Seal-clubbing is a time honored tradition. It is the online digital gaming equivalent of hazing; of putting newbs on the frat pledge line and putting them through the ringer. In truth, it is much less “congenial” than that, if I can use that term even in reference to frat hazing (which tells you just how far down the rabbit-hole we are). It’s way more toxic than that. It is an “end justifies the means” approach of attacking newcomer players in a MMORPG who break out of the training zone (ganking). In the training zone, or security zone…each game calls it something different…there are typically steep penalties for attacking other players, if attacking other players is even allowed. Once that training period is over and players cruise beyond that mystical barrier, it’s no-holds-barred, falls count anywhere in the building. And players who have accrued better gear will pounce on any junior players foolish enough to travel alone. This has been a key element to the gameplay loop of EVE OnLine. And the result has been for the EVE community to form its own corporations, gangs, tribes, family businesses, etc, often with complex relationships and chains-of-command. But the main thing is that in exchange for pledging loyalty and the house taking it cut of any spoils, you gain mutual defense.
On April 14th, CCP Games launched EVE Online Exordium. A paraphrase of the blog post follows:
“Exordium is a new dedicated starter region aimed at improving the new player experience. Instead of spawning across scattered systems, all new players will…
…begin in this single 53-system region, making it easier to meet others, play with friends, and engage with corporations early on. The region is structured around a central hub system and dynamically assigns players to starter systems to keep populations balanced. It’s designed to reduce the confusion and isolation new players often feel, while also encouraging mentorship and social interaction between rookies and veteran players.
Exordium is intentionally a safe, low-risk learning environment where PvP is completely disabled, allowing newcomers to learn mechanics without fear of attack. To preserve balance, it features restricted content, lower rewards, higher taxes, and limits on advanced systems like player-owned structures. Activities are curated and scaled for beginners, with simplified resources and adjusted rewards to match early progression. Over time, players are expected to “graduate” out of Exordium into the wider, more dangerous universe, ensuring the region acts as a structured onboarding space rather than a permanent destination.”
While this is a great baby bottle to ease players in, my concern is that it doesn’t matter to the end result: that you need to join a larger corpo with greater resources so that you can have worthwhile defenders looking out for you. And the crimp that puts on people is that you have to make a commitment to the game that a lot of people won’t want to because they want to play more than just one game. This is a great improvement for those looking for that one main social community; or even just one amongst two or three tentpoles. But it does not hugely change the value prop for someone looking to add a new game to the rotation of 2 or 3 other games and does not want any one of them to be a full-time commitment.
I had some other thoughts for the title of this blog post:
“PC Parts Aren’t Disappearing—The Media Just Wants You to Think They Are”
“Fear Sells: How Games Media Helped Justify 100% PC Part Markups”
“Stop Paying Panic Prices: The Truth About DIY PC Costs Right Now”
“This Isn’t a Shortage—It’s a Narrative (And It’s Costing You Money)”
“From Journalism to Fearmongering: Why PC Prices Feel Out of Control”
Look. I’ve never been one to make a lot of noise about “anti-consumer”, “price-gouging”, or really just price increases in general. The market always seeks equilibrium between suppliers and buyers; you guys have heard that old saw from me a million times. No need to beat a dead horse.
What’s going on right now in DIY PC-land is pretty much a travesty. Let’s start with the games media. Quite frankly, whether it’s the PC market, console market, or just consumer electronics in general, I’ve kind of had it with the brain-rot headlines that have made up a recurring sensationalist wave these first four months of the year.
Literally every day, I see some multiple sites run a headline that “…so and so says umptyscrunch prices are likely to increase in the next x months”. About everything. SSDs. RAM. Power Supplies. Steam Machine. Project Helix. PS6.
And so what does this lazy journalism based on rumor, conjecture, speculation, gossip, and bullshit lead to? Today WCCftech ran a story discussing the current pricing of components at Microcenter. Let my accusation be clear: this egregious pricing is being enabled by the games and tech media + influencers with their nonsense. Tom’s Hardware is the only site I’ve seen (there may be more) who are running weekly price-checks of various component categories. Even as I say that I admit that I have not checked to see how valid they are, so dip there with your own cognizance. The rest of the games media are having weekend freelance bloggers run brain-dead assertions of a thing that is not happening, thereby enabling things that should not be happening.
