So...a review for the steam controller leaked, and it was apparently $100. Which...I think is insane. I mean, here's my logic. As a PC gamer, I dont even use controllers often. For years, i used the infamous logitech submarine special, which I got for $13. As discussed in the linked article, it was mid. And this past Christmas, after seeing how even among cheapo controllers it's kinda lacking, I upgraded to an 8bitdo wired ultimately 2C controller for around $23. I could've gotten an uglier color for $18, but I wanted something that looked cool so I went for the more expensive wukong version. And while I havent played with it extensively, I thought it was a pretty good deal. it's a marked upgrade from the Logitech F310 and it's something finally worthy of using.
And...don't get me wrong, I can see people pushing for a more expensive controller. As I said, xbox branded ones, which presumably have better build quality are like $50-60. But I also know controllers get pricey these days. The switch was pushing like an eye watering $90 controller, Xbox and Playstation have elite controllers like $200. And yeah, a $100 controller? That's A LOT of money for a controller. I'm sorry, it is. I grew up in the PS2 era where those controllers broke and name brand ones cost like $35, or $30 on sale, and you could get some rip off mad katz one for like $15. Not that I'd recommend buying the mad katz one. Those things were boots theory in action. but yeah, $35 for a controller was pretty reasonable. These days, that's more like $65. And that's kind of fair. As I said, i can see a good quality controller being around $60. I wouldnt spend much more than that. Hell, i wont even spend that. I dont have tons of money to buy gaming stuff with, and quite frankly, I wanna allocate what I have efficiently. less money on controllers means more money for games. So for me....cheapo $20 controller, it does the job. And it kind of makes me wonder...what's even the point in paying so much for these things? I mean, again, I admit I'm going for something a bit above the mad katz boots theory special here, but given how we advanced from the logitech submarine special to something that feels a lot more premium for the price, why bother spending more? Idk, i think beyond a certain point, you're wasting your money. Ya know, in PC gaming, there's price/performance. You wanna get the best value for the money. That's what you do when you're money oriented.
But....other people on the internet dont like my opinion. And I've gotten a lot of really butthurt comments like HOW DARE I TELL PEOPLE HOW TO SPEND THEIR MONEY! And THE FEATURES ARE WORTH IT TO ME, BLAH BLAH BLAH, PREMIUM, BLAH BLAH BLAH, EXTRA FEATURES! And BLAH BLAH BLAH SO YOU DON'T WANNA BUY IT, THEN SHUT UP ABOUT IT.
No, you shut up. I'm sorry, but if you're making me double down, I'll double down. Buying a $100 controller is an irrational and stupid buying decision that plays into the hands of the same corporations jacking up the price of everything. Like, seriously. We have a cost of living crisis, and everything feels inflationary. And it's not just a little inflationary like 3-5% a year, some stuff seems to be going up WAY more than that. Like, as I said, a $35 controller in like 2002 is worth around $65 now. okay, but that doesn't justify a $100 controller, let alone a $200 controller like the really "elite" controllers out there cost. That's 50% above even the going rate of inflation. If we even wanna make that argument. I hate making that argument with tech because I think tech should be at least SOMEWHAT inflation proof given the whole point is stuff that used to be expensive is now cheap. Like flat screen TVs used to cost like a hundred bajillion dollars back in the day, now you can buy one for $100. Stuff like that. Of course, raw materials and stupid crap like tariffs can influence that. And I guess we do see that happen with the $20 controller I bought. But that's the thing. if something like that can be made for $20, why are such expensive controllers justified? It's like buying a 5090 for $3250 or whatever they cost now when you can buy a 5060 Ti 16 GB for $500 (and even that's too high, let's be frank, I've complained about GPUs in the past though).
Like that's the thing. i feel like there are two kinds of consumers out there. There's middle class, budget oriented people like me, who like normal americans are complaining about EVERYTHING getting too expensive these days. And then you have...the top 20% of the income earners. Those guys have gotten virtually all of the economic gains since the 1980s. They make up the majority of purchasing behavior, and while most people like me are spending less and less as gaming gets more expensive, these guys are gung ho into throwing their massive disposable income at the problem and arent very price sensitive. So $100 for a controller is nothing for them. It's like 1-2 hours of work. So what? And they're the ones driving the price of stuff up. one commenter made a point that $100 controllers didnt exist in the 2000s because there was no market for it and because consumers would've given them the side eye. Ya know...like I'm doing, since I still think like someone like that. but in the 2020s, the market is different. The middle class is dead, the market is adjusting to a more premium audience willing to throw higher and higher sums of money at stuff, and the rest of us are getting squeezed out.
