort of realistic, any sort of like actual like information about this. You're not going to get a nuanced opinion on why the price of something is going up whenever you look at CNN or Fox News because that's not what their goal is. Where companies are making record money off of the AI boom they're selling hardware by the truckloads to these data center giants. They're soaking up billions of dollars in new investment and they're still not expanding production for consumers. Instead they're keeping their supply. I think that the reason why they're not expanding production

is that a lot of these tech companies, I think, are waiting for what they believe is coming, which is some sort of like large technological innovation that is like in the process of being discovered or arrived upon. And I think that's the reason why you haven't seen a massive scaling of production lines. That's the reason why you haven't seen a massive scaling of production lines. That's the reason why you haven't seen a massive increase in supply chains or anything like

that. Quantum computing? Yeah. Like people don't know what is AGI, what is quantum computing going to be, and how will it function and change our lives on a day-to-day basis, and how you actually, you know, fucking make something, and how valuable is it it like a good example of this is cloud

computing, cloud computing, like we all know that in 50 years, we're going to be using cloud computing for basically everything, right? Like, this is obviously where things are going. But the question is, when does that happen? But it's inevitable that it's going to happen. But when it happens is the question.

And I think that these companies don't want to invest into something that they feel like is a short-term gain. They're raising prices, they're pouring all that new money into high-bandwidth memory for AI. They could ease the pressure on the consumer market if they wanted to, but why would they do that when scarcity is letting them charge more? So squeeze the normal people while feeding the AI expansion that's only going to just make all of this so much worse. Gizmodo only recently picked up on this issue with an article titled,

We're so screwed, written by Kyle Barr, where Barr wrote, I really, I don't like this article because it reminds me of the Star Forge website. It does, this looks just like the Star Forge website. It does. This looks just like the Star Forge website.

Like, what the fuck?

We have been reporting about the spiking cost of RAM prices since October. Essentially, AI data centers have such a demand for memory that the prices of SSDs, DRAM, and HDDs are all ballooning in price. This is most keenly felt in the discrete PC RAM market.

Corsair, one of the most popular brands for vast gaming ready RAM sticks, told Gizmodo over email, our DRAM prices have increased in response to the severe supply shortage we're seeing across the industry. And it just keeps getting worse, a pack of 64GB DDR5 RAM from memory brand Crucial spiked from $150 to more than $400 in just two months as evidence. Wow. That's insane. I didn't know it was that big.

It's by Amazon's price tag.

I mean, I haven't bought anything like a new computer thing at all. Like, is this true? I'm assuming this is true, right? Site camel, camel, camel. Other low-end RAM sticks may see less of a bump,

but users will inevitably find that the more RAM they want, the more it's going to cost. Four sticks of 16GB DDR5 RAM from Corsair now sells for an astronomical $688.

What the fuck?

Because like before, this is the way it always used to be. It was GPU, CPU, RAM, and then maybe motherboard and power supply underneath of that in terms of like cost for a computer. Holy shit! The same sticks in white demand $948. A thousand bucks! They're not even the priciest RAM available. Guys, I want you to know that this is nothing

like the crypto boom that we saw just a few years ago where GPU prices were driven by a hype cycle that eventually died. AI is far more of a tangible technology. It is gonna keep expanding. Yeah, it's totally different than crypto.

And it's gonna keep improving and it's gonna keep getting massive support from governments and corporations worldwide. Yes, there is a forming something similar to the dotcom era where only a few players are actually going to end up owning the market. That's probably true.

Even when that burst happens, the winners are just going to buy up the losers data centers

and they're just going to continue to grow.

Even if that's actually a really good point, these bring up is that like whenever there is a consolidation of companies and consolidation of businesses like what happened after the dot-com boost or a boom is that yeah you're probably not going to have a reduction in data centers you're not going to have a reduction in you know like the amount of resources there's just gonna be a reduction of names the different names on those resources what about monopoly laws well I don't know, man. Why don't you ask Apple? Banshin slows, that's still not going to fix anything for us.

