I won’t purchase another system because I don’t want to deal with 1) constant downloads- new games, game updates, system updates, data collection 2) logging in all the time 3) not owning a physical copy of a game.
They complicated the fuck out of doing basic things on their systems and I want no part of it. What have they done to keep the consumer interested in their systems?
Microtransactions, ads, no offline modes, you don’t own your own games any more… well they topped all of it with the new console. You buy games that are just empty boxes. Might be a slip of paper in there letting you rent it for $80 flat fee, but they’ll take that game back any time they damn well please.
NOW BEG FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT PEASANT.
They’ve never taken a game back. Everyone is causing a fear that doesn’t exist. I only buy digital, never had a problem.
This is either a blatant lie or unfathomable ignorance.
Ubisoft has done just that and so have several others. It’s the entire reason for the stop killing games movement.
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
Theres no way you are a “gamer” and have never heard of it.
Exclusives.
Legit the only reason.
I guess it’s also “easier” in a “It just works*” kind of way. Like you can have a pretty good expectation to how well a game will run on your system, and no fiddling with settings, or drivers, etc.
This is a big point for the steam deck and similar handhelds. There’s now a benchmark PC platform.
Turns out, fucking over your customers is bad for buisness. Who could have guessed?
OMG! It’s almost like constantly raising prices just isn’t working out!
It doesn’t matter how expensive RAM gets, what the market is doing, how much AI is driving up component prices, or whether the market is bullish or bearish. At some point, consumers reach a breaking point. When a product becomes too expensive, people stop buying it. They don’t particularly care why it’s expensive. They care whether it’s worth the asking price, and whether they can justify spending that much money on it.
And that’s the problem Sony and Microsoft seem to be running into. Between rising console prices, increasingly expensive games, subscription price hikes, and a growing number of anti-consumer practices, they’ve made gaming an increasingly expensive hobby while giving consumers fewer reasons to feel good about spending their money.
What’s worse is that these companies have spent years alienating a significant portion of their own fan bases. Aggressive monetization, digital ownership concerns, restrictive ecosystems, and the push toward subscriptions have steadily eroded consumer goodwill. You can only squeeze your customers so much before they start questioning whether they want to remain customers at all.
At the end of the day, consumers aren’t obligated to buy a PlayStation or an Xbox just because they bought one last generation. They can stick with their existing hardware, buy fewer games, switch platforms, or walk away from gaming altogether.
You can’t price your way to endless growth, especially when you’re simultaneously giving your customers more reasons not to buy your products. Eventually, the market pushes back. And frankly, it’s hardly surprising that we’re seeing that happen now.
If I have to drop nearly $1k on a gaming platform the money is so much better spent on a PC anyway.
Especially since on PC apps like retro arch give you better access to backlogs that these companies aren’t even offering! You want to play PS2 games 4k upscale 60 fps? Can’t do that on PS5. You can surely do it on PC though.
Yeah, being a PC is also a plus, since it isn’t relegated to only being a gaming machine like consoles. Can actually use it for productivity to do things like 3d modeling, video editing, coding, etc.
Gooning…
👍
The handheld PC market is really becoming competition, huh?
Lol
If I bought one it would end up in the pile of gaming devices I don’t use. I have an RG35XXSP for GBA, GB,and GC, a Retroid Mini for PSP, Vita, NES, SNES, PSX, DC, and arcade, a Retroid Pocket Nova for PS2, GC, and N64, an AYN Odin 2 portal for Android games, PC games/streaming, a 5800X3D/7900XTX PC for 4K OLED gaming, and a 5700X3D/9070XT for 1440P widescreen gaming. I’m nearing 660 games on my steam/epic/gog libraries and I have 2TB of rom dumps for all of the retro systems. I’ve spent thousands of dollars to realize I don’t like gaming, I liked hanging out with my friends.
Good lesson to learn. You can possibly still sell all that shit and break even, the way prices are these days.
