Alarmed at the price increase for Steam Deck, a reader fears gaming hardware is becoming unaffordable for ordinary people and that companies are preparing to replace it.
You probably saw the news during the week, that the price of the Steam Deck has increased by 40% worldwide, meaning a price hike of £200/$300. I have never, ever heard of anything like that and while it’s obvious why it is, with the memory crisis and the whole world in chaos, at the end of the day it’s still a huge amount of money for a bit of hardware that was already not cheap.
I was never going to get one anyway, and I imagine a lot of people are going to think too and just move on, but this is all on top of prices rises for the Xbox Series X, PlayStation 5, and soon the Nintendo Switch 2. And the price of PC components has gone up by even more, so you can’t just wash your hands of consoles and say you’ll get a gaming PC instead.
All this and we’re at the cusp of a new generation of consoles which always cost more, and which Xbox has specifically said will be expensive. I don’t know about you, but I’ve already gone as far as I can with this. I’m not paying close to a grand for a video game console, especially not when it has almost no chance of doing anything new.
So, this is a problem that has already started and there is no way to do anything about it, because it’s not even specifically a video game problem. It’s also something that’s only likely to get worse over time, unless the AI bubble does ever burst, which it’s really looking like it won’t.
But there is an alternative. It’s one that I don’t like but I think we’re going to start hearing a lot about it very soon, especially as Microsoft is super keen on it, since from their perspective they were already cooked when it came to the console business anyway – so they’ve got very little to lose at the moment.
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If you haven’t guessed already what I’m talking about it’s streaming, which we haven’t heard much about at all this gen, even though GeForce Now is trucking along quite happily. Although the fact that Microsoft’s service isn’t actually very good probably explains that, especially as Sony uses the same tech.
But really, like it or not, streaming seems like the only way out of the current problem. It’s not ideal because unless you have a watertight Wi-Fi at home you’re going to have choppy graphics, and that’s definitely going to happen when you’re out and about, so goodbye handhelds that you can use anywhere.
Naturally, it means not owning any of the games yourself, and the complete death of physical gaming, but I’m sure none of the console manufacturers will care about that.
I think there will still be consoles even once streaming takes over but I think, as Microsoft’s Project Helix is implied to be, they’ll just be ultra expensive high-end machines for super fans. That was probably always the plan, given what Microsoft has said so far, but now with the memory crisis they have no choice.
Valve is probably kicking themselves they didn’t get the Steam Machine released a few months earlier but I think that, if they don’t just cancel it outright, they’ll make that just for the 1% as well. After all, that Steam Deck price hike sounds outrageous, but it still sold out anyway at that price. So there are people out there that will pay anything to get the hardware they want.
Most people aren’t like that though. They just want to play games cheaply and conveniently, and that is not where the industry is headed. So when switching to streaming casual gamers will just put up with the downsides because it’s ‘good enough’, which is what most people do about most things they’re not passionate about.
It’s a grim future as far as I’m concerned, especially because I think it’s going to happen a lot sooner than we think. If consoles are already becoming unaffordable for ordinary people, then companies are going to want an alternative as soon as possible, and that can only be streaming. (Or just putting up with what you’ve got and embracing retro gaming.)
By reader Taylor Moon
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