Keep in mind, after the crypto crash, GPU prices never really went back to normal. So hardware prices... They went down, but he's right that they didn't go back to normal. This is one of the nastiest fucking things that companies do and they did this with like McDonald's did this is That like they took the kovat pricing and then they made that the new normal Might come down eventually sure, but they're never gonna go back to what we used to pay Yeah, and this is not something that's just gonna be a little up a hundred percent and then they go down

You know, like let's just assume that all the numbers are same, like 85%. So you're still paying theoretically 15% more. To memory or GPUs, it's going to stretch across every piece of computer hardware, gaming PCs, handhelds, consoles, phones, everything it makes getting into the hobby, upgrading your setup, or even just replacing something that breaks insanely expensive for everyday people. And I think that's exactly what these companies want right now. They want to squeeze customers harder than they ever have while

breaking in all of this investment and government backing all the feed these business to business sales while the rest of us are going to deal with the fallout at this rate. The hardware market is going to become completely inaccessible for most people. I think this is true in the immediate sense. I feel like if it, if it doesn't change in like two years, you are going to say you're either going to have new players come into the space that offer something that's better, or you're going to see a technology change where it's more accessible, like just realistically, like you can't leave an unanswered market for too long.

Because if you do, you're going to have other people come in and answer it for you. People talk about how the steam machine needed to be 500. So guys, all you have to do is just not play video games for two years.

Okay?

That's it. Or maybe $700 at most. And these guys do not know how fast these prices are moving right now. The costs have ballooned so much that I can easily see every single major console that's coming in the next couple of years costing over $1,000 when they get revealed.

Now I know some people are gonna say, well, that's not going to work.

Nobody's gonna buy hardware at the... I think that they will. I think that people don't understand how big of a wealth gap and how big of an equality gap we have in the country. The top 10% of income in America is like $150,000 a year or something like that. It's a ridiculous amount of money.

People think that it's still like 2008. No, it's like everybody else, it's kind of like like let's say you're playing an MMO and like 30% of the population bought the expansion to Burning Crusade and you're sitting there and you're still in classic Well, what do you what do you mean you got you guys have armor penetration what

You could get that. Oh

Wow

These prices and honestly I think that's exactly what some of these companies are counting on. Nearly every major publisher in the gaming industry has gone all in on AI. EA just announced their partnership with Stability AI. Ubisoft has

come back from their little media silence with some new AI deals and a push for AI teammates to replace making actions. It says AI teammates will make gaming more engaging and accessible. And again, I love Dragon's Dogma.

This idea isn't bad. The implementation of it is sometimes bad. Actual friends, which is incredibly bleak, but the clearest example here is Microsoft. I know somebody who she talks to chat GPT on a regular basis. Who does this?

It poured billions of dollars into open AI and anthropic and they've committed another $80 billion to AI enabled data centers. They are directly feeding into the same expansion that is driving hardware costs through the roof, the same expansion that they blamed on tariffs. It is a mutually beneficial relationship for them, not for us. Guys, this is the oldest trick in the corporate playbook. Well, this is the same reason companies are like, oh yeah, things are so hard with COVID,

so we have to make things more expensive.

Okay, well COVID's over. Are you gonna make them less expensive? Oh, man! Things are so hard with tariffs. We're gonna have to keep things being so expensive.

Jesus. Create a problem and then sell the solution. If people can't afford gaming hardware anymore, well, that becomes the perfect opening to be able to push cloud gaming where you don't need to have a console or a PC just A screen and a subscription. I talked about this in my video This is the last warning where I argued that Microsoft was pushing prices higher on Purpose to be able to funnel players into cloud services where they already have been testing ads inside of their games

Absolutely, you will own nothing and you will be fucking furious about it into cloud services where they already have been testing ads inside of their games. Absolutely. You will own nothing and you will be fucking furious about it. You're fucking out of your mind. D, you're crazy to think that. You're crazy to think that this is all connected. Guys, I do not think you understand how big the gaming industry actually is.

It's larger than the movie.

He's

probably going to say the same thing. The U.S. entertainment sector is the largest in the world and gaming alone is three times. It makes three times as much as film and music combined. It's still young. It's still easy to manipulate and there is a lot of money on the table. We haven't even gotten to hyper-realistic AI cat girls. That's the big one. And we're not even there yet.

