Am a gamer.
Fuck Elon with a spiny cactus.
Poor cactus!
Fuck these assholes, I’ll quit gaming before I pay them for streaming it.
It doesn’t suck to be a PC gamer, we have a massive library of 3 decades worth of games and a growing library of near-native emulation.
It just sucks when you’re trying to lick up the floor around AAA developers. But that sucks for consoles, too.
I was very lucky I decided to build a rig right after the last crypto collapse. My only regret is not going over the top with ram and storage.
I’ll be playing my DEEP catalog of games (decades of personal collection and frankly amazing emulation capabilities) for years on this 3080 EVGA ftw. It’s like we are holding the holy relics of a once great civilization. Mabey the 2nd foundation will do better.
It’s definitely bad if you had planned to wait on ordering upgraded memory, GPU or flash storage because prices and availability were insane during the pandemic, only for it to triple in price. Not bad enough that I am eyeing consoles. I can’t stand the terrible framerate and low FOV they tend to have.
Don’t worry, console prices are also going up. (unless the whole chip market collapses, but even with the pull back it’s not collapsing now)
It’s a good thing there are tons of games and game technology that doesn’t require a new system.
Yeah, I already have more games in my Steam library than I could conceivably play in my lifetime. Like if I sat down and properly worked through my +2500 game backlog, it would keep me busy for decades. And all of them can be booted on modern hardware.
And that’s before we even dive into emulation and retro consoles. I love my Steam Deck, because it’s actually a fantastic (albeit, overpowered) handheld emulator. Hell, even my iPad is an emulator these days, and I keep a PS5 controller in my bag just in case I want to connect it and boot up a game during my breaks. Being able to just pick up and play the old classics whenever I want is nice. I would consider one of those dedicated handheld emulators, but I really don’t have a need since I already have two ways to easily emulate in my bag.
The joke is on them thinking I haven’t planned for the apocalypse.
At least I have a good incentive to go through my evergrowing backlog of games, and retro-gaming through emulation is better than ever.
PC gamers spent decades being told they needed more RAM and better GPUs. Now the companies selling both have discovered customers who buy them by the warehouse instead of the unit. Apparently the future of gaming is watching an AI generate a picture of the graphics card you can no longer afford.
There’s also perhaps the beginning of an AI selloff happening this week. It turns out you can’t keep investing money into something that costs more than it makes forever. A simple economic reality means that this too shall pass.
There’s also the looming hammer over RAM and GPU manufacturers for price fixing. They’ve literally strong armed AI companies to buy chips that they don’t have the data centres or power supply to run yet, and by the time they do the chips will likely be obsolete.
I’m investing in seed potatoes.
I’ll trade you some garlic bulbs and sweet potato slips.
We can make garlic fries and play emulated games on 5 year.old hardware for the next 4 years while we wait for the collapse.
My built PC is 4 years old, still running a 2060 RTX and I’m thankful I have 32GB of DDR4. I’ve contemplated upgrading a few parts, but the problem always came down to memory. GPU prices have finally normalized themselves after the dumb bitcoin mining junk, that took a few years. CPU prices are arguably manageable. Everything else looks okay.
It’s just that memory is the choke point for every builder. My hope is the same hope it’s been on the GPU thing, prices will come down. It’s just taking time and it’s a matter of when. I’m just thankful I have a machine that’s fairly young. There are games I’d still like to get and upgrade for, but I’m glad they’re out all the way in 2029 (Diablo V). I need to play what I have already that I can still run.
At some point supply will meet demand but I don’t think anytime soon unfortunately. This is a runaway train at the moment.
If this week’s stock prices mean anything that train ran out of rails. The two big AI companies are out of time and the money isn’t flowing in. NVIDIA and AMD will be fine but the buyers of warehouses of hardware can’t keep doing that much longer.
As usual, China scaling up will somehow take everyone by surprise.
