This is the end of gaming industry and here's why......

Posted by bhartiya_pirate@reddit | buildapc | View on Reddit | 64 comments

We all know that how just ram and SSD prices just went up by 300-400% which means new people now rarely gonna built new pc until these prices comes down and guess what.....micron is shutting down the crucial and samsung also stated that they are gonna focus on the demand of ai data centers only and NOT ON CONSUMER DEMAND....... This is just a starting of the price hike and will definitely go higher in the future....

Not only ram and SSD but graphics card price will be higher too because till now nvidia used to provide their graphics card to their AIB partners ( like ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Zotac, Inno3D (InnoVISION), Gainward, Palit, and Colorful ) with pre stacked vrams but now guess what, now the vram will have to install by the AIB partners only.....

And about processors, you guys can see the price hike stared to happen already no need to say about that

Not only in pc but all the devices which uses flagship memory will be expensive too like consoles, handheld, and laptops.....

Which means there will be no budget gaming and GAMING WILL BE THE LUXURY HOBBY NOW so that means new people not gonna built new pcs ( same for laptop gamers ), consoles gamers will not buy new consoles because its price will be skyrocket too...... So what's gonna happen after 7 or 8 years when people's devices take the last breath ?

If people don't buy devices then for whom gaming companies gonna make games for.....for AI DATA CENTERS?

What you guys think about this ?

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Pale_Consideration97@reddit

I paid $2,000 in 1996 (equivalent to $4,245.00 today) for my first PC. It was an off the shelf PC for college, not a gaming PC, but it had okay specs for the time, so it could play most games. I had to take out my first credit card (from Office Max) and my Mom co-signed on it for me. I think it was 12 months same as cash or something like that, so I paid $200/month until the PC was paid off. I was making minimum wage at the time ($4.25/hour).

Don't get me started on the $4000 I paid in 2001 after I started making some money after college for my 400 pound, 65-inch widescreen projection TV. It took 4 delivery guys to move that thing into my house. I think the delivery fee was more than what a 65-inch LCD goes for today.

By comparison technology is still cheaper when adjust for inflation than in the past.

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ThatSorcerer@reddit

All I'm hearing is there is an incentive for arcades again

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Capital-Traffic-6974@reddit

Just waiting for the AI Bubble to blow up and prices to collapse. The electronics and memory industries have always been very cyclical.

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Due-Ball-3090@reddit

Did house prices collapse after the housing bubble? No. Neither will they do so now. Gaming will soon only be possible in the cloud, using shitty phones. They want computing out of hands of the people.

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Symbiotic_flux@reddit

Yep. There's a reason they refuse to make an economically semi-competitive ai workstation card for under $3k. The reality is that the more people that have access to high-end a.i capable cards, that's a threat to Nvidia's market share and dominance and their partners.

I spent a summer training my own A.I model on audio spectral analysis. Using VAE to train and create new spectrograms of sound for a.i driven audio synthsesis. It took a week to train on a 4090 and A4000, not the best. I quickly learned of bottlenecks and the reality that these models, especially developing a base model, require a cluster worth at least $30k+ to become competitive enough to fine tune for commercial use.

It's really no different than early days of personal computers, they used to be very expensive, only for corporations and rich people. The only difference is modern gpus and cpus are an established technology that is artificially inflated by supply chains driven by profit motivated companies consolidating the market further and further!

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MajesticFucksquatch@reddit

The average home price dropped 30% in the year after the housing bubble. What are you talking about?

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JDSweetBeat@reddit

I mean in general the price still went net up over time. Like, a 300% price hike followed by a 30% price crash still leaves you 200% above the baseline/starting price (which in this case is still substantially out of most normal working-class people's reach.

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MajesticFucksquatch@reddit

This is some pretty rough math but I think I'm relatively close.

The average home price in the 5 years previous to 2008 had increased by ~60% then in 2008 the avg home price dropped by ~30% meaning a net increase between 2003 and post crash of ~30%. The average increase in value of a home is ~5% per year so in a normal 5 year stretch a house would be expected to increase by 25%. This means after the crash there was an increase in price ~5% higher than normal. So you ARE correct but I think there is more hope than you think there is for home prices returning to close to what they "should" be at based on historical trends IF there is another market crash.

