Many of you are lying about being unemployed our there.
this post was submitted on 28 May 2026
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Same reason scalpers struggled to keep stock of cards being sold at 4x the price during covid, which directly lead to nvidia and AMD skyrocketing prices the second stock stabilized.
The world is full of idiots who have more money than sense, who make terrible decisions with no thought of the consequences or ramifications.
You can afford to pay more for this like this when you live with your parents and have no plans on moving out
I bought a steam deck when they came out (the cheapest one so I could upgrade the storage myself), and it's a pretty nice device. But I honestly couldn't come up with a use case for it. I think I just don't like games as much as I used to.
I went with the Lenovo legion go for the switch-like removable controllers. It's running CachyOS and I use it more as a mini computer than a gaming device. Same, gaming just doesn't do as much for me as it used to
Same here, I bought a play station 4, and it was collecting dust. I couldn't find the energy to play, when I had time, I just opted to lie down and rest.
Is this old age?
How tf are there so many people who have this much money just lying around? We are in a freakin recession (or damn near close to one), the most sensible thing to do currently is to NOT spend large amounts of money.
My best friend does landscape design and her clients are in the rich neighborhoods. The rich have plenty of money and in return makes her plenty of money.
The people with money still have plenty of disposable income.
Then there are plenty of people without that financial security that make poor decisions. The people that are actually struggling like myself aren't the ones purchasing this.
It's the furrys
Not that surprising - somebody's always willing to spend money they don't have on stuff they don't need.
This may be my pessimism talking, but I feel like PC and Console gaming are probably both going the same route as Disney Theme Parks. If you have to ask how much it costs... If you aren't willing to blindly shell out too much for too little... Gaming won't be for you anymore. When it boils down to it, these things are luxuries. They've found their latest "limited production" excuse (AI gobbling up SSD, GPU, and RAM production) to pump up cost and there's definitely excess demand. Or at least enough scalpers willing to take that risk. Sure the cost spike will probably come back down some once the bubble pops, but if they keep selling out, then why would they ever lower the price again?
Don't worry, for just 50 dollars a month you can subscribe to the basic peasant tier version of GeForce NOW that entitles you to a whopping 4 hours of game play per month, as long as its played between the hours of 3am and 4am local time.
(With ads)
It's definitely getting worse, but I feel like it won't get that bad. I don't think that the unaffordabiltiy of PC components will result in gaming becoming a niche commodity, I think it will result in people either not being able to play certain games, or not play them at the settings they want. I think gaming will persist via things like cheaper or used hardware. I think also some game developers will adjust the performance requirements of their games so that it meets (or attempts to meet) the reality of what people are able to buy. Triple A gaming might die tho if they don't adapt.
It will shift to streaming that can run on anything and things like mods, running older clients, and cheats will essentially be impossible. Unless of course you pay for them with in app purchases, which publishers love
Short sighted consumers will eat it up because “oh now I don’t need an expensive console, I can just run an app on my tv!”
Then comes the death of all the above, as well as a generation of kids having access to not just gaming, but 3d modeling and serious digital art, programming (as well as learning through modding and finding ways to cheat), music production, video editing, etc. how many of those things were only available to kids via piracy? Capitalists don’t give a shit about this. They’re salivating at everything become a streaming client which both essentially eliminates piracy as well as turning a one time software purchase into perpetual subscription hell.
The crazy part is everyone but the tiniest sliver of people will be fucked by this. You know how musicians have shifted to basically making dick from streaming, and view it essentially as advertisement to funnel people into physical merch and concert ticket purchases, their only remaining revenue streams? Developers will be in the same place. It’s arguably advantageous now to be on something like gamepass but that’s because Microsoft is purposefully taking a small percentage barely above costs (10.5%). Once it’s dominant do you think they won’t shift to 30% like apple, steam, and google? And probably even more once distribution outside of their platform is unfeasible?
And for the short sighted consumer saving $3-500 on a console once every 5-10 years becomes another $30 subscription, which outpaces the cost of a console in 2 years and also robs you of the shred of autonomy you did have
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$950 handheld gaming device that I'd only ever use on a plane or long ass road trip in which I'm not driving.
Or, play games on my phone.
OR, gasps read a goddamn book.
Thats has hardware thats 4+ years out of date, and was already long since showing its age with running newer released stuff.
Its a neat device, but its.. at this point.. an old neat device.
I use it mainly as a home media pc. I got it as a gift though.
People are now conditioned to need INSTANT GRATIFICATION FOR EVERYTHING ALWAYS!