Anybody that can wedge themselves in that ecosystem, especially if they can figure out how to force ads into whatever they want, whether we like it or not.

Yep.

So when I see this, I do not see a bunch of different trends happening all over the place.

I see-

You're gonna get ads on your car. Whenever we're old, not even old, whenever we're 50, we're gonna be having ads inside of our car. One big pattern. And I'm not saying that, oh, it's gaming

that's helping to push this entire AI situation. No, it just so happens that, well, it's just falling in the perfect spot for these companies to be able to take advantage of it. And of course, they're going to be taking advantage of it. That's exactly what they're doing right now. It's where coincidence and opportunity have collided for these guys. And it just so happens that your money, your hobby, and your enjoyment are caught in the middle of it. Ironically, this is happening at the worst possible time for us because the console wars are effectively dead.

Exclusivity is largely gone at this point outside of Nintendo. Yeah, fucking Nintendo. These guys don't care about pushing their games to be able to make profit. They're trying to profit off of their services and off of their hardware now. That's actually a really good point, too. I don't know if they're going to profit off of the hardware. I'm not sure if I'd agree with that.

But I think that the using services and service fees, that is going to be the new way that companies make money. And I think that the best use case of that and like the, you know, the, the, I guess like the frame of reference they use is Valve and how much money they've made with exchange fees, transaction fees with CSGO. So you have all these people that are able to make tons of money on like these, you know, you know, fractional microtransaction costs that just kind of, it's like, you know, like how to, how to ants

eat something that's really big? Well they eat it one little bit at a time, right? But eventually it's gone and that's what they do. All the stars are aligning in the wrong way for us at this moment. There is so much money heading going on. I right now I it's just absolutely crazy. Every single one of these companies has their hand in each other's pockets. If you see where some of this money goes, you see one company gives it to another.

That company gives it to another and then it goes straight back to the source. They're just circling all like I mean, yeah, it doesn't like it's like meta or like I have a friend who's like an engineer at Metta. Like we went to high school together and we were talking about this. It's like basically a human centipede. It is. And it's like, oh, numbers going up, numbers going up, numbers going up. Yeah, well, they're paying each other.

All this wealth while squeezing us as hard as they possibly can. Yeah, Enron? No, he was even telling me, he's like, yeah, they came out and they said they're not Enron. And it's like. Probably actually exactly that's that's working out that that's working very well. I mean, it's extremely video and Microsoft are the biggest perpetrators here. And both of these guys have cloud gaming services. Of course, they have no problem with hardware prices spiking and because Yeah, because it all

leads into their business model. It fulfills their business model and it accelerates their business model for hardware prices to be basically unapproachable. Not being able to get into higher-end hardware. That sounds great to these guys.

Yeah.

And they're going to continue to expand. They're going to continue to invest. And they're doing that off of the back of investments that they're getting from private and public investors and also from the government. Yeah, we're paying them to price us out of our own hobbies. We're paying them so they can scrape our data, sell it back to us in a censored way that reinforces their own fucking control and

We're supposed to be happy

It's insane these guys effectively have done doing it over the hardware industry. No, you're not as well They can do not order them out of stock It's only right now. This is limited to higher-end hardware. It's going to trickle down to lower-end hardware I've seen some people talk about well, I'll just buy hardware, it's going to trickle down to lower end hardware. I've seen some people talk about, well, I'll just buy DDR4, it's cheaper. You're not the only one thinking that.

Yeah.

Oh, wow. I'm instead of five, I'm going to get four. Oh, my God.

This guy is so smart. And because the scarcity is largely inauthentic and inorganic and is being controlled, well, that means that they're just going to affect those markets regardless. The same thing goes for console markets as well. They can use the exact same excuse,

because the data center expansion, sorry, the GPUs or the RAM or whatever else is too expensive for this console, it's going to have to be more expensive. They're going to push it there, too. And the reason why is because these guys do not need hardware to be able to make money off you anymore.

It's not necessary for them.

They can find that's a good thing, too, by the way. It's a good thing that I mean, cloud gaming is going to make technology more accessible to everybody. It will be an improvement and it will be better for everybody. But the problem is that the approach to getting there is very unpleasant and painful. That's

it.

