So...Microsoft won't stop shooting themselves in the foot lately. And I did want to discuss the $1200 rumor a bit more. It comes from the idea that Microsoft said their next gen console will be a "very premium, very high end curated experience." They also hinted that their thinking comes from their $1000 Xbox Rog Ally. *ugh*
So...I really have to ask, who wants this? Not many people who I know of. I kinda hate the current push of PC handhelds. They're all WAAAAAY too premium for me. The only one even remotely close to my price range is the steam deck (or the OG rog ally Z1 on sale, I saw that for $350 before), and even then, I went for a $200 razer edge over either of them because $200-250ish is...what I'm willing to pay for a handheld. It's what I can comfortably afford, while still buying actual GAMES I want. I can blow all my money on hardware, but if I do that, I can't buy games to play said hardware on. But I digress.
Honestly, I hate these PC handhelds beyond that too. They remind me of the game gear. The game boy beat the game gear back in the day. Why? because while the game gear was also a "very premium very high end curated experience" for its time (COLOR AND GRAPHICS), the game boy outsold it. Why? Because it was a lot cheaper for one. And a lot more flexible for two. It was smaller, used less battery, had a better library arguably. It was the better handheld, despite being worse on paper.
I think we're gonna have to relearn the lesson of the 80s and 90s that the equivalent of a $300+ handheld or a $1000+ console is NOT okay. We did this back then in the experimental days of gaming. And the cheaper options won out every time.
Even these premium handhelds, they've only sold like 6 million of them, which is like..nothing. And 4 million of those were steam decks. Why is the steam deck winning? because it's $400, not $800. That's why. It's simple supply and demand.
And, as we know from the other day and act man's video, game sales are lagging too. Most gamers only buy 1-2 games a year, in part because it's all we can afford. Most spending is driven by a small number of big spenders. And that's actually kind of the point. It's where the market is going, as hardware becomes more expensive, and more and more people are being pushed out of the market.
But what if Microsoft's strategy is to adjust to this reality? What if they see the writing on the wall, know the middle class is dead, and they're trying to appeal specifically to that 4% of gamers doing the vast majority of the spending? Many of those guys are wealthy, arguably, not very price sensitive, and they'll spend TONS of money for a "premium experience", even if the masses won't. What if the gaming industry is abandoning us? And by us, I mean the middle class, the ACTUAL middle class.
Many people discussing microsoft's strategy seem to be pointing to the so called "K shaped recovery", where the wealthy make up the vast majority of consumer spending, and the not wealthy....don't. It's a sign of the times. We've seen most of the wealth and income over the past 50 years go to the top 20% where the bottom 80% stagnated for the most part. Despite this idea that growth is a tide that raises all boats, much like a trump rally, the big boats are sinking the small ones. And a lot of that is concentrated not just in the top 20%, but the top 10%, 5%, even 1%. Now the top 10% make up half of all consumer spending. To be fair, the economy has always been skewed toward the top, but now it's even more so, and given I'm in, idk, either the 20-40% quintile or maybe the 40-60% one, well, let's face it, corporations don't give a flying FUDGE about someone like me. Oh, you're gonna spend $250 on a GPU? That's nice, this rich fricker wants to spend $2000 on an RTX 5090 to do RaY tRaCiNg!!!11! on our brand new $70 $80 game. Your dollars just aren't good enough any more! Screw you, have a nice life. Enjoy having nothing.
...and this is why the American people are pissed. In 2016, people were pissed over the loss of status and jobs as their middle class factory jobs disappeared and were replaced by low wage service jobs. This is why Trump won. In 2024, even though the jobs were there, people were pissed as the price of everything went up, and people are facing even more setbacks as their living standards keep declining. It doesn't matter what side of the phillips curve you're on, the economy isn't working. Because all of the wealth and income is going to the top, while the bottom and middle are getting less and less. We've seen the mass erosion of relative living standards from the 1970s on, and every economic crisis since has made it worse. The wealthy come out better than ever. The stock market is up, unemployment is down, but at the end of the day, the masses are struggling more and more. Either our jobs aren't paying what they used to, but inflation is low, or inflation is high and jobs pay more but it's not keeping up with inflation. Either way, we're being crushed.
And maybe microsoft, being the for profit business that they are, are looking at this and going "hey, let's raise prices to appeal to the premium segment who do most of the spending anyway." And because most people don't pay up anyway, well, screw them, we don't need them, we ONLY need the rich people.
Fordism is truly dead. The middle class was built on the idea of paying your workers enough money to consume with, you need to pay your workers so they can buy your cars, and now our system is the masses work to produce stuff that only the wealthy can afford to buy anyway. Rather than being participants in the economy who both work and consume, we just work and don't consume as much. The "American Dream" is dying. Younger generations don't believe in it any more. It never worked for us, and unless we have a paradigm shift, it never will. And given we shot ourselves in the foot by putting trump back into office, and he seems intent on becoming a dictator and turning us into one party rule, things may never get better. This might just be life now, and we might have screwed ourselves.
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