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Fennarth@reddit

That is very optimistic and it may not even happen before 2029. There is no indication that the AI bubble will suddenly burst, at least not anytime soon. I would rather just forget about PC gaming unless if I can play the game on my cheap laptop.

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HellaReyna@reddit

its not going to pop anytime soon, and there's a chance it won't "pop"

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Acceptable-Camel-848@reddit

Gaming has been a luxury hobby since it's inception. Also, as much as i hate to say it, console gaming isn't going anywhere. It's just PC gaming that's dying. Yes, gaming PCs will be even more unaffordable for most people, but it's still going to be roughly the same margin of people that can't afford them. With Sony no longer porting games to PC, it seems like console will continue to be the only budget gaming option.
TLDR nothing ever happens.

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bhartiya_pirate@reddit (OP)

Consoles going to be expensive after this fiscal year

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Antonio_Malochio@reddit

My parents paid the equivalent of $4000 in today's money for a family PC in 1997; I'm still amazed by how cheap PC hardware is nowadays (other than cutting-edge GPUs). A 20" monitor would cost $2000 back then, and you'd have to budget $100 just to get sound.

So yeah, maybe you'll struggle to get a $1000 mid-range gaming PC for a while. But if everyone carries on using old hardware, game companies will simply have to make sure their games are actually optimised for what people are using, which is no bad thing.

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theRealDystrophy@reddit

You actually think gaming companies are going to optimize to what the customer has....dream on buddy. That gave me a laugh.

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Siddyus@reddit

You are so right. I am starting to remember the old PC gaming days now when it was a super niche hobby since you need expensive PC parts to run them well. It just comes full circle now. I guess people who got into this hobby around late 2000s and 2020s have gotten used to good parts being affordable. Its time to lower those settings and just enjoy gaming with what you have for now.

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Hayseed1776@reddit

Well I built my PC 13 years ago for $1,200 and it still runs the only thing I've done to it was replace the video card I upgraded also now I'm running a GTX 1070 with 24 gigs of RAM Windows 7 Home 64-bit and recently after playing World of Warcraft for the past 14 years now they have kicked me to the curb like steam did a couple years ago when they stopped all support for Windows 7 because I can't just update my operating system some of the components in my computer have no idea what Windows 10 is probably mainly my motherboard so trying to upgrade it's not a viable option not to mention having to reinstall four TB of games and software so so other than a few Standalone games that I currently own and I'm buying a few more I recently acquired BattleTech which plays flawlessly on Windows 7 and is a great game and so I'm trying to decide I'm not going to buy or build another PC because it's too expensive so am I just going to game with what I got until it dies or do I want to purchase a PS5 because I've heard that there's a ps6 coming down the pipe but it's going to be like $1,200 and I can't see too many parents going out and buying that for their you know snot-nosed 10 year old kid for Christmas so I think we're kind of coming to a empath like a boiling point with the future of gaming versus AI versus price so it's going to be interesting to see this play out honestly I think the console industry is going to see an upsurge for sure and not to mention people buying old consoles

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bhartiya_pirate@reddit (OP)

man thats sad, and here im getting scared with nitro 5 2022 model, gaming was op back then. companies used to does what people wanted and now they just trynna suck consumers wallet well all these shortages are just for to promote those big so called cloud gaming scenes so they could earn money from consumers on monthly basis for forever, this will end the sense on owning, well you see its been months and nothing changing but i hope something happens to this shit and we could get components again

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ro3lly@reddit

There might be some downturn for people looking to get into pc gaming for the first time, or people with really really old setups... but for the most part.. I dont see it as a doom and gloom scenario, it just means people will continue to pay on their existing hardware for a long time.

If anything this puts more pressure on developers to optimize

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Karok2005@reddit

I still think it’s a deterrent for gamers wanting to get into pc gaming that doesn’t already have a rig tho

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Disastrous-Shop3634@reddit

Yep. I am getting close to entering college, and had planned a 2k rig. That "2k" is now much closer to 5k than to its original price... and I don't even have a rig. Very frustrating and disappointing, since I won't be able to enter the gaming industry unless I have just a bucket load of cash lying around, which, mind you, rarely any of us consumers have.

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Fennarth@reddit

A $400 PS5 is well within your grasp, my young friend.