For Microcenter, let’s walk this dog:
Microcenter => 2TB at $699
Amazon => $343.45
Microcenter => 128GB RAM kit at $4199
No one and everyone => no one needs 128GB of RAM so who give a s***?
Microcenter => 32GB of RAM at $699
Newegg => 32GB of RAM at $389
Even with the notion of there being a price premium for being able to procure locally, there is zero excuse for a 75 – 103% markup over similar-to spec’d components available from other retailers. Microcenter is doing this because they know now they can get away with it. And they know they can get away with it because of the idiotic fear-mongering going on in the games media and online. For months the media and wanna-be-relevant influencers have slaked off of the doomsday scenario that there’s nothing left and prices for components are in the 1000’s of dollars. They have also not revisited historical prices trends and depicted how RAM and SSD prices have moved over time. We’re only ten years into SSDs becoming priced to be the normalized pick for your boot drive, 5 – 7 years for capacity drives, and only 4- 6 years for picking nVME as the norm. Prior to each of those transition times, SSDs in either 2.5″ or nVME form-factor had not hit the affordability points to be the norm. And I’ve already covered the realistic view of RAM over the 30 years of past history.
I get that a lot of people who came into PC gaming when you could get 32GB of RAM for $82 are experiencing sticker shock. The does not excuse the lazy reporting, the doomsday extinction-level event story-telling, and the fabrication of a crisis that does not really exist. And of course @BRAP_Podcast just bought a perfectly performant gaming PC with an RTX 5080 for $2600 (actually I think he even got it marked down on sale).
Don’t buy into the BS. Check prices. Expect more of the games media. It’s pretty pathetic right now. But also, do not pay these ridiculous prices at Microcenter. Especially when the truth is they have plenty of stock. And yet are selling components at scalper and pirate prices.
Nope. This doesn’t make any sense. And it is exactly what I am talking about is part of the industry problem. What am I on about? Today, GameRant reported that Jason Blundell opened a new studio, Magic Fractal. This is the third studio he has opened in 5 years. None of which have shipped a game.
Before people go in on me thinking that I am making a dig at Blundell, that is not the case. I’m not putting him in the same bucket as I do Jade Raymond. My point is that, in 5 years, he has run into the adversity that the market, or at least PlayStation’s assessment of it, will not support whatever game he is working on, whether it be due to genre, content, or other factors. And that still applies if it has been different games that he pitched while at Deviation and then Dark Outlaw.
And that is not specific to PlayStation. And those market conditions will not change with Magic Fractal. The market still sends 19k games to Steam each year, 5700+ to consoles. The socioeconomic middle-class in the United States is getting squeezed with less discretionary income to put into video games spending. And there is more free content for the middle-class that they can partake of without spending any money on TikTok and YouTube, or with the allure of payouts in prediction markets (ie legalized digital gambling).
The industry needs fewer games. And less studios.
This penchant to spawn another independent studio when there are not enough people buying the AA and indie stuff. When the available funding in the games industry outside of the traditional publisher pipelines has become radically more scarce post-pandemic. And when those traditional publishers are aggressively cost-cutting…it makes less and less sense.
I wish Blundell and his crew the best. But there are more and more games and more and more studios seeking success in a world of decreasing opportunities for it. The market needs to correct for the oversupply. The industry doesn’t need more games—it needs a correction.
Events were triggered in the mid-1960s that culminated in a bow wave of buyers whom consoles could be sold to 3 decades later, in the 1990s. Ten years after that, those buyers were giving rise to the opportunity for a second round of explosive growth in the market, one that would be more beneficial to the platform owners of the 2000’s, now that there were fewer competitors than there had been before.
This is a detailed discussion of the history of the gaming industry and the socioeconomics in the United States that enabled The Great Age of Affordable Gaming; an era that lasted from 2005 until 2020. And that contextualizes today’s fifth age of the gaming market’s evolution and provides reasons why and describes how we have entered The Long-Lasting, Quasi-Perpetual Bubble. The bubble that may not collapse, but will offer less stability to traditional market sub-segments, and much more greatly fragment and stovepipe the industry.
