Well, here I was thinking that Steam Machine had priced itself out of the market, but it sounds like it’s gonna end up having parity with PS6 anyhow
Next-gen consoles are rumored to be around a 5080 in terms of performance. With 32GB of unified ram, $1000 would be a good deal for that level of performance. If Microsoft added the ability to run windows on it, that would be a pretty compelling package.
Hopefully things will get better, but with ram prices where they are the steam machine would probably need to be $900 if it launched today without being subsidized by valve and is around the performance of a base PS5.
I hate to say it but consoles may be the better deal next-gen.
I thought nobody knows the specs for it yet?
These are the rumored specs according to moore’s law is dead. Of course things could change or he could have gotten misinformation.
MLID has <50% accuracy IIRC, so everything to be taken with a spoonful of salt. Not saying it’s definitely wrong, of course. He’s gotten things right sometimes too.
Didnt xbox say they are quitting the hardware side of things?
No, they said it would run PC games.
Whether that means Steam remains to be seen.
Pc parts aren’t cheap either…
However your options are much better when you’re building a PC with a $1000 budget.
Half of that will go towards RAM
1000 for a PC? Are you mad? With the prices going up it would be miracle to pay 1000, if you find ram or cheap HDD/SSD.
I don‘t think people who can‘t cough up 1000 bucks for a console will cough them up for a PC. They just don‘t have that kinda money to spend on videogames. It‘ll lead to people stickin with what they have and those who don‘t have anything (especially kids) will play games on their phones or doomscroll all day. So the whole next gen might be crossgen and/or even tank the industry in general. That‘s my prediction.
$999 “is not impossible”
At that price, just buy or build a fucking computer already.
Not anymore. Same thing’s driving prices on both sides.
Ram is short Storage is short Video ram is shorter
The newest consoles outside the switch are just pc’s with different opperating systems.
I bet the next big thing to be released is a ps6-lite for $399 that’s just a terminal with a $50 a month rental fee to a cloud gaming provider, game licenses not included.
They know that by the time they release, a gaming pc will cost twice as much.
Can’t slowly upgrade a PS5 into a PS6 though.
You can on PC.
We must be reaching a plateau in terms of generational leaps in between consoles. Though I love the PS5 it’s not a huge jump from PS4, just slightly better graphics and better frame rates. As things stand, I can’t see a need to upgrade for years. PS5 it’s only 6 years old. It’s easily got another 6, maybe 10 years in it.
I’ve been complaining that the consoles and graphical fidelity have been seeing diminishing returns since the PS3 / Xbox 360. At this point, we’re just pushing way more power for minimal improvements. It’s stupid.
It’s amazing to see what they squeezed out of the PS3 and Xbox 360 towards the end of their life compared to the launch titles. It feels like there was not much of an improvement over the life span of the PS4. The PS5 has ray tracing, but apart from that it doesn’t look much different from the PS4. I suppose framerates are higher now.
Yeah for sure, “better” from here on out will have to involve better features.
No.
Maybe the Gabecube will launch with a “console price” after all.
I’m kinda hoping valve waits for component costs to calm down before releasing it - otherwise I could see the price making it DOA.
I imagine it won’t do console numbers, but I’m sure there will be enough fans and early adopters to justify the added expense of a 2026 launch. However, I’d like to think the popularity will grow organically as the system gets older and prices start dropping again.
PS5 was too much day one at £400 and it’s only gone up since. What happened to the days of sub-£200 consoles later in their lifespan?
AI datacenters and greed.
We’re also losing the ability to shrink our transistors at this point, so the things that made old tech cheaper before don’t really apply anymore.
I think the problem might sort itself out once the data centers are actually built. The impact from maintaining a data center is probably less than from actually building one.
If they allowed to build all the data centers around me, hardware be less of our issues. We want have any water left in our homes. They literally trying to build 26 of these fucking water draining things in our area.
No it’s gonna suck. Those data centers will consume fresh water and power driving up costs of both over the long term.
The chips will also become obsolete or will degrade over time. After 7 years they will require replacement. Same is true with memory and ram.