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Disastrous-Shop3634@reddit

No, I mean, like, I don't have a PC, and the one I had planned to build when I saved up money used to have costed 2k lmao

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Fennarth@reddit

Just get a $150 mini PC. Better than no PC at all. You'd be surprised what you can do with integrated graphics as long as it's Alder Lake or better. I need a new PC too but I gave up after one 16 GB DDR4 module costs more than the whole mini PC I'm using now. I'm waiting for the Xbox Magnus as the PS5 Pro doesn't give me the performance I really want.

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bhartiya_pirate@reddit (OP)

I know it's for at least 2 years from now and don't know about the future, the " this is the end for gaming industry " is just a ragebait to attract people to the post

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Deep-Procrastinor@reddit

I don't think you are correct a lot of people are already starting to see that AI is not the next best thing, AI is all new at the moment ( yes it's been around for years but it's only in the last couple that's gained traction ) the cracks are already starting to show with people walking away from stuff done with AI. When enough people.say no the bubble will burst.

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ProfitExtra2604@reddit

And yup, that’s coming sooner than most think, too.

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Deep-Procrastinor@reddit

We can but hope.

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mikeyeli@reddit

Industry will be fine, gaming has always been a luxury hobby, who the fuck pays $80 for a game?

Battlefield 6 runs on toasters, if AAA studios want to, they can optimize their shit to run fine, if anything they will adapt or die, and if they choose to die, there will always be another studio that replaces whatever niche they catered to.

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ProfitExtra2604@reddit

“ gaming has always been a luxury hobby” Thing is, though, that hasn’t been true for decades, and trust me-if this ever did come to pass, there would be a lot of other much more serious problems on our hands….

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JDSweetBeat@reddit

Meh, it's more like it will become an upper-middle-class hobby.

Until recently, it was a super accessible hobby for the vast majority of people (like, anybody on the upper rungs of the lower classes/the bottom rungs of the middle classes) could probably afford a decent rig - I got an okay gaming laptop a few years back for $800 - the same laptop is now running $2000-$3000 on Amazon). Replacing it would be just way out of my price range unless I doubled my income.

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ProfitExtra2604@reddit

“ Meh, it's more like it will become an upper-middle-class hobby.”

Realistically, it absolutely goes back to being a super accessible hobby for the vast majority of people in the medium/long term. We are living in a very aberrant period right now, and there’s no plausible scenario that it lasts more than a few more years.

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anothershadowbann@reddit

"there will always be another studio that replaces whatever niche they catered to." i doubt it

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Aggravating_Sky_2652@reddit

Gaming isn't gonna go anywhere bro it's the hardware we gotta worry about , but I don't think ai bubble is gonna last much longer 😂

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Bubbly_Top4242@reddit

It’s funny all these people digging out 10-year-old sticks of DDR4 thinking they can put it on Facebook marketplace and make a fortune.

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alphamachina@reddit

After years of working in this industry, I have crates full of sticks of DDR4 and DDR5. I even found an old crate with 10 x SCSI drives, 6 x VelociRaptor drives and like 20 sticks of DDR3 in it. I think I probably have 60+ kits of DDR4, and a solid 20 full kits of DDR5.

I have 4 kits of Corsair Dominator Titanium 64GB 6000 CL30, 6 kits of G. Skill Trident Z5 Neo 32GB 6000 CL30, 3 kits of Corsair Vengeance 64GB 6000 CL30, Crucial Pro 96GB 6000 CL30, and a handful of random DDR5 kits by brands like Lexar and Silicon Power. I also have a few dozen NVMe and 2.5" SSD drives. I'm going to continue building PCs for my customers at as close to normal prices as I can get, as long as I have stock.

But it literally makes me feel depressed to see what's happened to this industry over the last few years. I hope I live to see the day AI collapses and burns, but it'll probably end up being uber successful.

It's insane to me that many of these kits are worth anywhere from $800-$1500 now, just for RAM, but I refuse to pass that burden onto my customers. I'm retiring this year anyway, so the timing was perfect. It was a good run. Sad to see the personal computer industry hit these kinds of lows.