It’s the same theme everywhere. They build for some kind of non existent luxury market while buyers stretch themselves thin. Now no one has any money left and credit cards are maxed.
We’re not buying what’s being sold. So now what?
Now they blame millennials and gen z kids for ruining gaming
And then they switch to everything being a live service so instead of buying games you just have access to the “whole library” of games (for whatever payment tier you’re in) which they will change and remove games without warning and deleting all of your progress unless you pay them at least $20 a month for cloud saves
Oh and the only games in the games library are ai slop vibe coded games that are unplayable carbon copies of each other
Clearly this is because people are just tired of buying physical goods. They want digital consoles!
Honestly, almost every console runs on my PC. Why not just make Microsoft Xbox for Linux?
The hardware now is just an x64 or ARM platform built to a certain spec running a custom OS. Basically, a PC or a tablet or a Mac Mini.
When you look at it that way, the idea of these walled-garden publishers and marketplaces starts to make absolutely zero fucking sense.
The need for consoles is rapidly getting eroded. There’s no proprietary hardware, no special sauce, nothing that they can do that a moderately spec’d PC can’t do, and often for less money.
Where they still succeed is just being easy enough, that they more-or-less just work predictably with barely more effort than running the updates that it prompts the user to run. And they’re fucking all that up with stupid shit like Virtual Gamecards. It’s honestly impressive that Nintendo managed to be the straw that broke my fucking back, would’ve never seen that coming. At least I knew what I was signing up for with GamePass (and they knew exactly why I term’d it when I did).
Stadia tried it.
Ahead of its time, IMO. And honestly should not even have wireless. Might be usable in grandma’s house out in the middle of the woods (unless Grandma’s got a shit-ton of IoT stuff…or one cheap security camera), but just about anywhere else it’s far too unreliable.
Yeah! Everything muat be digital and if someone still wants the box it can just have a paper with a code in it.
I mean who would like to play the single player game about 5 years later when the servers are down?
Right?
The future will be even worse. Have you seen what people have been doing with AI the last couple of weeks. People have decompiled entire games using AI and made PS5 games run on PC natively. Something that took years by multiple devs takes a few days by a single dev with a Claude account. Sony and MS are definitely shitting their pants right now. Their solution will be cloud streaming only consoles.
Good thing there’s already more good games out than I could play if I lived another hundred years.
Can’t play games when hungry.
You’ve clearly never seen me ignore all my biological needs to play games for 14 straight hours.
Yeah, indicators are indicating. Things they don’t seem to talk about. Used car lots are empty while new car lots are full. The tourist restaurants no longer have waiting lists. Gaming is a luxury expense, as in we don’t need it to survive, while new game prices are higher than they’ve ever been. I’m willing to bet most if not all luxury spending is down.
Prices are high and companies decided shitty AI is better than good people. So jobs are getting scarcer or paying less.
In the words of my kids: we’re cooked fam.
Amateur!
Not just here but everywhere. Everyone (except those with too much) is holding tight to their wallet until trump dies and some stability comes back to the world.
These companies have said plainly that they don’t see prices returning to pre-pandemic levels even if the current economic crisis is resolved. Corpos are too greedy, and the people in power are even greedier.
Just another flavor of rent never goes down.
And yet somehow there are millions of people preordering GTA 6 for 100 bucks lol
its not even a choice for me. i have been unemployed for over 2 years now. since just before he got elected.
Lol as if one person can be the cause of all this
Doesn’t mention how Switches and Steam Decks are doing, but I would venture to guess that Valve is eating Sony and Microsoft’s lunch.
Sony and Microsoft don’t even know Valve exists. The Steam Deck sold in its lifetime less than each console in a few weeks after launch.
The new Xbox coming out next year is going to have direct Steam support. And that’s no accident.
Xbox series X|S sold a total of just under 35 million. Those are actually estimate numbers, as Microslop stopped reporting their (embarrassing) numbers years ago.
Steam has an average of 38.5 million concurrent users, with a peak of 43.5 million users.