First things first; we need to level set some definitions of terms, because the internet screws these up all the time, myself included. The first key ones are disposable income and discretionary income and the difference between the two. Disposable household income is money left after taxes, used for all living expenses. Discretionary household income is the smaller amount remaining after paying taxes and essential living expenses (housing, food, utilities). Disposable is total “take-home” pay; discretionary is “fun money” for savings or luxuries.
Second, we need to cover Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs, because a lot of people have it mistaken in their view that playing video games is not a luxury; Americans in particular suffer from a horrendous case of decompression sickness that warps their minds and makes them think 1st world problems are all the worlds problem. “Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a motivational theory in psychology comprising a five-tier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid. Needs lower down in the hierarchy must be satisfied before individuals can attend to needs higher up.”
When we talk about things, even in America, that are entitlements that we believe all Americans should have access to, we have propped up systemic, institutionalized means that have fixed those items upon our society. A great example was when, under Obama, ISP’s were designated as common carrier services, reclassifying them as Title II services. A ruling that was overturned, but then restored in 2024. What this means, despite a ruling in 2025 that established precedent that net neutrality, a subordinate principal of making the ISPs common carriers, was overreach for the FCC, is that all Americans are entitled to internet access. Cell Carriers, in terms of mobile broadband, are considered part of the common carrier pool, but the carriers themselves are designated as a private mobile service, meaning all Americans are not entitled to cell phone service. But if you have cell phone service, you are entitled to mobile broadband.
We have also institutionalized access to art for all of society, but gaming is yet to be included in that pool. Western society and America has decided people should have universal access to certain art forms. Books. Static art…paintings and sculptures. Music. But not games yet in terms of provisioning of the hardware to access it. Your public library, a common service funded by a mix of tax sources (local, state, and federal), and therefore voted into being by the American people, provides this access. Basically anything that is provided by public libraries is a thing we have, as a society, decided people have a right to access. Ditto for most tax-funded museums.
And so, acutely, this article is primarily to discuss the affordability of gaming and how it is changing in the face of rising hardware prices, and to a lesser extent software prices, gating the access to gaming for some people. So the level-set is that gaming has always been a luxury.
It has changed in its affordability over time, being unaffordable, then affordable, and now becoming unaffordable again. But throughout that time, it has always been a luxury; a thing that is not essential or an entitlement in institutionalized terms in the United States. I use these terms with all of the requisite caveats as a thing that should be understood. “More” or “less affordable”, More affordable ” for some”, less affordable “for others”.
So let’s start the history work. How is it possible that gaming began as something unaffordable if it was cheaper? “Cheaper” is a matter of great debate, won mostly by economists who convert the dollars at the time to current-day dollars. The principles of inflation and the constantly decreasing value of the dollar means that, mostly, it will always mathematically come out as near-equal over time; meaning that, for the most part, when you adjust for inflation, gaming will always seem about the same net cost as it has always been. If anything, economically, it has been cheaper. But even if you think gaming was “more affordable” in the 70s and 80s, I think what is more important is to discuss it in terms of just who it was “more affordable” for. And then adjudicate your perception as a net of the total population.
Along the way, we’re going to continue defining (debunking) the use of terms that get twisted that actually have very specific economic definitions. Let’s first talk about what is meant to be to be “middle-class”. Being middle class generally means having a household income that is two-thirds to double the median. The U.S. median household income was approximately $83,730 in 2024. Today, economists show this bracket as typically ranging from roughly $50,000$ to $150,000+ annually, depending on location. In discussion, I typically use $170k as the upper band. It is characterized by financial stability, the ability to afford moderate luxuries (vacations, dining out), and reliance on credit for major assets like homes and cars.
Key Aspects of the Middle Class:
Income Ranges: While definitions vary, in 2023, the national middle-class household income was generally defined between roughly $53,740 and $161,220.
Cost of Living Adjustments: The definition shifts based on location and household size. For example, 2025 analysis shows in high-cost states like Massachusetts, a four-person household could need over $170,000 to be considered middle class.
