So, the amount of apologia I see toward nintendo, nvidia, etc. is just ridiculous sometimes. It's like some gamers will just defend any industry practice and call it justified. Now, I'm not saying all criticism of the industry is valid either, for example, I've been critical of halo infinite critics for complaining about paid cosmetics when the game and all of its actual content in terms of game play is free. Sometimes gamers are, shall we say, "entitled" and demand too much. But most of the time, I still stand by my stance that I largely hate that word, and think that consumers have a right to vote with their wallet and loudly complain.
The problem is, there's A TON of gaslighting on forums about how we should be willing to pay more for graphics cards, nintendo switch, video games, etc. And most of it is nonsense.
Look, "inflation" is not an excuse for the recent price increases. Inflation just refers to a general sense that things slowly get more expensive over time. It doesnt even affect all goods, it's just an average. Tech, for example, tends to often go in the opposite direction, where over time, you get more processing power and better technology relatively cheap. The first TVs in the 1950s cost thousands of dollars, and dropped to being sub $100 for color 720p today. DVD players used to cost hundreds, now you can get one for, again, less than $100. Gaming consoles at launch start out kinda expensive but drop over time. If you go back to the 1980s and what they charged for some consoles, you can see that the prices were insane and that there's a reason most of these consoles failed as they cost north of $1k in today;s money. PC and tech stuff in the 80s and 90s was expensive, but then got cheaper in the 2000s and 2010s, and that was largely progress. Hell, I got into PC gaming in the first place because, as we saw, around gen 7, console prices went UP significantly, while the cost of PCs went down. Corporations got more greedy but PC hardware got cheaper. That caused me to shift from console gaming to PC gaming mid 7th gen. Games also got cheaper as access to platforms like steam drove the cost of digital games down. It was good for the consumer, and good for gaming as a whole IMO.
But in the 2020s, something is happening, and that thing is called "inflation". Now, we know this modern inflationary wave isn't really like most inflation in the past. Most inflation in the past was driven by wages or by supply chain issues. But in the 2020s, we're seeing just unfettered corporate greed as businesses are charging more simply because they think they can get away with it. And for the most part, consumers just enable this. Sometimes there's no choice, but other times, yeah there IS a choice, and in tech and gaming, there IS a choice.
The fact is, Nvidia is getting greedy. Before 2020 even they started raising prices. They did this in 2018 with their RTX 2000 series. Which is why i was put off from ray tracing and DLSS. I don't care how good these technologies are, if they price me out of the market, that's no bueno. And since then, your typical "60" card has been north of $300 and even $400. The "cheaper" model is now $300. Those cards used to be the bread and butter of mainstream gamers. And now they're becoming increasingly low end and we talk about the $200-400 market as the "budget" market now. The "budget" market used to be sub $200, with cards like the "50" series or even less. There used to be a real ultra budget market, but sadly those cards died off from lack of demand. I dont think anyone misses cards like the GT 210 or the 8400 GS or crap like that, those were ewaste. But honestly? The "real" market started around $100ish with 50 series cards, and even then I considered those "lower midrange" for a while. But yeah, this company, nvidia, they control 90% of the market and have IPs surrounding these new technologies reminiscient of physX and they're choking the market out. And that's the real reason prices went up. Yes, crypto enabled this, and AI is enabling this, but seriously, these companies are getting greedy, their market cap is insane, nvidia went from a relatively small company to this massive megacorporation in recent years because of this...and why do you think it is? Because they charge more and dont pass along savings to the customer. The GPU market has been starved for almost a decade now. The only meaningful improvement that we got was in 2022-2023 at the new "low end" (formerly known as "midrange"), when crypto fell out of style and we could finally afford GPUs again, and even then, AMD was the only one who actually lowered prices because their strategy of matching nvidia didn't sell due to not having the fancy tech nvidia had. So they could sell 6600s for $200 and 6650 XTs for $250.
Btw, in complaining about 5000 series prices, I recently got "well ackshullyed" by some idiot pointing out that originally the 6650 XT was a $400 card and...yeah...and it didn't sell at that price, and they lowered it to around $230ish. And the 7600 was around $250. That's progress. That's good. Full price for $400 never should've been a thing. I also get told I spent too much on my CPU, which is a 12900k, and I understand that that's typically a very expensive CPU, microcenter had a killer deal on it where I functionally got it for $200, which is what your typical lower end i5 costs these days. And it also performs closer to an i5, or as they call them now, "ultra 5". Seriously, the 245k matches the 12900k in performance, and that normally costs $300. But I got it for $200.
Btw, speaking of which, if you really wanna see what stuff should cost, look at the CPU market. The CPU market and the GPU market used to cost the same. Your best midrange builds used to be $200 for a CPU like an i5 2500k and $200 for a GPU like a GTX 660. Now, inflation has happened, and has influenced both markets. i7s used to cost $300-350, now they cost $400. i5s kinda bufurcated from the lower end ones costing like $170-250 to the high end K model being $300. The i3s still cost $100ish. And that's what they should. The market is still accessible. if you wanna buy a i3 12100 for $100, you can even get a i5 12400 for slightly more, like $110 these days. The lower end i5s are $150ish, so you can get a 12600k or 13400 pretty affordable. 12700ks are $200ish. 13600ks and 14600ks are $230ish. If anything, CPUs have been cheap AF, and while yes, we now have this super high end "X3D" bracket on the AMD side with unrivaled performance, both companies are offering relatively decent options from $100ish all the way up to $500-700 on the premium end.