The people who can't afford it and then they can push those who can't into subscription services and cloud services where they can feed you ads or you pay a monthly sub. For what costs? Well, I think that again, like you guys, this is really important to keep in mind, right? Is that for a lot of us here, we are 1%. We are 1% in regards to a lot of you guys make a lot of money.

You know, I generally have an older audience. This is a tech and computer, you know, video game based channel. So you have a lot of people that are like involved in, you know, that kind of stuff. A lot of people make money, right? And I, you know, who?

A lot of people. Like every time, if I go to an event, the people that own the business probably fucking know me. And so that's it. I have a digital empire. There you go. And so I'm not saying everybody, but I'm saying I have a very high ratio of those people.

So what my point is, is that obviously for us, the ability to invest in, and also like a lot of you guys, like we play video games a lot, right? Let's say, and we're older, so you have more resources generally. This is generally, I'm saying generally, not everybody generally, okay, relax. So because of that, you might still want to be an enthusiast, you might still want to invest in the highest hardware and do all this stuff yourself. But what

I'm saying is that for an average person, for a lower income person, that person will be able to access higher quality technology at a lower cost with cloud gaming in probably, I would say, 10 years and I think less than that. Doesn't that just sound lovely? Now, I'm sure it sounds great to these guys. I'm sure they're all in on this idea, and I'm in one of those rooms would probably sound

pretty good to me, but this entire thing is incredibly risky for them to do, not because anybody is actually going to come in and try to interrupt it. That's not going to happen, at least not for a while.

But they're under the assumption that they're not going to be able to, because all of the companies inside of the ecosystem are already kind of inside the same game. And a lot of companies also, these big companies push for regulations that pull the ladder up and make getting into a market

very hard to do. So it's not like somebody can just start going in and selling RAM, let's say for example, because there's probably like 7,000 regulations for it that are created by these big companies in order for them to maintain their monopoly.

I'm sure that customers are to continue to chase them, chase them wherever they go. We're chasing the highest end hardware, the highest end games, but that's not necessarily what's been happening. See, the question they need to be asking themselves is what happens when players go in a different direction entirely?

Because that's exactly what's happening right now. Yeah, I think so not to interrupt absolutely this video But man, it really sucks that we even have to be talking about any of this We should be celebrating what this industry is capable of especially with the game awards right around the corner I've been eyeing a second playthrough of expedition 33 and every time I think about that game how confidently it ignored all of the noise How it cuts through everything, all of this industry's nonsense. It reminds me of how things could be, how things should be.

And it also reminds me of how disgusting these executives are who want to drag this hobby into the mud for profit. I genuinely believe that these major hardware and software companies think raising the price floor is going to guarantee them victory. If people can't afford new hardware,

they're just going to default to cloud or whatever subscription. They will. I think that's what will happen. I do. I think actually that is what will happen. Like, I know people say, like, oh, I won't do that. I think that's what will happen. Service pipeline that they want to shove us into. And once players are trapped in those ecosystems, well, then these companies have full control. They can raise the prices, they can tier their access, they can lock features behind a monthly

fee, they can deal with it. They're going to Netflix you, right? They're going to get you in Netflix in 2008. Oh, my God. Everybody had it, right? Like we all had Netflix back then or our parents had it. And then slowly over time, the inshittification of the product happens. And I think that's where things are going to go with something like cloud gaming. I think at the beginning, it's going to be great.

And then I think that you're going to have artificial, you know, like let's say latency increases, right? Like if you want a fiber optic connection or like a higher, you know, like a precision, you know, like machine or a connection, you're going to have to pay

more money. And then if you want certain games, you're gonna have to pay more money. And then suddenly you're getting piecemealed and dissected until you're paying like $50 a month, right? And this is what happened with Game Pass is that Microsoft invested a tremendous amount of money into making Game Pass a really great deal and a tremendous value. It was. It was a great deal and a tremendous value. I think it was. I've had Game Pass. I think it's amazing. But, here's what happens.

