LOL Consoles are too expensive, and this is the find out stage of their fuck around journey. Its not all that surprising, especially with the ending of physical games on Sony’s part and Microsoft being generally shitty… They might not recover for a while. Bully for them!
This is true. Who wants to spend all that money at once. My PC may be more expensive than I console but I spent no more than $250 at a time as I upgraded it. People don’t need $1000 graphics cards to play modern games.
I had a ps3 and a ps4 and was fully up for getting a ps5. Then it came out right around COVID time and I couldn’t get one anywhere because of scalpers. So I thought, “No worries, I’ll just wait a year or two and pick one up for cheap.” Then it just never got cheaper. Now it’s like a 5-6 year old machine that costs over $900 CAD so I just never bothered.
And in the midst of these increasing hardware costs Sony thinks people would not mind paying the premium for their digital only games, completely killing the second hand and retail markets, bless their heart.
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.
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
People have unfairly held US presidents responsible for the state of the economy in the past… But in this case Trump’s illegal tariffs and pointless war with Iran absolutely are the cause of current high prices, or at least huge contributing factors. Republicans are a disaster for the economy…
He’s both effect and cause, he wouldn’t be there if the USA didn’t have fundamental social problems, and if he didn’t exist, someone else could have been in his place causing different problems
The evolved system is the cause. One person with several minions could easily topple this.
I don’t really see what difference trump dying would make to me tbh. Got enough money, don’t really want to buy many things even though I can afford them.
I could afford a new gaming PC every year. But my RTX2070 is fine. I won’t spend money without a good reason to and I don’t really see many good reasons right now. I have pretty much anything I could reasonably.
Cutting my hours worked, that could be something to go for.
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
Oh and the only games in the games library are ai slop vibe coded games that are unplayable carbon copies of each other
Man, Ubisoft sure did trailblaze for the industry. Including that part where it has already started dying before its competitors.
If me putting another 1000 hours into factorio is millennials killing gaming, I guess I will go and kill gaming.
Nuclear MLRS robot spiders. Railway artillery cannons. Flamethrower turrets. Industrialised warfare. Why would I leave? I just started a marathon deathworld run.
Steve Bannon ruined gaming.
No, I will not be taking further questions.
Raising Prices and making them the EXACT same as Computers but Worse didn’t bring in MORE Sales? Quick! MAYBE if we Raise the Prices MORE it’ll Reverse course!
-EVERY High Paid CEO ever!
EXACT same as Computers
I wouldn’t call it exact same. Hardware, yes, compatible. But that is not what a console is about. The hardware compatibility to a PC if any is a positive for consoles, because it makes ports and develop on the games much easier without much fuss. And consoles aren’t worse to a PC in all cases, they still have some value. The operating system and game compatibility, and ease of use are major factors.
It’s not exactly the same, but I do feel like it’s almost always worse in the console side these days (excepting Nintendo here).
On console you’re juggling patches and updates, installing to drive, you have concerns about whether games will play well on non-pro versions of the system, Xbox is traditionally hostile to physical media while PS is ending it.
If you’re going to install digital games and download updates, worry about compatibility, might as well play on PC. Those issues are less on console, but present on both.
Meanwhile most games are getting PC ports (since modern consoles are very PC like and games need the extra sales), you’re not as locked down to a single store, you have more room to upgrade incrementally (in theory). Operating system is also in favor of PC.
Ease of use I’d still grant that consoles have advantage, sure.
I don’t argue all this to put down consoles, I love consoles and played only/mostly on consoles for many years. But I think there’s a lot of truth to saying modern PS and Xbox have moved so close to PC that they’re losing the pros and embracing the same cons.
This is a much more nuanced take I could agree with. The previous comment wasn’t like that. I decided to go full PC gaming around the end of XBOX 360 generation, because I saw it coming and consoles were more PC like ever, and PCs (thanks to Steam) more console like ever. It’s been what, 2 decades almost and I can say confidently that consoles are not exactly the same like PCs.
But in an other comment the user I replied to said he didn’t even talk about all of the stuff, but was talking about the price. If we talk about the price, yeah sure, the gap has almost vanished. One of the biggest advantages of buying a console was also its initial price of hardware.
As for the PC more and more like console, it’s even more true with something like Steam Machine and Steam Deck, but without the downside of locked down console. That’s the closest we get to a console like experience and usability. Meanwhile current gen consoles have a PC architecture, getting digital only, supports keyboard (and mouse?) for selected games, updates are similar to PC, but without the issues of a PC. The user does not need to type in password on boot, doesn’t need to update several parts of the system, no need to install drivers.
