Bread and circuses are getting expensive. The emperor’s throne is held by one who could never wield it’s authority with the competence and loyalty of the one who built it. What year is it again?
I think know where this is going:
“NoBOdy wAnTs to BuY gAmeS AnYmORE”
I feel like everything is being priced to where we aren’t meant to have any savings.
Companies want unbounded exponential profits. Now guess where those profits are coming from.
spoiler
It’s from squeezing every cent they can from regular people.
The objective is to kill home computing :D (🤮)
Unemployment max is 1200 a month in my state. Thats nothing.
I think he means the rate of unemployment, not unemployment benefits.
I know, I read it wrong at first too.
I basically don’t buy games anymore. I started to get the free epic games 2 years ago and this got me like 200 games. I don’t play much but when I want, I try a couple until I find something interesting. Playing Disco Elysium now.
Everything inflated but my pockets
everything’s going up except for my desire to continue living on this planet
Everythings expensive but my labour
I think consumer devices are slowly going to not exist. It will switch to screens that stream from the data centers.
I don’t think it’ll ever happen fully. There’s waaaaaay too much money in selling even 1980s-tier hardware to individuals after a certain point.
Where there is a demand, there is a market. Life, uh, finds a way.
That’s no longer the way it works in this new economy (at least in the US). About 50% of all consumer spending is done by the top 10% of incomes. Companies have figured out they can either join the race to the bottom, fight with the competition and eak out meager profits. Or they can just make shit expensive as fuck, have record profits and still have enough customers in the rich. By simply doing less for more money, they can earn more even though the total amount of sales and customers has gone down. The decline in sales is easily offset by the higher prices, leading to more revenue and more importantly way more profit.
This is why there are so many people living pay check to pay check, unable to afford needed stuff and on the edge of losing everything. While at the same time the markets are doing better than ever, so many companies are having record profits across the board. And this trend is expected to continue in the near future. The rich are spending while the other 90% are unsure about the future and limit spending. This furthers the divide between rich and poor and makes companies target the rich and forget about the rest.
Maybe some crazy person would take the risk and try to make something for the other 90%. But in doing so they have to work a lot harder and margins would be slim. Costs are up on everything and anything, so making something regular people can actually afford is hard. Let alone do that and make a profit and be able to keep quality at a proper level. The quality would suffer, lots of outsourcing would be involved, meeting any sort of regulations is hard and costly let alone optional targets like the environment and being sustainable.
The only way companies see a future for less rich folk is with subscriptions. Just load everyone up with a shit load of cheap subscriptions. Can’t afford a new $1000 appliance? Not a problem, you get it now and pay later. Not mentioning that pay later means pay forever and the total amount paid is way more than $1000. Plus people have a hard time managing finances with a lot of small loans and subscriptions. It’s all abstract till they get overwhelmed with debt. Something that happens more and more each day.
I get slightly bummed about this possible future, but then look at my crazy backlog from over the years and all of the old spare hardware I have kicking around. I could spend years just going back through emulators, let alone the literal thousand Steam titles built up and waiting to be rediscovered. Plus all the fan projects and indie studios that don’t require frame gen as part of their base spec.
We’ll be ok, we just may have to revisit the Old Ways a bit.
picked up a steam deck as a piece of insurance a drew months ago.
it has simply become a darksouls 1 machine.
I love to hate it.
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The newest numbers are yuge, the best numbers everyone says so, it’s incredible, it’s all because of me, because I’m incredible, and if it’s not then it’s Bidens fault, but I’m amazing and Biden isn’t, thank you for paying attention to me
Gun prices haven’t risen though
Ammo prices absolutely have
You can jump into backlog of older game titles. Its never late to discover GOG gems.
It is weird to see people obsess over the price of a new release AAA game when the classics tend to be better made, less buggy, have a bigger mod community, and much lower specs.
Go back and play the Halo series. The opening scene of the first game still gives me chills. Play Portal. And then play Portal 2.
Check out some old school RTS titles. Planetary Annihilation is a reworking of the old Total Annihilation game and absolutely stands up.
Go try some indies - Blue Prince or Slay the Spire or Darkest Dungeon.
There’s no reason to spend more than $20 on a game anymore
There is a reason many good old games can’t be easily played on modern hardware.
If you’re not allergic to 5-10 minutes of looking at protondb or other resources to understand how to get the game running, this isn’t a problem.
I’ve not yet found a difficult process for getting old games running. They’ve been around so long that the community has typically documented everything you need to know to get up and running.
I mean… I am used to getting things like modding skyrim on linux, so this is not really a topic needed to preach to me.
But I met countless people who will give up after three repeats of basic installation attempt.