Steam is literally bigger than Microslop’s Xbox division, and infinitely more profitable. Sony’s PS5 has sold something like 91 million units.
The Steam Deck isn’t the relevant metric here. Every single computer with Steam installed is.
They were clearly referring to hardware sales because that’s what this post is about. As far as software sales go steam obviously does better since the market of people of with a pc is greater than consoles. Same reason why mobile is by far the largest gaming market.
Given that RAM prices are up on everything, probably not.
People aren’t avoiding new consoles because they object to Sony’s business practices. They’re avoiding them because they’ve been priced outside of the “toy” category.
Gabecube is projected to sell several hundred thousand copies. PlayStation 5 is close to 100 million units sold.
“Sold” as in the past tense of “sell”.
It is estimated that Playstation sold 13 million consoles in 2026.
And yet Valve’s revenue was twice that of Sony Interactive Entertainment’s. Steam can run on a generic PC; Steam Deck and GabeCube are merely gravy. Storefronts are where the money’s made. Hell, haven’t PS5s been selling at a loss until recently? What’s 13 million times a negative amount?
I am all for the little guy. I looked up all the stats because of what you said. PS roughly 10 million estimated by end of year, Xbox roughly 2 million by end of year. Gabecube maybe around 60k per month with a total in 2026 of around 400k units sold. That will be roughly half of Xbox sales if they performed similarly the entire year.
Impressive start, but the PS blows them out of the water.
I will be curious how PS5 does moving forward and how well any PS6 does. Seems like Sony is in the FA stage and might be transitioning to FO.
PS5 pro prices are through the roof so it will likely keep sales muted plus everyone is ready for the new console by now. With prices the way they are the next console generation could be three years away. That is an extremely long cycle and will further hurt their sales.
Another industry with its bottom falling out.
Hardware costs have gone up, compelling games releases for them have gone down (and didn’t start from a good position).
Such a mystery.
Not to mention they explicitly stated disc sales are dead. All my console games are physical, so I will no longer buy consoles games or consoles. Seems like the way to go.
Gaming in general is way too expensive now.
At least we have retro games to play instead.
I dont really feel anything for newer games. Theres been very few that ive been excited about. Graphics dont woo me in the slightest.
I feel ill booting up any console after the 360. Even the 360 was the start of enshittification.
“Wait, you mean this has no internet, you put the game in and it works? Wait, you own the game? Sony vs Illinois made that illegal years ago! no sign in or email? How do they track your eye movements for serving ads? How do they count your verification cans ?” -2040 kids.
I thought the Ps2/3 gens were the last truly good years of not overly monetized gaming.
Pretty much.
Which I’m playing on my Steam Deck! Which starts at only…wait, 750 dollars?!?
Edit: $790
Bought it when it came out 419€. I dont see myself paying twice the price today.
Or you could get an AYN Thor for 350$ + 30$ shipping and a wait time of 3 months
Or you could buy a miyoo mini plus and get it within a week for like $50.
That’s what I did and I play all my retro games on it, I even prefer it over my steam deck for retro gaming.
Or you could download an emulator and play on a 10 year old laptop on a big screen tv.
I can’t get over how great ps2 emulation is
PS3 is decent but half the games I wanna play aren’t ready yet, the ones that are done are great though
Given how fast AI recompiles are coming out just wait a week or two.
Yeah, that’s definitely directly comparable to a portable device like a Steam Deck or AYN Thor.
About as comparable as the AYN Thor (Android phone with weird form factor) is to Steam Deck (PC with weird form factor).
Are you unfamiliar with the concept of portability? Or do you carry a television everywhere that you go?
Laptops are portable. I think the point of the TV was that the formfactor and weight of the system aren’t a big issue when docked.
I think you can put SteamOS on those badboys now too, so you can say goodbye to shitty Android launchers
That’s true. Or depending on what I want to play, lots of even cheaper systems. Although the Steam Deck is JUST powerful enough for everything I want to play.
Edit: Also I use the shit out of steam play streaming to TVs and things