They are closer than ever in history of computing, PC and gaming. But there are lot of differences that I cannot say exactly the same (which you personally agree with me, based on the reply).
The user does not need to type in password on boot, doesn’t need to update several parts of the system, no need to install drivers.
That’s how it works on a steam machine/deck. You get an update from steam that updates your whole system. That’s it. If you install other stuff from outside steam then things change, but you can’t do that in a console anyway.
That’s how it works on a steam machine/deck.
I know (own first gen Steam Deck myself), but most people don’t have SteamOS. In Windows this is still necessary, because it’s not just for gaming and unlike SteamOS it isn’t read only mode.
That’s an user problem. SteamOS is already compatible with many pc’s, and there are other linux distros that work similar to steamos when it comes to updating. Users still want windows when for the majority of them, it’s a non-issue to switch to linux.
People want windows but then complain that windows is awful. I mean, stop hitting yourself?
The problem is that not all hardware and software functions under Linux.
It was about the prices… THEY are the same
Oh, right. I thought you were talking about the architecture. And for the prices, well I wouldn’t say its the same, but let’s say that consoles no longer have a price advantage of the hardware. Because PCs gone up in prices too, as consoles gone up, so consoles never catched up to PC in that regard.
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Clearly this is because people are just tired of buying physical goods. They want digital consoles!
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?
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.
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.
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).
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 $80 flat fee, but they’ll take that game back any time they damn well please.
NOW BEG FOR YOUR ENTERTAINMENT PEASANT.
I find it weird tho, Xbox literally started ‘cloud’ gaming a few years ago and now there’s games that can’t be played on consoles. You need a subscription to cloud game instead of just using your console to run the game
They’ve never taken a game back. Everyone is causing a fear that doesn’t exist. I only buy digital, never had a problem.
This is either a blatant lie or unfathomable ignorance.
Ubisoft has done just that and so have several others. It’s the entire reason for the stop killing games movement.
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
Theres no way you are a “gamer” and have never heard of it.
Did we forget Nintendo shut down their entire store just to open a new one?
What’s to stop people from remaking the game and discontinuing support for the original? That happens in Apple’s App Store.
Haven’t had a problem yet*
Sony has done it this year https://www.playstationlifestyle.net/2026/06/26/purchased-studio-canal-content-removed-playstation-library
I guess technically it’s movies and TV in this case, not games. But the precedent is there.
Exclusives.
Legit the only reason.
I guess it’s also “easier” in a “It just works*” kind of way. Like you can have a pretty good expectation to how well a game will run on your system, and no fiddling with settings, or drivers, etc.
This is a big point for the steam deck and similar handhelds. There’s now a benchmark PC platform.
Hardware costs have gone up, compelling games releases for them have gone down (and didn’t start from a good position).
Such a mystery.
Don’t forget you also don’t own those 120$ games!
Plus they bought up all those game studios only to close them, lay off all the workers, and cancel the finished or in-progress games for tax breaks. And like Sony, they have said that they will no longer support physical games, creating a monopoly in their digital store and destroying further goodwill from gamers like me. They have completely lost the plot…
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…
PC ends up being so much cheaper in the long run… Far better game prices and no subscription cancer
And you can do a lot more with a PC, nevermind upgradability
Gaming is not an expensive hobby at all if you stick to good games. The best game in the world runs on a Pentium 2 with 64MB of RAM.
Does CDDA still run on 64MB?
Is it… Is it Doom?
Doom needs a toaster. No I meant Deus Ex.
Can’t play games when hungry.
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.
Spending might be down overall for the average person, but that doesn’t necessarily mean no spending either. Could be moving to spend somewhere else, on things perceived to be better value for money.
Last AAA game I bought was shadow of mordor and it was discounted to £2.50 at the time. If I had paid £60 for that I would want a refund. It wasn’t a bad game by any means but no where near enough playtime of value to be worth that price. Meanwhile Factorio or Rimworld release at much lower prices and keep their price for over a decade because people generally see them as being worth it even after all this time.
You’ve clearly never seen me ignore all my biological needs to play games for 14 straight hours.
Amateur!
Clearly you don’t have good enough games. When I first got Factorio I became nocturnal.
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.
Gabecube is projected to sell several hundred thousand copies. PlayStation 5 is close to 100 million units sold.
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.
“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.