And then when you tell them their purchasing behavior is stupid and irrational, and quite frankly, ruining it for the rest of us, they get all high and mighty. Hell, even toning that down, and on forums these days, i HAVE to tone it down because we all know how snowflakey people are when you call them an idiot or something (they're idiots), I still get huffy people who feel like merely pointing out that MUCH cheaper options exist make the value proposition of more premium products questionable, I get a whole bunch of HOW DARE YOU SAY THAT, I SPEND MY MONEY AS I WANT BLAH BLAH BLAH. Fine, spend it as you want I'm not saying you CAN'T (although i think people with that much disposable income should be taxed more heavily), I'm saying you SHOULDN'T because the value isn't there. But then i get people who are like "im a butcher and im at risk of carpal tunnel syndrome so i need a super comfy controller and I'm willing to pay a lot of money for it", okay, but is this controller really that specialized? it's not.
But then I get, BUT BUT, THE FEATURES! Okay, so...others brought this up too. But....remember my discussion of how yeah, you can get better value than a $20 controller with more features if you spend like...idk...$50-60? The same company that made my controller (8bitdo) has a controller with the fancy pants features like bluetooth (which i think is a waste, I hate bluetooth), gyroscopes in the controller (which I can use on my edge, but never do, because motion controls are stupid to me), etc, for $60.
Heck, the only thing that version lacks is...the touchpads. And let's discuss the touchpads. Okay, so you can argue that adding them costs a premium. idk how much. $40 for touch pads? Not sure that's worth it. but let's discuss the touchpads.
The touch pads were used to great success on the steam deck. Another device I don't care for because it's fundamentally flawed in many ways (man I write a lot of articles about how I hate certain tech), but for that device, you can make an argument for them. here's why the steam deck trackpads exist. Because the steam deck is a handheld gaming PC. Gaming PCs typically use keyboards and mice to control games. So the steam deck offered trackpads to give people an alternative to a mouse, to simulate mouse movement. I assume it works similarly to a laptop trackpad or a touch screen on a mobile device. And having played shooters on android, I would rather use that over joysticks as controlling FPS games with controllers is a miserable experience IMO, the fact is, you want to use a mouse if you play PC games. Kind of like...if you wanna play console games, sometimes using a KBM is a terrible experience. Hence why I needed a cheap controller, for those niche situations where using a KBM kinda sucks.
But on PC, I'm like 90/10 KBM vs controller. This controller is to be used with the upcoming steam machine, a "cheap" gaming PC made for a living room experience. It ain't cheap, it's looking to cost maybe $800-1000, even though my PC arguably packs equal to better specs. But...again, RAMmageddon, I can give SOME leeway here, but yeah. You're talking a PS5 tier experience for like $1k. Which is...pretty bad given that level of hardware is 6 years old and we've barely made significant progress since then and now we're talking of replacing that with super expensive consoles. Again, price of everything seems insane these days. But yeah, this controller is meant for that. And it's meant to offer a "living room" experience for those who want a console like PC experience....but not really a console like PC experience....like they want the benefits of a controller...while not having the drawbacks...because controllers actually suck for PC games...idk. it doesnt make much sense.
Hell, the idea of a steam machine doesnt make sense to me. Valve tried all this literally a decade ago, including that horrendous controller with the touchpads and it failed. But apparently the market has shifted so...they're trying again? To be fair I think steam OS and the like is a good idea, but pushing these super expensive gaming PCs as....consoles....isn't necessarily a good value proposition. Which is why it failed the first time.