It’s never going to end.
Increased demand translates to increased memory and ram production capacity?
In a world where inputs to the process of chip creation can scale you would be correct.
However it takes at least a decade to bring a power plant online restrict power generation. Access to natural gas and oil can be distrupted further restricting access to power. There is a finite supply of water in most areas that can not be expanded . Disruption to trade routes due to war and tariffs make expanding the inputs to production difficult. Reduces access to capital due to a lack of faith in the US government and rising interest rates will restrict that access.
The world of plenty we lived in was dying even before Covid killed it off. We live in a world of scarcity and disrupted supply and resources now.
Yes and no. Production capacity takes a long time to build up in manufacturing. Plus these are specialized parts so the build up will take longer. Don’t expect a significant production capacity increase in the US for 5-10 years.
I guess it’s finally time to tackle my backlog.
Personally I don’t need better graphics, PS4/PS5 level is already great. Developers can do pretty much everything they can imagine.
I’m for cheaper, more accessible hardware.
There’s literally enough in my PC backlog for the rest of my life probably, don’t need another new console, game or graphics card, ever.
I pray for immaculate memtests on us all for all eternity.
🙏
Famous last words, now your RAM and GPU are going to fail
I’ve got like 30 years worth of PC parts laying around, I’m sure I can cobble something together 😁 sometimes it pays to be a packrat.
Seriously, anything after 2015 has perfect graphics, I don’t need slightly more realistic hair or whatever. Even a lot of 2010 is enjoyable. And this is only about graphics quality. For gameplay, story etc, you know shit actually matters, there already is way more than I can play.
As a long time PS customer, the Steam Deck has been probably the smartest/luckiest impulse purchase I’ve made. I used to not have a PC backlog, but now I own a PC port of pretty much all my favorite console games PS4 and backwards, among others, and the majority of those purchases have fallen under the “might-as-well-at-that-price” category of expense. I’ve been playing on Deck nearly every day since I got it and have only scratched the surface of library I’ve built since buying it.
“might-as-well-at-that-price”
The reason I have 130 games installed on my Steam Deck. My backlog has gotten absurd to the point of comedy. I’m set for years.
This year I try to stop this. Went 2 months without buying a single game. I have an absurd amount of games and the list of games i actually want to play is so large it would still take years to complete.
Between Humble Bundles and Fanatical I’ve got more games than I can play in a year for less than a single new release. It’s amazing.
Haha ok buddy, can’t wait to see you puzzling about why millennials hate game consoles or whatever when launch sales numbers are rightly in the shitter
Yeah, feels like the correct move here would be to hold off with the next generation, if you can’t get enough of a performance jump without increasing prices. Otherwise you’re just offering a premium edition.
You…
You think they care?
They want people streaming games to phones/TVs and paying by the hour.
Not subsidizing console sales anymore will make cloud gaming seem more attractive, and that’s where the most money is at
Google couldn’t make cloud gaming work when the entire world was stuck inside with a sudden desire to play more video games. They were given an underhand toss for the best possible scenario to get cloud gaming off the ground, and it didn’t take. The math doesn’t work out.
Looking forward to indie developers who actually want their games to sell optimizing them for older, more reasonably priced hardware.
Conspiracy theories are a trick by big Dumb to make people think less.
This sounds like a conspiracy theory.
This is becoming my default position for so many things now it’s ridiculous.
That’d be quite high compared to historical inflation-adjusted launch prices.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/game-console-launch-prices-adjusted-for-inflation-1975-2024/
Game Console Launch Prices Adjusted for Inflation (1975-2024)
https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/995e4917-5bb0-4dee-8b7d-f43e8ef21d62.webp
Weren’t Saturn and PS1 the same price at release? Or am I misremembering
I wonder who they’re trying to sell these to. Back in 2002 the Xbox cost 480e and it was already very expensive. The 360 was cheaper at release already (400e). Fast forward 25 years, salaries are the same and hardware costs… double? The math doesn’t work out
I mean…those are not prices the market will pay so I guess rip console market?