Key Characteristics:
Financial Stability: The ability to save for retirement and handle unexpected expenses.
Education and Career: Often includes individuals with college degrees or those in professional/salaried roles.
Consumer Habits: Access to quality healthcare, homeowners (or aspiring homeowners), and ability to afford amenities.
SONY DSC
So when you talk about this definition, and choose to make an assertion like “gaming was more affordable in the ’70s and ’80s”, an assertion which is, inherently, based on who was in the middle class….was everyone in that pool in the ’70s and ’80s? Most decidedly not.
Two key events happened in the 1960’s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 begat a series of US codes that were designed to level the playing field for all people in the workplace, having especially impactful results along racial and gender lines. In 1965, the Higher Education Act strengthened federal funding for HBCUs. But it also introduced the modern form of Federal Student Aid, added federal funds for continuing education, provided federal funds to recruit teachers to underserved schools (thereby raising the academic competitiveness of students within those schools), impacting admissions policies for colleges in an effort to end discriminatory practices.
Since then, a few enabling effects occurred on the path from the 1960s to the 1990s.
High School Completion: The Black high school dropout rate fell from 33% in 1968 to 5% in 2018, essentially closing the gap with the national average.
College Attainment: From 1960 to 1991, the percentage of Black males (25-29) completing at least 4 years of college rose from 12% to 18%.
HBCU Economic Mobility: HBCUs, strengthened by 1965 federal recognition, act as major upward mobility engines. Graduates from these institutions are 14.6 percentage points more likely to earn a BA than comparable peers, and 70% of their graduates reach the middle class or above.
Income Premium: Ten years after graduation, first-generation HBCU graduates have income levels on par with non-first-generation graduates.
Shift from Labor to Professional Roles: Post-1964, Black workers saw increased access to white-collar jobs, moving away from manual labor jobs where they were previously segregated.
Federal Sector Representation: In FY 2020, African American women made up 11.7% of the civilian Federal workforce, nearly twice their participation in the Civilian Labor Force (CLF).
Income Growth: Real median household income for Black households has risen since the late 1960s.
Record Highs: In 2023, Black median household income reached its highest point in a generation.
Dual-income households increased significantly between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s as more women entered the workforce. While less than half of married couples were dual-earners in the 1960s, this increased from roughly 30% of families in 1970 to over 50–60% by the 1990s. By 1994, this surge made dual-income households a common structure in the US.
1960s Context: In the 1960s, the “sole-breadwinner” household was not the strict norm, but dual-earner couples were still less than half. Data for 1967 shows 44% of married-couple families had earnings from both spouses.
The Shift: From the 1970s onwards, the trend grew rapidly. By 1994, the trend was firmly established, heading toward the 66% level observed in the following decades.
***Impact ***: By 1994, the increase in dual-income couples resulted in a higher concentration of income in the upper income quintiles, as many households had two earners.
While this was occurring, a second dynamic was starting to take place beneath the surface. While it was true that there was an increase in the percentage of dual-income earning households, an increase in racial minorities and women entering the professional salaried ranks, and a modest increase in the wages of the middle-class, a secondary effect began swirling that really became a catalyst. That was a diverging hockey-stick effect altering wealth equity in the country. The really wealthy, not the middle class, but the band that we call upper-income, began accruing wealth in an uneven distribution ratio in comparison to the middle-class. In essence, the rich were getting richer, and at a rate well-exceeding the ability of the middle-class to keep up. Now, before we think “upper-income” means the Elon Musks and members of the billionaires club. Today, Upper-income households in the US are generally defined as those earning more than double the national median, starting at over $167,460 to $169,800 annually for a three-person household, according to Pew Research. More elite tiers start higher, with top 10% earners starting at $251,040+ and the top 1% at $659,060+.
So, in the 1990s, you had high median household income growth (10% over the decade), record stock market growth (Dow Jones up 309%), and a steady decline in the poverty rate (reaching 11% in 2000). The late 90s experienced a rapid productivity surge, low inflation, and a surge in household wealth. And despite the increasing divorce rate in the US, Women’s participation in the workforce grew to 60% by the end of the 1990s, with their income relative to men’s increasing. The share of high-income households increased dramatically. In 1967, only about 9% of US households earned $100,000 or more (in 2017 dollars), but by 1990 this had risen to over 15%, with continued rapid growth throughout the 1990s.