Is that after you establish that market, after you control the market, now you can raise the price, and you don't have as many competitors in the space that are really going to... like, that you're going to lose business to. You can just do that. And that's what happens. Ever they want, they can even slide ads in with almost no friction. That is the future

that these AAA publishers want. Now, the problem for them is that I don't think this plan is actually going to work in the real world. It's built on the assumption that everybody needs the highest end experience, that we are all desperate for cutting-edge Triple-a titles and will follow the industry wherever it tries to push us But that ignores the biggest risk in their entire strategy one that is already happening right now What if people don't buy in what if players stop chasing high-end entirely?

What if they split into a different direction a shift that ends up starving? Triple-a while fueling the rise of studios who can thrive without expensive hardware. I do think I'm going to give you guys to business. I do think this will happen also as well as that. And you're already seeing this happen where smaller indie studios are able to bring out video games at a infinitely lower price point.

We're not infinitely lower, but like, you know, $10 versus $70 price point. And I think they've been able to capture a huge market of people. Demand destruction and market bifurcation. Demand destruction is when prices stay so high for so long that people just stop buying a product altogether. Market bifurcation is when a market splits into two groups that behave completely differently.

The haves and have nots in this case if you will and we're seeing both of these happen in the gaming industry right now even if the shift has been relatively slow. Just take a look at Steam's latest hardware survey, Nvidia's brand new 50 series GPUs, they're not even in the top 10, they're not even in the top 15, the 5070 sits at number 16, the 5060 is 22nd and all their other high-end cards They might as well not even exist at all The top five are dominated by lower and 30 and 40 series cards I mean that makes perfect sense. Like I mean these higher-end cards are really expensive. I

Mean they are they're really expensive like an average person doesn't have a thousand dollars to spend on a graphics card. I Mean really like that's insane. GTX 1650. Look at this like I mean yeah and a 3060. I think yeah you can run a lot of things with a 3060. Especially with DLSS. I know people don't like it but I think people probably like DLSS more than spending two thousand dollars. Especially whenever they don't like it, but I think people probably like DLSS more than spending $2,000, especially whenever they don't have $2,000.

Six year old GPU is still holding strong. People are not upgrading. And when they do, they're choosing the cheapest, most sensible option they can, either because of the cost or because they don't see any reason to chase higher end hardware anymore. I think that this industry has completely misread this. I think that they're looking at these numbers and assuming that people want the highest-end hardware but simply can't afford it. But that doesn't really track with

reality. Well, I think it is true that people can't afford it, but the thing is that affordability is always a spectrum. The reality is that for a 3060 is going to be able to run like 90% of games, right? 95% of games. And so are you really going to make a very large purchasing decision for being able to play a handful of video games with a different water texture? There's a huge diminishing returns there. Huge. And like for maybe a guy that's a computer enthusiast or

something like that, yeah, they're gonna do that. But for most other people, they're not. 3060 can run Megabonk at 8k. I believe that. I do. I believe that. I want to say that I did rendering for my PC, my stream PC. That's the one that's behind me one of those. It's a fucking computer graveyard over there But what the blue one? the one I had it had a 2080 TI and I had that computer from like

2020 or 2021 up up until like three weeks ago Not a single problem Switch to broke they know is blue that way the temperature of the computer would stay low Not a single problem. Console sales records by selling over 2.4 million units in only 3 months and nobody overheat. But why would anybody want to do that anymore? Why would we want to spend thousands of dollars on a new rig or a console when these games come out broken day one? Borderlands 4 is still a performance nightmare with the developers

issuing apology after apology. Monster Hunter, and it's there's no excuse. There's no excuse for it to be bad. Expedition 33 was made with Unreal 5. Monster Hunter was total garbage. The original Dragon's Dogma wasn't like this, you have

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, like I, you know what I wish Jeff Keighley would do? I wish that he would make a category for video games for optimization or making a game accessible for like lower end uh lower end systems i feel like it would be kind of like more of a a tech award but i think that companies like you know uh warhorse right that made kingdom come deliverance 2 i really think they deserve a tremendous amount of acknowledgement for that and you have now also where wins meet there's another one too and uh you know maybe for the

shame awards we'll have to do the opposite right like? Like, is the winner going to be? Ah, geez, guys, is this going to be Borderlands four or Monster Hunter Wilds? Who's the biggest loser here? I'll take all of its momentum and our mutation because it couldn't run properly either about this year, and both of them are defined by the same problems. There has been a sharp decline in sales across the board for AAA because people just aren't impressed anymore.