But apparently in the 2020s it's like, the internet has been lobotomized or taken over by those top 20% yuppie types who come into tech spaces with all their market fundamentalism and are like BUT THE MARKET, THIS IS WHAT THE MARKET WANTS, YOU HAVE TO FOLLOW THE MARKET! Which is hilarious, and brings me back to why im rambling about this. Markets exists for humans, humans dont exist for markets. Well...actually, humans do exist for markets, but that's that really dark theory about how markets were used to enslave us. Either way, markets SHOULD exist to serve us, we SHOULDNT exist to serve markets. And....honestly? i feel like this weird market fundamentalism is just used to astroturf the internet into making us WANT to pay higher prices for stuff and to silence critics like me who actually are pro middle class consumer and wanna keep prices stable. But no, the logic of the 2020s is just, "everything's expensive, that's just how the market is now, if you have a problem with it, the market is right, you're wrong, and you should feel bad, and join the consumption craze, or feel bad for being poor." It just feels like massive gaslighting. And it's not just this. It's the $450 switch, the $70-90 games, the next gen consoles reportedly costing $700-1000, controllers being $100+. We're literally being gaslit into accepting higher prices, which means higher profit margins for these corporations screwing us, and we're not supposed to say anything about it? like, if you dare say "that's too expensive" or "that's not a good value", we're just supposed to stfu while upper class yuppies throw their money away for overly expensive products while telling the rest of us to STFU?
Quite frankly, this is one of the reasons I hate the overmoderation of the internet. Because it allows bad faith trolls to astroturf and encourage these behaviors, while anyone who speaks out gets dogpiled on, or even worse, modded when they dare get a bit too rough with the verbiage to criticize these kinds of spending habits. I HATE it.
Well..sorry, not sorry, $100 is too expensive for a controller, you're stupid if you think it isn't. Either that or way too rich for society's good. And while I didn't initially make my criticisms against this product about individual consumer habits and spending, if they wanna get butthurt and take it personally, I will double down on that, saying that anyone who throws their money away on this stuff is not just wasting THEIR money, but participating in the same inflationary forces that we've been complaining about since 2021. Seriously, by buying it, you're showing the big corporations that people are willing to pay this kind of money for this stuff, which...just leads to them charging this much or more next time.
For markets to work PROPERLY. You NEED people like me to say no. You NEED people to say, "no, this is a stupid product at a stupid price and i aint buying it." And then it fails, and then the company goes back to the drawing board and makes something more reasonably priced next time. It's kinda like how, we need unions to ensure people get good wages in the work force, while we look down on those scabs who cross the picket lines. Basically, if you spend $100+ on a controller, you're a scab. I'll say it. It's funny these same people will say "well back then, this idea would have failed, but now things are different." Yeah, they wouldve failed because consumers wouldve laughed the idea out of the room and not bought it. But now, in the 2020s, people just buy everything at ridiculous prices, say "this is how things are now" and then complain not at the people charging ridiculous prices but at other consumers pointing out the absurdity of such a price? Like...what's wrong with this picture? Well, from my analytical perspective, everything. Because as I see it, much of these price increases are happening because:
1) Businesses have all the market power
2) Enough consumers refuse to say no
3) This enables the offending behavior
4) Stuff is more expensive for everyone as a result
Back in 2006, horse armor was laughed out of the room. Then we went on a decade long binge of "season passes" and stealth $110 games. And now, while we've axed the season passes, all games are full of microtransactions that make horse armor look relatively tame.
Back in 2015, these steam machine/controller ideas failed. because they didnt make a lot of sense. Now we're conditioned to just accept $100 controllers and upcoming $1000 consoles. Back then, consumers said NO, and forced businesses to backtrack. Now, we just open our wallets, throw money at the problem, and then the rest of us are increasingly priced out of the market.
Quite frankly i think the problem IS income inequality. Some people just have TOO MUCH money, and they need to be taxed more so the rest of us can get a UBI. Call it "class envy" or whatever, I dont care. Society doesnt work right when most wealth is held by a handful of people. Just look at how rich people are destroying the entire PC hardware market right now by buying up EVERYTHING for years on end sending prices to the moon. Markets work when you have more equality, because people can spend dollars a bit more democratically, and businesses have to appeal to a broader customer base to get more dollars. but now, we just got a handful of people owning more and more stuff, and the rest of us are just the slaves to make it all, but can't really consume it because we dont get all the money any more. Fordism is what made the american consumerist model possible, but with that being abandoned, so are the bottom 80%.
And yeah. This isn't just me ranting about tech. It has politics and economics in there too.
And yeah, that's just my opinion on this. Take it or leave it.
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