"I want a Steam Deck! I can't actually afford these new prices! I'm buying it anyways!"
Then retailers see the insane prices people pay for stuff without blinking. Steam Decks sell out after a 40% markup. RAM & SSDs & HDDs sell out at 4x what they sold for a year ago. So the prices never go back down.
And everyone goes full surprised-Pikachu-face when everything is now always goddamn expensive.
Show some fucking restraint for once, people!
Goddamn.
So the prices never go back down.
So, the bottleneck here is really the memory prices, and while Steam Deck sales do affect memory prices
as with anyone buying anything with memory
my guess is that it's a pretty small factor relative to other devices using memory.
According to WP, the Steam Deck has 16GB and sold uh, 4 million units over its entire lifetime as of February this year. It's been out for four years. So figure ~64 petabytes of DRAM over its lifetime, or ~16 petabytes of DRAM per year.
For comparison, in a single year, looking at smartphones:
https://wifihifi.com/1-25b-smartphone-units-produced-in-2025-apple-samsung-tied-for-tops/
1.25B Smartphone Units Produced in 2025, Apple & Samsung Tied for Tops
Global Smartphone Average DRAM Hits Record 8.4GB in 2025
8.4 GB is the per-phone average, including older phones, so this is probably a conservative estimate, but assume for 2025, that meant that phone manufacture consumed ~10,500 petabytes of DRAM in a single year.
EDIT: And I'm sure that AI consumers dwarf that, given announcements about how much OpenAI alone was buying 40% of global capacity.
EDIT2: And if one wants local LLMs
I'd like to run my LLMs locally, not have some cloud provider do it
and you assume maybe 1% capacity utilization, then we're going to need something like 100 times what the cloud AI companies are getting in RAM to get to that point.
So, yeah, Steam Deck purchasers do count towards demand for memory, but...I don't think that they likely move the needle all that much alone.
People are now conditioned to need INSTANT GRATIFICATION FOR EVERYTHING ALWAYS!
you haven't read anything about credit cards and the 20th century, have you? how old are you? like 19?
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As we have seen, they won't and never will. This is arguing for gravity to stop pulling so hard.
The mechanism to fix the problem you're describing has broken long ago and everyone stopped trying to fix it. Your money needs more choices of where to be spent, then businesses will force each other to price things reasonably. If anyone can name all the companies that make a type of product, then that is not enough companies.
I posit it's a consumer culture issue.
Look at Temo, Tiktok, Amazon, YouTube; people are bombarded with "buy this on impulse!" every day, 24/7, through notifications. They're urged to buy high by dozens of influencers they're bombarded with.
So they do.
And now that's the culture. Competition isn't going to fix that, and doesn't naturally arise in that kind of environment anyway.
I think that's true. I think that stems from the fact that a large percentage of global consumption is American in origin, and since at least the Industrial Revolution, that country's culture has been led around by the nose by business magnates to the point that our national culture has remained relatively shallow compared to other nations and is largely centered around buying things, as you point out.
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I got a Steam Deck LCD 64GB for $350 and then put a 1TB SSD in it, so like $430 total. I love the SD, but it’s just not worth double that. A gaming laptop with a 4050 goes for about $800 now, so the current pricing isn’t really that good of a deal even at today’s prices.
Can you share a link of that laptop? My sister in law needs a new gaming laptop but everything I'm finding is waaaaay more like expensive than that. Granted, she's doesn't live in the US so whatever retail you send me won't work but if the laptop is cheap the same brand/model would probably be cheaper there.
MSI Thin 15 B13VE is the model. The only place I see it for $800 is Amazon at the moment.
I love the Steam Deck, but it’s definitely not worth $1000. That’s absolutely ridiculous. I guess I’m going to find a new hobby, gaming is becoming way too expensive.
There's countless good games that work on older equipment. You could play for the rest of your life on just that slightly older stuff and not get through half of it.
Exactly. I've put more hours on my retro handheld playing ps1 and SNES games in the last year than I've spent on my desktop. It was $26, and I've hardly even dented the library it's got.
Gaming can be very cheap, you dont need to spend thousands to start gaming, you need to in specific settings
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So glad I bought one in January
Honestly, the way shit is going, get what you can while you can. Gaming is only going to get worse and more expensive by the week.
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I’m so happy I got a white limited edition one off marketplace for 650 last week. Sold my LCD for 400 so it wasn’t a bad upgrade for the price.
Half these "sold out" stories don't tell you if it was 500 units or 50. Supply was already a mess before the price hike ... AI ate the RAM market and now everything downstream pays for it. The device is great, the timing is just bad.
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