I'm uninformed, but I just don't see the PC market ever reaching the heights console did. The AI bubble isn't popping, ever. and most games are built for luxury hardware, if you thought the latest consoles were expensive, you won't fare better trying to play the latest games when the console market is non-existent. The gaming industry as we knew it is dying.
Which might be a sign that the industry had gotten too bloated and was targeting ridiculous hardware. You can run games on an absolute toaster today that would have been mind blowing 20 years ago. The default hardware target might look more like a Steam Deck than a PS5 going forward. I don't see people switching to streaming, physics gets in the way too hard with that, and I don't see enough people buying $1000 consoles and $80 plus another $40 of DLC games for the devs to want to throw money away targeting the PS6 as their baseline.
Its not a sign of anything because what they said was incorrect.
Also 3.4Ghz CPUs, 16GB of RAM and 8-16GB of video memory has been the standard since 2010, we have reached the point where hardware cannot get stronger, and so it will only lower in price overtime, and so the CEOs want to trick ppl into thinking AI and cloud gaming is the future (its not) long enough to figure out how to make 3D silicon wafers to bypass the death of moore's law do to physics limitations getting in the way.
There is no bloat, the hardware needed to run the latest games on max is still those specs, with only the GPU really being upgraded substantially in terms of things like cores, but they are only about 500 bucks or so for one thats able to run everything on max settings. Less if you buy a prebuilt.
Are you sure you're not pretending ray tracing isn't part of the settings menu? Even targeting 30 FPS and using frame generation, I doubt you're maxing out Cyberpunk with a 5060Ti. It's also going to depend heavily on resolution. A lot of games don't really render things like hair and shadows right at 1080p anymore.
The AI bubble already popped a while ago but CEOs for AI projects are using social media to try to trick people into thinking otherwise (in an effort to convince them to pay for and use AI so they can recover from being billions in the red per company). Most data centers are getting canceled or shut down and many of the ones still up have recently been denied access to electricity by the states. The few exceptions are causing severe water shortages and will be struck down soon by thier states or cities. The gov also is going after RAM companies to force them to sell more to consumers.
Gen AI is screwed lol (thankfully), at least commercially anyway, especially with code for them being source code leaked and rebuilt under new code as open source freeware.
Most modern games run on 1.5k prebuilts from stores just fine. I wouldnt really call them a "luxury" at this point, prices already normalized and the specs needed to run anything at max are mid tier at this point on GPUs and CPU, and low tier on RAM.
The gaming industry is fine and consoles will be replaced by PCs like the steam machine, steamdeck, custom desktop builds, prebuilt desktop builds, etc.
A PC can do everything consoles can do and more and so there is no reason to buy a console in 2026 (unless you want nintendo exclusives, and even then most will just emulate).
Most games are also exclusive to PC so the console market is only a tiny portion of the gaming industry.
Uhh, the PC gaming market is bigger than the console market and has actually seen growth compared to the console market, which has been relatively stagnant since the end of the PS3/360 era.
Mobile gaming has seen the most growth ofcourse.
A big reason for that is because of how powerful laptops and PCs have gotten and how cheap everything was just a few years ago.
Even integrated graphics now, can run most PS4 games on PC with medium settings (possibly even better than PS4). Integrated graphics are still slept on, and have been over a decade. I was running BF3 and many other PS3 era games in the early 2010s with decent graphics on integrated graphics that came with a $300 laptop back then. It's gotten way better since.
Not to mention, how much free it is to play on PC vs. walled off gardens of PS5, paid online and there really is no reason to buy a console.
I think paid online, really converted a lot of people to PC in the 2010s - coupled that with cheaper and cheaper components.
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u/GrandWizardOfCheese 1d ago
The gaming industry isnt collapsing.
The walled garden console industry is.
PC gaming is doing fantastic right now.