And that's the part that these companies don't really seem to understand, is that when you're game... The issue also is like a lot of these AAA games, they are making graphical enhancements, but the enhancements are so granular that, I mean, really, people can't really hardly see them.

I mean, you're having, and I think that also, graphical fidelity is overrated. Stylistic lighting is underrated. Two great games that emphasize this are, three actually, Wuthering Waves, that's the weakest example. My strongest example is Elden Ring. If you actually look at Godfrey, you look at Godric, you look at their character models, they look like shit. They look like absolute garbage. Like the actual fidelity pixel count for a lot of the things in Elden

Ring are very mediocre. But because of the lighting, colors, and shading in the game, it looks incredible. And the other one that's very new, that some people said in chat, were Winsmead. Incredible, amazing game, awesome graphics, but the fidelity is very low. But it's made up for because of the lighting the shading and the style of the game Ames don't justify the hardware the hardware stops

Oh, yeah The hardware stops selling the high-end market freezes and triple-a is gonna be the first thing to suffocate bring back style Yeah, what I think is happening right now And it's only going to get worse for the triple-a industry is that with these rising hardware prices Especially if they bleed into the next generation of consoles, it's going to effectively put a stop to high end gaming entirely.

They are building a price wall that people cannot climb. And in doing so, they're going to do. I think that you're always going to have high end gaming be popular, but I do think that the gaming like high end PC gaming. It is probably on a timer.

Destroy their own demand. Players do not trust

AAA enough to be able to justify it. I think it's like a 15 year, 20 year timer, but it's still a timer. Or game, let alone a thousand dollar console or a four thousand dollar PC upgrade. And if they're not buying

the hardware or the games, well, why would we be interested in the services that are tied to them? What is the point of cloud gaming or subscriptions if the games on those services aren't worth our time?

All that I think is actually going to happen is that this market is going to split. They're going to accidentally fuel the rise of AAA even further, which honestly is this industry in its purest form. Smaller teams, lower budgets, higher creativity, more original ideas and no need to chase higher end hardware. These games are targeting mid-range or even older systems by design. And when you look at what people are actually playing this year, Expedition 33, Kingdom

Come Deliverance 2 at approaching 60 FPS. Easily. I'm guessing. Yeah, there you go. That's insane. That's ridiculous.

And even Stellar Blade and Arc Raiders don't need a 5090 to run well. Arc Raiders can get everything they want without buying any of this hardware at all. The funny thing is, when you zoom out on all this, there really is only two futures that are ahead of us right now. One is the one that the corporations, one of the one is the one. Well, players are actually moving towards right now.

The corporate one, I actually do think that there will be a growing demand for cloud gaming. I do think so. And I think that cloud gaming for a casual player will actually be a solution that has a large, sizable audience. And I think that that audience over time will eclipse PC and also console gaming. I think that it will probably always be mobile gaming that will be the biggest one because everybody has a phone and it's a common denominator. But after that, you're probably going to have cloud gaming be the most popular of the three because of its accessibility

and the lower price point that it's going to have. That's why I think it's going to hardware that nobody can buy. Cloud gaming is the affordable alternative subscription stacked on top of subscriptions ads baked straight into the experience, a world where every part of gaming is metered, tracked, monetized and controlled. Oh boy, that is the end point that these guys have been building for.

Yeah, Hardware Labs, this is about to say NVIDIA. It's for years. Because in that future, they own everything, we own nothing. But there's been another future that's been forming underneath their feet this entire time. And it's one that these guys just haven't planned for. studios and mid-tier teams that have been making incredible games that run on any hardware hardware that people actually own a future where the most popular game doesn't require a

$4,000 rig or a thousand dollar console a larger where creativity outperforms fidelity where Studios that are willing to take a risk end up defining the industry more than the one creativity has always outperformed Fidelity by the way you want near the best example of that Minecraft always outperformed fidelity, by the way. You wanna know the best example of that? Minecraft. ...that are burning $500 million dollars on another forgettable game. Yep. And I really think that this entire thing

should terrify these AAA publishers. They should not be trying to lead into it. If these players stop upgrading, if they stop buying into high-end, then AAA is the one that becomes an endangered species. That's true. That's actually a very good point, is that, yeah, triple A gaming

and its necessity, it does rely on continually increasing the quality of products or the quality of the systems. Making sense, the audiences shrink and the only people that are going to be left right are the teams that never needed cutting edge hardware to begin with, because at the end of the day, we're the ones that decide where this industry goes.

