Well, the USD is worth 15% less today than it was when the consoles launched. As such, keeping the price the same is the same as discounting it with a stable currency. The price today is the same as $425 at launch, so prices have come down we just don’t see it reflected in the dollar price.
In addition to that we’ve passed that era of Moores law. New hardware is coming out with diminishing returns unless it’s big and expensive. We’re long past the era of every 2 years hardware is released with exponential returns in power and efficiency rendering everything that came before obsolete.
Hell even from an aesthetic point of view Red Dead Redemption 2 came out almost 5 years ago and with higher settings on PC still holds up as a pretty game. The biggest factor holding graphics back these days is development time and money.
Also fab production is a fundamental limitation to a greater degree than it was in the past, prices typically fell quickly as a process node gained better yields and could be made on less busy production lines but you have a much higher fixed cost just to convince TSMC or whoever to put you high enough up in priority to get your wafers made at all.
Well I make 3% more now because companies refuse to give raises compensatory with inflation let alone actual raises, so actually it’s more expensive.
I’ve been feeling like console generations don’t need to come as often as they do now and this only strenghtens my view. Rather than making new consoles as tech evolves, since we are facing diminishing returns, they are making them larger and more expensive. Given how the economy is, and how much people can afford, if they expect to keep making future consoles increasingly more expensive, they’ll find quickly that there is a limit to how much people are willing to pay for an entertainment device.
Not to mention that the production costs to keep up with the graphics potential of these extremely powerful consoles are also increasingly unsustainable. It’s time to focus on game design above anything else.
New consoles don’t come out in response to new technology, though. They never have. The next console generation comes when people stop buying the last one.
They still need a reason for people to buy them. The usual one being “look how much prettier it is!”, but they are getting to a point the leaps of graphical fidelity enabled by technology are smaller and smaller, but the costs of making everything higher definition are skyrocketing.
They are following the Apple playbook. Put out a new system every 2 years and eventually will find some arbitrary ways to force users to upgrade.
I don’t think that is going to work as well for consoles as it does for phones. People can just keep playing older games. Living in a third-world country I know that too well. And if they try to sabotage the consoles, that might drive people away from console gaming entirely.
The inner generation consoles aren’t marketed to those who already own that generation. So the console cycle is still over every 7 years or so.
Apple doesn’t force you to upgrade. They have the longest support length in mobile. What they are fantastic at is convincing you that you need to upgrade.
Don’t they stop giving updates to slightly older devices. Also, I read reports of them slowing down older models as an incentive to upgrade. Late Stage Capitalism
They of course stop updating old devices. The 5 year old iPhone XR is getting updated to iOS 17 this month, and they are still putting out security updates to the 9 year old iPhone 5S.
They started limiting the CPU clock on older devices that had poor batteries in situations where it would try to draw more power than the battery could maintain. Identical devices with good batteries were not slowed down. Literally the opposite of planned obsolescence, but they failed to communicate what was happening which very likely lead people to buy new phones instead of getting their batteries replaced. At that time I had an iPhone for personal use and a Galaxy S5 for work. The S5 started doing the exact thing that Apple prevented when my battery started wearing out and random apps would crash the phone. However, unlike Apple where I could pay them $99 to fix it, Samsung and Verizon essentially told me to go pound sand and wouldn’t even sell us an official battery. We resorted to buying some sketchy thing off Amazon that never seemed to be as good. Kinda funny how Apple got all the hate, yet Samsung was the one that let me down.
Well he’s not going to say " oh yeah, wait a year or two to buy our hardware for way less" now, is he?
Well lots of people wait for prices to come down, that’s what I’ve always done. Guess I am sticking with PC.
With Microsoft and now Sony releasing their first party games on PC, there really isn’t much point to own a console outside of Nintendo.
Do I need to play the new Spider-Man or God of War right now? No, I’m happy to wait for them to release on Steam.
Even then if you have the hardware to run the 1st party console games on PC you can always emulate the switch.
Quite true. I personally like having a physical handheld to play on, but a Steam Deck would do the job just fine.
The Xbox Series X came out in the US for $499 dollars in 2020. That’s $586.18 in July 2023 money.
By selling it for $499, the price has effectively come down $87, or about 15%, in two and a half years.
The original Xbox came out for $299 ($515 in today’s money). In August of 2004 it was still sold for that price. $299 worth if 2001 dollars was about $320 worth in 2003 dollars, meaning the price effectively went down 6%.
In other words, the Xbox Series X has been reduced in price twice as much as the original Xbox. To get the same savings you would’ve gotten on the original Xbox in the same time frame, Microsoft should raise the price to about $550.
Microsoft did slash the price by $100 around the time the Xbox 360 came out, but you can’t expect that from them unless they can find a reason to build a new console. And honestly, with the power modern consoles have, I don’t see a reason why Microsoft should release a new console at the moment. It’s not like PC or PlayStation competition are driving them out of business.
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