By Marc W. Polite
Good evening, my readers. I hope all of you enjoyed your weekend. If you pay attention to what is going on in the video game industry, you’ll hear about a few concerning trends.
There’s yet another price hike on the current generation of Xbox consoles. Six year old hardware will cost you more than it did on launch, bucking the trend of tech dropping in price as time passes.
Due to the AI boom and increased costs of RAM, this is happening. Both the PS5 and Xbox declined in sales in May due to increased prices.
The problem seems due to worsen. The Steam machine, an offering to get more people into PC games was announced at $1,050 dollars- with no controller. The Xbox Helix, the code name of the next generation Xbox is said to be expensive as well. Also, in the past two days, rumblings of stories have come out about the forthcoming Playstation 6 costing 1000 dollars to manufacture. It’s unlikely for it to cost less than 1k, to say the least.
There’s a saying “the juice is not worth the squeeze”. The cost of entry has to be at least worth it. The gaming industry is looking to squeeze it’s consumers for more money, and for what? Triple AAA games that take five to six years to drop? Remastered games from the last generation? In my opinion, there’s no need for any new gaming consoles until at least 2030.
Are you as a gamer cool with the idea of dropping a G on a next generation console, only to wait 1-2 years for a good game to launch? For that alone, that’s enough to make this writer reconsider the entire hobby. I’m going to use my Actual Intelligence and opt out of this whole rigged game(see what I just did there?)
It’s not worth getting squeezed.