Companies have zero incentive to give a f-ck about consumers anymore, so I feel it's our duty to make them care by telling AI to go f-ck itself. Don't pay for AI. Don't use AI. I'm certainly not anymore. It was a fun gimmick at first, but now it's just an annoyance, and it makes me feel gross every time I see anything made by AI.

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SuklaapiparkakkuDB80@reddit

You have a treasure, unexpected treasure, but you watch over money as you are not greedy, you did your honest work for years until retiring time, you got what you needed and stop. You watch over all this, at the market's future (a dark one), revealing yourself as a man sincerely loving his job and field of knowledge. Definitively you would have been the man all people searching for new build or upgrade are needing now. Hats off sir. My respect.

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Alarming_Middle_9432@reddit

I can only hope that people might engage directly when dealing with data centers.

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Fit_Wallaby538@reddit

People start to become dependent and addicted to media and entertainment. Even if the pc become expensive some people would pay for them. Cigarette used to cost so cheap but now with all the tax and price hike people still buy them.

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Fennarth@reddit

I agree with this. PC gaming is pointless now unless you can afford 64 GB DDR5 RAM and an RTX 5090. I assume you also have three new Ferrari's in your garage. The rest of us will just have to content ourselves with the PS5 and retro/indie gaming on non-gaming laptops. Fortunately, Intel have provided us with the new Panther Lake which is really all you need.

I'm done with graphics cards and RAM prices and I just don't care about PC gaming anymore. PS5 gives me all I need and I don't care if most games are only 60 fps.

Nvidia have openly stated that they don't care about gamers anymore so they may as well discontinue every card except the 5090 as there is only a market for that. Ferrari do not produce cars for the masses and Nvidia will not produce cards for the masses either.

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jasonbirder@reddit

This is the end of gaming industry

Its like people haven't been through GPU Price hikes/RAM shortages/CPU shortages etc etc before...

I got smacked in the face by the price of 3000 series GPUS on my last build (Crypto-farming)

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superfasttt@reddit

yeah that didnt have anything to do with ai it wont ever go back down just up

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superfasttt@reddit

i finally saved my 9.4k AUD to buy my new pc from my older 2070 setup to a really nice looking 5090. well that dream ended its now like 14k to get same build. think pc gaming might be interesting in next year or 2

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fantamos@reddit

my conspiracy is that its all a way to make more people have to use walled garden devices, like rokus, firesticks, iphones, chromebooks...things that basically have apps exclusively.

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bmtechs@reddit

I agree, they make us blindly practice humiliating rituals against our own freedom. They get joy and pleasure out of it. Sick materialistic devil world we live in.

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Alarming_Middle_9432@reddit

Until we rise against it. People like Musk are sociopaths, no matter how much money they may have. I am just glad I am not like Musk or the suicide-enabler Zuckerberg.

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Knet8@reddit

Yes, I was on the brink of buying a new gaming PC untill I checked the prices. It's not that I can't pay it I'm just not willing to pay that much. That there is going to be a decline in PC gaming over time is a normal development of the higher prices.

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Agreeable_Phase_3254@reddit

Just play old games. Hell my 4070ti super will last for a but longer and I still have my series x. I might go purchase some disc games just in case. Don't support them they will eventually drop if they get no consumer support. Otherwise gaming will be for the rich only.

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Redsand-nz@reddit

What is happening, is data centers are being built for AI even though demand for those services doesn't exist yet. I know it sounds crazy because AI seems so in-demand right now, but the data center industry is expanding so fast, they're actually just being built on pure speculation right now.

If that rapid growth is not met by demand, it will be painful for hardware manufacturers but great for us.

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FlippenDonkey@reddit

there will be demand.

they'll shift over to game streaming.

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GRiM_87@reddit

Die Gaming Industrie wird Cloud Gaming Subscriptions richtig krass pushen. Microsoft pusht gerade Krankheit(Ai) Symptom(steigende Hardware-Preise) und die Heilung für eine selbstverursachte Krankheit in Cloud Gaming.

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originallycoolname@reddit

It's gonna be hell for a while price-wise as economies are shifting, but really I see it like this:

Gaming companies already had the infrastructure to begin to support the massive demand of AI centers. They are shifting away from gaming and into AI data center fulfillment. That doesn't mean gaming doesn't have a demand, but they had the opportunity to fill a larger niche and as public or profit-first companies, they're gonna do that.