And if the industry starts building a future that we don't want, well, we simply just walk away. Yep. I have a strong feeling that outside of Grand Theft Auto six, if it actually releases next year is probably going to play out just the same as this year. There's just not going to be a lot of I think he's right. I think we're going to have a number of dark horse incredibly very good.

You know indie games and I think that those indie games will keep gaming going but it doesn't look like there's any AAA game that's coming out next year except for like maybe a handful that are like super amazing.

Winners in AAA.

I mean more than half of the nominees for game of the year this year.

We're all independent or indie studios and that's's not just, oh, these are just for awards. No, these are also some of the most beloved games by players and also some of the highest selling games that we've seen all year. And that's going to leave these guys with not a lot of other options. I know some people are probably going to say, oh, well, then they'll just start making double A games themselves. They'll just stuff these services with double A and they'll stuff them with indie games, but that really doesn't make a lot of sense. That doesn't make sense. Yeah, of course not. The reason why they're AA is because the studios don't have the resources to make a AAA game. Like, that's the reason.

What is the point of your subscription service or your cloud service if, one, I have the hardware, so I can play those games regardless anyway, and two, those games are cheap to begin with. Yeah. Why would I want to pay $30 a month plus to be able to play games that I could buy for 15 to Yeah, it's like $5. Exactly. cases. Doesn't make any sense. I mean, Game Pass I know right now is about $30. We can guarantee you it's probably gonna climb to 35 or even 45 next year. Who knows how that's gonna go. And that's more than most people spend on video games in a month. It just doesn't make any sense. Nobody needs it. I don't need it, I can tell you that right now.

Yeah, it's very, very high. This is an incredibly big- And I think also the other thing too is that like you're going after an audience that if the price point is too high doesn't exist. Because the people that have a lot of free time probably don't have a lot of disposable income and the people that have a lot of disposable income probably don't have a lot of free time. So the ubiquitous nature of, oh my god, you can play 150 games, these are people who struggle to finish one game. So, like, where is your, like, what is your actual market here?

I don't know. Dangerous path for the games industry. That's a problem with subscriptions, and it's also something that they really shouldn't be supporting. I just don't see a lot of movement in hardware and helping to push those prices even higher.

You you're going to starve yourself because I just don't see a lot of people that are chasing some of these new releases. Sure, we've seen some movement, we've seen some buzz, but I don't know if you guys have noticed this, with a lot of these AAA games the minute that they come out the hype around them dies like that. You just stop here. When was the last AAA game I guess like Battlefield 6 did really

well? Besides that, when was the last AAA game that came out that was like a success? I mean, Ghost of Yotai was decent. Um, yeah. Ark Raiders? Would you say Ark Raiders is a AAA game? I wouldn't, I didn't classify it as that personally.

Wukong, I feel like, yeah, it's a Chinese studio. It's a different grading. It's a different grading mechanism. Hearing about them entirely. Battlefield six, I think is probably the only one that I could point to this year that is actually kind of survived for the most part. But Monster Hunter Wilds, that game just absolutely tanked after its first month.

They haven't been able to sell. I don't even know if they've even sold a million copies past the first 10 that they sold in that one month.

That is crazy.