You’ve missed the point. Any computer can run games from Valve. Why buy a stupid expensive console when you’ve already got everything you need? This is why Sony and Microsoft are losing sales.
The original point was sales. I do agree with your point of view though. I just need to build a gaming computer for each gamer in the house. Six computers at today’s prices… Nevermind! I guess we are sticking with what we got for now.
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.
I’ve just bought my first console in nearly 10 years but it wasn’t any of the big three. My partner and I are loving our new Steam Machine.
Ah yes, the Nex Playground.
I literally own two ps4s and two copies of a game my SO and I wanted to play together, but neither of us have an active PS+. We would both have to resub just to play it together in the same room. It ended up being cheaper just to buy two copies again on Steam to play it together on PC/laptop. There’s no reason to own a console anymore. Their convenience is completely gone.
Similar-ish story here. I set up a Minecraft server for the household and set up Minecraft on the Switch so my kid can play it. Turns out you have to have a fucking Nintendo subscription to play online in Minecraft on the goddamn Switch on my own server that’s on my own local network in my own house.
Let’s not even mention that you can’t even add a custom server on the switch, you can only play preselected servers or Minecraft realms that you have to pay for. I had to do essentially DNS fuckery to make that work.
Fuck these companies.
I bought Minecraft for switch to play with my son. What a shit experience it was.
First off, it took like an hour of trial and error to even get the two of us playing in split screen. Then I realized that to render split screen the game had reduced the draw distance to like 1/4th of what it was on PC years ago. We dealt with it until we actually had a good area built up and the frame rate dropped to like 10fps. Then my wife accidentally let Minecraft update and it bricked split screen until I completely turned off the switches WiFi.
Recently purchased Java for PC, spent another hour getting couch co-op going on that and it’s a completely different experience.
To be fair, most of your complaint is about the hardware of a low-power device not being able to handle rendering double the game and then compensating accordingly.
Which is an expected outcome.
The game is advertised and sold as having split screen co-op. Having to mess with console settings to get it to work and the resulting experience being shit isn’t excusable. Of course I didn’t expect a full PC equivalent but I expected it to have a minimum of polish and optimization.
If they couldn’t make the game do split screen decently, they shouldn’t put that as a feature. If the game can’t be run decently in single player, they shouldn’t have sold it at all.
That’s infuriating. What game? If you don’t mind me asking.
Monster Hunter; we both already have World on PS4. Rise and its DLC was/is on sale for $10 so we just got that instead.
Two full games and their DLC for the cost of one month of PS+.
Og Xbox rocked. Because sega engineers made it.
Sega engineers? I know the XBOX was always seen as the spiritual successor to the Dreamcast, because it was continuation from software by Sega just when Sega stopped with hardware. So far so good. But how does it come it was engineered by Sega?
Indeed. OG xbox feels a lot more like a Microsoft endeavor. It’s built on x86 hardware with very little proprietary components, powered by direct x.
Several of Sega’s engineers went there after Sega hardware shut down.
Interesting indeed. I was not aware of this. I’ll probably dig into this subject later today.
Well, for one thing, compare a Dreamcast controller to an original Xbox controller
The Dreamcast also ran a form of Windows CE and had its own version of Xbox Live. Dreamcast was a prelude to what 21st century gaming would be like more or less.
Woah, this is the first I’m hearing about it running windows CE. Got anything where I can read more?
BTW the Windows CE label was even on the console I think: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast#/media/File:Dreamcast-Console-Set.png (ah yes, I remembered it correctly) I was always wondering what this has anything to do with Windows. I think it wasn’t a full Windows anyway, and components were modular. Never digged into this myself, which is a shame because I’m interested. Found following interesting link:
In the end, this didn’t materialise into a full desktop interface or integration with Microsoft’s online services. Instead, it served as an optional layer of abstraction to simplify hardware operations.
In conclusion, ‘Windows CE for Dreamcast’ was merely a secondary SDK of choice for developers.
- https://blink.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/operating-system/
It was an opt in feature, not the main operating system I think. Don’t know what the actual OS of the Dreamcast is.
And the obvious links:
Thank you for the detailed answer! That’s interesting!
It literally says Windows CE on the console…
Because I see so many Sega Dreamcasts in my day to day life, in 2026. Man, fuck off. Have some curiosity about the world.
You fuck off, too lazy to zoom in on a picture of it LMAO
Turns out, fucking over your customers is bad for buisness. Who could have guessed?
Not Sony or MS.
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.