These are the conditions that led to a commensurate boom in the video games industry that began in the 1990s. The convergence of explosive growth in the combined middle-class and upper-income households that home video game consoles could be sold to; a burgeoning increasingly larger addressable market, converged and reached critical mass. While the video games market in the US would only support two set-top console competitors from 1985 – 1994, the mid-90s saw a time when the market was willing to support 3 main console competitors (Nintendo, Sega, and PlayStation), and 5 second-ring competitors, albeit for a short time (3DO, Philips CD-i, Neo Geo, Turbo Grafx, and the Atari Jaguar). There is a reason that these consoles were supported and the landscape of the console gaming market radically changed in the 1990s. It didn’t just happen by sheer chance and industry force of will.
Between 1994 and 2005, this support buckled, with the market telegraphing that it was only willing to support three console vendors. The second-ring competitors all failed out. And Sega also became a casualty of market demand (and its own mis-steps). It would be Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo that would create the new 3-front war. But those diverging economic hockey-sticks that started in the 90s create a new problem. The rate of increase of dual-income households had flattened out by 2005. While the upper-income households were continuing to earn more, the middle-class was barely keeping up. And so, in order to maintain industry growth, we entered The Great Age of Affordable Gaming (2005 – 2020). A time period where, whether sub-consciously or deliberately, the platform owners kept pricing relatively flat, with very little increases in hardware prices across three generations of consoles, and no increases in the stock price of the primary SKU in retail gaming software. This despite rising production costs for games.
Those diverging hockey-sticks, what was coined as the “K-shaped economy” by economist Peter Atwater in 2020 in reference to dynamics we saw during the pandemic recovery period (but has really been going on since the 1990s; it was exacerbated and accelerated by the rise of the knowledge worker in the shift in the American employment landscape since 2000), has led to an effect in the 5th Economic Age of the Games Industry. Underpinning that age are facts like “In the past five years, the top 10% of U.S. households gained more wealth than the bottom 90% combined—even after accounting for all those circa-2020 stimulus checks and wage gains.”
What also needs to be understood is that while the Upper-Income bands are garnering more of the net wealth, they are also increasing as a net percentage of all American households. Upper-income households were 14% of US households in 1971, 18% in 1991, and are now 30 – 33%. The middle-class households were 61% in 1971, 56% in 1991.
“The economics are important… But it’s how people now feel that matters most. As we see so often in history, when people feel powerless and uncertain, it impacts their political and social choices, not just what and how much they buy.” —Economist and adjunct professor Peter Atwater, speaking to W&M News.
And that is what is going on now in terms of the responses that pepper the landscape of social media with regards to the rising prices of video gaming. It is mainly about how people feel, and in that, what needs to be acknowledged and recognized is that the reactions are not everyone’s. And not just social media, but in real-world terms of how the market has, is, and will act. For the middle-classs, they are experiencing a thing called “The Squeeze”. They are experiencing an acute contraction in their earnings, largely due to rising costs for housing, healthcare, and education exceeding wage growth. While six-figure incomes were once firmly upper-middle class, they are increasingly becoming the standard for middle-class status in many U.S. states. And the buying power in that band is under siege. Meanwhile, as I’ve been saying for four years, and as corroborated by Circana data months ago, the Upper-Income households continue to spend. The Great Age of Affordable Gaming is over. Since 2020, we have entered The Long-Term Quasi-Perpetual Bubble, a 5th age in the economy of the gaming market & industry. A period of time when the industry is mostly moving forward on the support of the Upper-Income bands, with less support from the middle-class.
It is a bubble that could burst at any time. I don’t think it will. I think it will deflate a little, in very specific slices of where certain vendors operate in the market demographics. And there will be winners and losers in whose specific slice deflates, who remains afloat, and who needs to pivot, some of which you are already seeing. You can read about what that future looks like in the two articles I previously published:
“To be successful, games need to be on every platform.”
