I consider myself a classic gamer, in that very few games over the past 25+ years interest me in any way. I’m hoping that consoles die off and people take to these awesome emulation machines that are popping up everywhere.

I look forward to seeing whether the predicted GTA6 (at price ~$100) spike occurs next month, as that will help distinguish between ‘spending power decrease’ (if the trend is not reversed) and ‘cost-value decrease’ (console pricing is too high for perceived value).

TBF the Xbox has already been doing extremely poor.

This is simple economics. It used to be that game consoles got cheaper. People who didn’t want to pay the launch price could get them later.

Then that mostly stopped happening. And people have been complaining they’re getting more expensive, although I’m not sure if that’s true in real dollars.

But just like everything else, AI claimed another victim. Now the prices are going up. It’s even worse than before, waiting to buy actually means you’re worse off.

Game consoles are just computers. They’re made of the same things. Raise the prices on RAM, SSDs, and getting chips fabled and it’s going to hurt the market. The only way it would be worse is if we were all still using ROM chips for games.