Adapt or Game Less: Notes from the Priced-Out Frontier [from My Gaming Diary – Gamedate 78738.1]

I wrote at length on BlueSky this morning about all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth I have been doing over the Nintendo Switch 2. The hand-wringing. Agonizing. It is much the same as I have done over the iPad Pro. And again two times over now about GPUs. And I realized this afternoon in an epiphany…this is the sort of thing that people do when they are priced out of the market.

It has led to a reorganizing of the natural order of things. That being the sequence of things on my Major Purchase Planning List. There are things that have dropped off. Things that have been substituted. Things where I have had to re-orient my target to a SKU decidedly downscale. 

It’s funny when the pundits crow their own misbegotten and claimed forewarnings that “the gaming industry is changing”. Funny how they never add that perfunctory stamp to that claim “…and as a result, you may be priced out of things you would have normally enjoyed.” Funny that they try to walk this line that everything is getting more expensive for the supplier, but you, the buyer, should somehow miraculously expect prices to remain the same. And if they don’t, then you are entitled to yell and scream about it. This is in strict, clinical, academic opposition to the laws of economics we all learn as children.

I prefer to dwell in reality. And to make decisions. Often those decisions are hard. Unpleasant. Uncomfortable. Difficult. Unfair. I find, however, that when I unchain my mind from past paradigms to think beyond entitlements, I often stumble upon unique solutions that I hadn’t allowed myself to consider before when things were easy. To consider technical paths that I had previously thought too onerous or inconvenient.