“The most successful games are multiplatform”
=> They are also the ones that tend to be cross-generational. If you’ve been playing the games that supposedly “everyone plays” while they “ignore exclusives” and believe “exclusives don’t matter”, then a persistent cross-generational state of affairs in a gen btn console HW doesn’t have the impact some have claimed today. You can think it does now, but true-up the rest of the proclamations. The gamers supposedly playing all of those games…NBA 2K, CoD, all the GAAS stuff…those players have been playing those games while “held back” by the previous gen, so people not upgrading to the PS6 won’t impact that segment of the market as something new. They already do.
=> On PC, those of us on the high-end, for time immemorial, have upgraded while being conscious that we are “held back” by PC Potato Nation; the 86% of the market. The market slice that drives consumption of older games, non-premium games, tons of GAAS…isn’t worried about performance…plays at 1080p. For the 14% who stay on the bleeding edge & current gen tech, it is a market economy we have become accustomed to and settled with. For some console players, it will be system shock; a bit of “Welcome to the suck”.
=> I see some other content creators finally getting the thing I have been talking about for years, CLV (although they don’t use this term). The battleground is the digital storefront, the console piece of HW is the primary access-point for that, you need to put it in the hands of users, and give them a reason to choose yours over another competitor’s. You can do that with differentiated content (exclusives), differentiated & competitive pricing (value), or exclusive access to a value-service.
=> I’ve also mentioned before how other consumer electronic spaces have for a long time stopped generational MSRP cuts. An iPhone or Galaxy will cost you launch MSRP the day before the new one launches. For a long time, suppliers have kept their MSRP for SKUs until they launch the new one. Those days have come to console & other world economic factors are leading to additional price increases.
=> Reality: some people and parts of the market will get priced out. On PC, people have been getting priced out of the $500 budget build that used to be viable a decade ago. The era of the $500 GPU has also ended (the GTX 1070 launched w/an MSRP of $379, $449 for the Founders Edition). On PC, the “cross-gen” market economy and value-prop decision factor is an engrained way of life.
None of this is to say anything is fair, justified. It is to state conditions of dynamics in adjacent markets. People will have to make choices and decisions. Maybe next-gen there will be an actual battle btn the market demo that puts a priority on quality vs the demo that puts a priority on low-cost of access. In that world, maybe value-props like Smart Delivery, Game Pass, Play Anywhere, and being able to access your games on a mobile device through the Cloud will make a bigger difference. The console cross-gen split might start to look more like PC. If so, I reckon the ones who decide to stay on the edge of tech in consoles will do the same as high-end PC players…make decisions about where they want to play, and make peace with that decision.
As I wrote earlier this week, the gaming industry has been on a perpetual, long-term bubble for the last 5 – 7 years. If the blister pops, there will be more damage. But it also seems that the blister is not likely to heal on its own. At least not quickly and without the death by 1000-cuts approach we are experiencing. There needs to be a market correction. And “the answer” to that is not less powerful HW, although lower-priced SKUs will be part of the mix. The unfortunate key answer is fewer games. And sad to say fewer studios. Over-saturating inventory with product people don’t buy, especially in the face of rising HW prices, doesn’t make sense.
Is the door open for AMD to mount an offensive in the wake of nVidia’s DLSS5 announcement last week? Here’s the tale of the tape over the past few GPU generations. And my outlook on the objective impact of last week’s announcement.
RDNA 5 maybe starts rolling out the end of this year, but more likely 2027. AMD GPU launches are typically barely a drum-beat from being a paper-launch. When the 9000’s launched you only got two SKUs, limited in their availability, nowhere near MSRP, and didn’t convince enough people they were a challenge to the 5000-series, even though low-end 5000-series didn’t show up for 3 – 4 months after Radeon 9000’s. RDNA5 will have FSR Diamond, which is all tech meant to close the gap with nVidia…more ML, higher FP precision, AI upscaling, FrameGen, Ray Regen…all stuff to chase down DLSS and RTX. And no different in its generativeAI nature and foundation.
The 9000-series was the best chance AMD had to hit nVidia while nVidia was way overpriced and weak with inventory…and it didn’t make a dent. MSI skipped the 9000-series; coming back is a significant cost to spool back up.