I mean, the game Monster Hunter, why it's just has so many problems, right? I mean, we could get into it, but yeah, that is that is not good, man. That is not good. And when we're starting to see equipment dive off of a cliff like this, you're going to have to come down to meet those players. And if you're not willing to do that, you're in a lot of trouble. I can tell you that right. I'm curious. I can be able to make your money back because you're activatable market. You're like your market is not large enough in order for you to make your money back. It's very simple. Like, I remember I learned this, this is, it sounds stupid,

but like I learned this and I was making gauntlets in Burning Crusade as a blacksmith. And I was thinking to myself, I'm like, okay, well, how many people really want these? How many people are there really that can buy these? And like the amount of money that I'm investing into this,

am I really going out of you know or you know like spread it over You know the amount of different items that you would need to sell in order to make the money back You're never actually going to make the money back out of this and like eventually I think that they're gonna hit that same point too. Is that the Like the the activatable market will be so low that you can't even there's not even a business model. That's a winning business model It just doesn't work

To know what hardware you guys use I Want to know what people are actually using because I can see a steam survey and I talked to people in our community discord if you guys don't Engage in our community discord you should it's a group of absolutely fantastic people But most people there are on lower end hardware. A lot of people that I know outside of myself,

the only reason why I have a rig as great as I have or as expensive as I have is because of all the work I do with editing and recording and all that stuff. Outside of that, I wouldn't use it. I wouldn't get it. Are you kidding me?

True. I'll be playing on something else entirely. I'd probably still be playing on the twenty eighty or thirty eighty that I have behind me. But. Yeah, I'm really interested to see where all this stuff goes. The one thing the one thing that I find really interesting about this, if you're a triple A publisher or if you're just a bigger publisher in the games industry at all, I would be really interested to see how they feel about a company

like Microsoft. Having the influence that they have right now because they're making the industry incredibly uncomfortable. So I think I do other companies just as a byproduct of what they're doing on their A.I. side, all the investments that they're making, all the money that they're putting in. I mean, yeah, of course, they're going to focus on A.I. Because like making video games, like the problem is like the ceiling for AI right now is theoretically

infinite, but the ceiling for selling video games is finite. And I think that they've been at that ceiling for a while. So obviously they're going to go into something else. All these different data centers and things like that, the increasing of prices of hardware specifically, pretty much across the board, that becomes a threat for a lot of these other companies.

So I'm wondering what their perspective on this is. Anyway, hope you guys enjoyed the video. If you guys did enjoy the video, like the video, subscribe to the channel, follow me on Twitch, follow me on Kick, follow me on Twitter. And make sure you guys come back later

this week. I think I have like two more videos that I have to do. Oh, wow. This one just kind of popped out of nowhere. And I was like, I got to talk about this. But anyway, stay cool. Stay righteous. Stay safe. I'll catch you guys in the next one. I feel like this is going to be a big one. And I think it's going to continue getting worse over time to guys for pricing until until you have affordable cloud gaming. I think pricing is just going to get harder and harder. I don't think that you're going to see, you know, RAM prices or any of that go down anytime soon. Because again, I don't really see these companies

trying to change, you know, trying to change anything else, right? They're probably just not going to do that just because of something very short. So yeah, Amazon probably has the same logic chasing AI, which is why they're letting Twitch run wild. I think that's probably true. I do. I think it's probably true. And, uh, they don't really care. And I think that really, this is the Holy grail for all of these tech companies is to approach AI and to have a foothold in the AI ecosystem. And if they're able to do that, then they're going to be having a great time. They're going to be having an amazing

time, a great time, and they're going to be fucking trillionaires. But if they don't do that, then they could go the way of Yahoo, right? Do you want to be Yahoo? No you don't. So I think that's really the big reason why. And money printers eventually? Yeah I guess so. And yeah anyway give the video a sub, give Legendary Drops a like. This is a really good video and I think he's talking about this. Again I think that there are a lot of just logistical and structural reasons why this is happening and I just I think realistically like an overnight price increase I mean how like how much RAM can you realistically make right because

you have a whole supply chain that has to change because of this thing it's hard to do that really have you checked your twitch recap no I haven't the first time I felt like actually something else out of gaming or some of these discussions yeah no I thought this is really good video, man. And again, I think it's one of these topics that the more that like, I mean, because gaming and technology are the same thing, right? I mean, they are.

And so the more that you talk about gaming and especially now that, you know, like we already had this happen with crypto, for example, is that, you know, you have a lot of gaming stuff that's now being encroached on by crypto in the past. And now it's AI. I think that, yeah, it's like you have to understand this stuff. And if you don't, you're going to have a really bad time.

That's really it. It's unavoidable. That's really it. It's unavoidable. Like Yahoo. Yeah, I guess so.