That's what the GPU market should look like. I mean, we should be seeing a 5050 for like $100-150. A 5050 ti for $150-200. 5060s should cost $200-300, including the Ti model. Like maybe at most $350 for a Ti if you wanna push it. 70 cards should cost $400-500. 80 cards around $600-700. 90 cards maybe up to $1k tops. Instead, we're charging $300-430 for a 60 card, which as people are pointing out, is actually what the 50 series should be. The real 60 cards are the 70 cards and they're charging like $500-800. 80 cards now cost $1k+. And the 5090 currently goes for something like $3k with all the scalping. Even at MSRP it's what, $2k? That's INSANE. Look at the CPU market, where we see legitimate inflation, while still maintaining accessibility, vs the GPU market where prices are just so unreasonably high there's no way you can reasonably justify this. but then people continue to justify it and say "but but inflation." They even appeal to what stuff cost in the 80s and 90s when the stuff was unaffordable to most. Not gonna lie, I didn;t even own a computer until 1999. I couldnt afford it. It was $600 for literally the cheapest POS at best buy and it was woefully obsolete even like 2 years later. Again, PC gaming wasnt affordable to me until the late 2000s when console gaming got more expensive and PC gaming got cheaper. And now that trend of cheap PC parts is disappearing and I'm being priced out of the market.
The same applies to Nintendo and their shenanigans. $450 for the switch is the most expensive console in my lifetime. Even with "inflation", most consoles were sub $400. Games were expensive back in the 90s, sure, but again, that was a growing pain of the tech. Tech like this when it's new is very expensive and only appeals to the upper classes which can afford it. Even my above average middle class home only got me a few games a year and most at DEEP discounts. We rarely paid MSRP.
And again, MSRP is one thing, but things used to get cheaper FAST. It used to be a game that released for $60 during the year, like say, a game released in april now? I'd get it for $20-40 by Christmas. If I got a 2-3 year old game, it would be like $15 in a bargain bin or my local equivalent of gamestop from when I was a kid. I almost never paid full price for anything.
But here's nintendo pulling an nvidia. And let's face it, that's what they're doing. They're doing the business strategy of the day if just raising prices to see if they can get away with it, and the only thing we can do is say no and refuse to pay those prices. Which sucks, we're being priced out of the market, but what are we supposed to do, live beyond our means? I know theres a tendency to do that as consumerism has led to tons of debt in the past few decades where the middle class uses credit to compensate for declining living standards, but yeah, that's not healthy for the people involved or for society. Youre selling yourself into servitude just to play some crappy games. I love games, but say no to funding them with debt. But yeah, that's where we're heading. And we shouldnt want things to be like the 1990s again, when a lot of fledgling technologies were expensive and we didnt know what business models worked yet. When I was a kid, video games were luxuries only middle class people and above could afford. Nowadays, they're relatively cheap and accessible. Even literal working poor people can often get a last gen console and like games out of a bargain bin once in a while. Most of the poorest people I know often do that if they're gamers. They'll buy PS3s, or now, PS4s, and play f2p games or $10 games they get on sale. Again, it's good that that's available. But when nintendo is still charging $300 for an 8 year old about to be LAST GEN console, and $60 for games, that's BAD. That means that stuff will never become affordable. And once its out of production, it'll get worse. Old pokemon games on the game boys and DS sell for insane prices these days because they're literally out of production. It's crazy. But this is what nintendo wants. They're a crappy, greedy company these days, and they wanna take you for every cent they got. They are charging $450 for the switch 2 and $80 for games simply because they CAN. Everything about the switch 2, from the price, to the fact that "physical" games are now keycards attached to digital downloads, to paid online, and paid game chat, just SCREAMS anti consumer to me. It's anti consumer. Don't buy it. And stop defending this crap with the "but inflation" and "well ackshully if you account for what stuff cost in 1997" nonsense. As I pointed out, my own living standards havent kept up with inflation. It's a real problem. A huge part of the reason why people are so angry and there's so much populism is because we can tell our living standards have been in decline for a while. And these price hikes make it WORSE. I know not everyone is in my specific situation, but it's not exactly uncommon. Middle class people have seen their living standards hollowed out over the past 50 years or so, and we notice. Stop defending this stuff.
Heck, stop being market fundamentalists in general. I know that in gaming forums they're not supposed to be political, but this IS a political topic. And a lot of gamers just have this right wing "this is what the system is, adapt to it" mentality. No. Systems are created by human beings, they should adapt to US. And we have power to actually make them do so, if we actually advocate for our own interests and don't just start gaslighting people and defending this. Let's not act like these are impersonal forces beyond everyone's console. They are very personal forces of rational actors, and the other side often knows how to advance their interests, while consumers/workers are fricking stupid and defend getting screwed every time. In the working environment, we see it when we talk about how hard we work and how little money we get while gaslighting anyone who gets too "uppity" and demands better. And we see it in the consumer environment as people just continue to buy insanely priced nvidia cards and nintendo consoles while acting like those who don't are somehow irrational or entitled. No, they are now. 99% of the time, I hate the word entitled. Always remember that. Always advocate for your own interests. I aint saying some people are so kneejerk corporation they hate on even decent deals. Like, again, look no further than halo infinite and how people were complaining over a free game with paid cosmetics. People can overcorrect, but generally, they tend to just lick boot. And they should stop doing that.
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