That just leaves an open gap for new up-and-coming brands to make an appearance for gaming technology. The gaps will be filled eventually as that is money consumers are willing to spend, the market will eventually make it available. These new companies might even bring new ideas and new tech to the table.

Just gonna take a while

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Alone_Contract_2354@reddit

Thing is, semiconductor production is kind of a limited market. Not really easy for new companies to get into, especially with limited capital. Base ressources is limited and hard competition to get and then the production itself is super refined and complex.

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ghostsilver@reddit

Just like the crypto bubble, I am excited to have great deal on used AI hardware after all of this is over.

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Karok2005@reddit

I agree with you. First it was the GPU, then we get RAM skyrocketing.

I had the money back then (and still do) to build my pc, but couldn’t justify spending that much only to game a few hours per week. I bought a TUF 3060 gaming laptop back then for like 1/3 of the price, which gave me a solid 2 years or so being able to game at 1440 with relatively high performance.

I wanted to finally build a pc a couple of weeks ago but once again, the prices are just stupid high. Gaming is a fun hobby but I don’t think it’s worth that much so I’ll wait until my laptop gives up and see what I do.

I think consoles won’t be impacted that much as they will need to figure out a way by keeping prices affordable. it’s a shame because I came from console to PC and may switch back because of it, which I said I wouldn’t because I do think PC gaming is just better.

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bhartiya_pirate@reddit (OP)

Yeah that's what I'm saying, I'm a laptop gamer and was gonna build a pc in 2026 but leave the prices coming down even other components are getting expensive

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Karok2005@reddit

Exactly. Last time I talked about it in Reddit people just said I was broke and somehow turned it into a money flex, which is pretty stupid as money really isn’t my problem. I set a value over things and hobbies now and I won’t blindly spend whatever just to get something.

It was about 3.6-4K CAD on Black Friday to build the pc I was looking for. Running a 5070ti, not a god build. Now at I’m spending 4K for the few hours I have in my gamer dad life.

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Furyo98@reddit

This isn’t the end of gaming lol, this will be like this for 1.5-2 years. Also have you forgotten about consoles? Ps5 sold extremely well just over Black Friday and depending on valve their new steam box might be actually worth it now if they can find a reasonable price with ram.

Also this was said when gpus were a demand for mining and then again when ai companies needed gpus. Ah look at that it last around 2 years and ai stop needing gpus.

The only reason we’re in this mess is because manufacturers were limiting supply of the chips the last 2-3 years because ssds and ram prices sunk so much. If they didn’t stop producing so much chips for the last 2 years then we wouldn’t be in this mess but that’s how these businesses operate. They weren’t ready for this shit to happen so quickly and why they’re needing to stop selling to consumers because they can’t make enough.

Heck the companies have already stated they won’t build more manufacturing warehouses because they know this is just a short term issue.

Also Indi devs aren’t going anywhere, we’ll be able to survive 3 years without it. Consoles will rule for the next couple years, I can see Sony delaying the next gen by 1-2 years to wait for ram to come back down as well

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Invictu520@reddit

Well there are a lot of variables here maybe prices will continue to grow but there are always new developments. People already talk about an AI bubble that they think has to burst eventually. If that is true that might bring down prices.

A couple of years ago we had this whole chip crisis where even age old GPUs suddenly sold for triple or even more that eventually calmed down as well.

Then with increasing bandwith, streaming games perhaps might become more popular. And yes I get it, me and a lot of others want our own PC at home, but your question was affordability in general.

Also there are already pretty powerful iGPUs maybe in some years you won't need both a CPU and GPU for low to mid tier gaming. Which might then bring down the overall price again.

Also ofc. there will be developments in the AI sector either they hit a ceiling eventually or maybe there are new and less resource intensiv ways to train and run them, which is in the interest of companies because it will lower the prices for them as well.

I am not an expert in economy nor a tech expert and in the end we can only wait and see what is gonna happen. What I do know is that in the past there were also things that seemed unstoppable and only increased until eventually it all just crashed and burned.

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king8654@reddit

think we’ll be just fine, ppl will pay more who have the money, others will just wait to upgrade

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bhartiya_pirate@reddit (OP)

2-3 years is not wait dude, it's called accepting the faith 🫠

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