My prediction is the DLSS5 thing in its noise will be a peep by the time DLSS5 rolls out in the fall. I can’t see AMD mounting some huge offensive out of nowhere; they have less market share in the post-launch 9000-series window. Is there an nVidia “loyalist” bias in the market? I personally think there is less of an nVidia loyalist effect on the market, as much as broad swaths of the market who look around at benchmarks and the supply when it is time to upgrade and see nVidia parts as easier to obtain, easier to maintain, & with more forward-looking features. Most of those buyers aren’t aware of Jenson’s comments. And I think social media is making more of a deal out of a molehill than consumers will actually respond to.
I hope AMD mounts a challenge; better for competition. But they had Radeon 5000’s in ample supply when you couldn’t get an RTX 3000 due to crypto and the pandemic, power parity with Radeon 7000 vs RTX 4000, and then, like I said, a weak nVidia in inventory and retail cost for the RTX5000 launch vs the Radeon 9000’s. I can’t see an upending occurring because people are making a lot of noise on social media because they didn’t like a tech demo.
On niche markets. The advantage of console is when it hits the tipover point where people benefit at scale from mass adoption. But I think the gaming market is becoming more and more a niche of niches. Skinny verticals having very disparate needs and price points.
So the industry will have to, in aggregate, adopt a Samsung model and cater to this highly fragmented market. Because you start having problems at the ragged edges once you achieve scale that can’t be spread wider by your baseline momentum. I think PlayStation is doing this by entering the next generation with a three SKU or potentially four SKU strategy.
I think this is partially achieved more so on the market by the way PlayStation is catering to the high-end and Nintendo is catering to the lower end. In and around them, there will be skinny spaces that can be occupied by the Steam Machine and Xbox Helix. Then other skinny verticals for Cloud services and GeForce now, NEX playground, other handhelds. Roblox. I don’t think any one of these things takes over. They all have their own ceiling; a quantifiable cap. No one of them has the potential to be ubiquitous. That will be the transformative thing that none of us see coming. The Holodeck or games beamed directly to our brains or some such other. My money is on the Holodeck.
And I think the market will continue like this for maybe a decade, decade and a half at most and then, just like we did in the 90s, the market will swell to a point when there are too many platform suppliers; where it decides that it will no longer support this atomic fragmentation of supply and will re-congeal in the more consolidated timeframe that we’ve seen from 2000 – 2023. No single supplier can or needs to cover all lanes. But in aggregate I think we’ll see this effort to blanket and play more man-to-man defense during this time than the zone coverage that the industry has been playing for twenty years.
If the console function is just for BC, then Xbox is asking you to pay a premium for the reward of buying a digital replacement for the Xbox Series X you already own, and then charging you an addl tax b/c they say you also need a PC to go along with it, b/c they can’t sell enough consoles to keep devs from skipping Xbox.
If the console function is forward-compatible and a true successor to the Xbox Series X, but it is locked down in some way, either by running within a sandbox, logically separated (drive partitioning), or physically separated (the OS’ sit on different storage chips), will it have access to all of the box’ resources? If the box has 32GB of VRAM, will the “console” have access to all 32? Historically, we only allow that sub-system to have access to some capped number of the total resources, not all. And so if someone is not interested in playing PC games, are they paying for bundled resources and capabilities they don’t need just to get access to the next gen console? If it is forward compatible, then again Xbox is telling you you cannot buy the console stand-alone, but that you must buy it as a bundle with the PC…b/c they cannot sell enough consoles to keep devs from skipping Xbox.
In fact, they are telling you you can’t buy either stand-alone. They are taking away the option even for BC for you to just keep your Xbox Series X for BC and legacy play, as they will not sell you their Xbox-branded PC w/o the console sub-system.
At the end of the day, either way, Xbox is punishing their die-hard consumers by gold-plating a device due to their shortcomings. Making their consumer bear the burden of their reduced market demand.
This is how we define “the New Xbox Tax”.
As a post-script, then the further question is how is this an appealing value-prop to new gamers onboarding to the hobby? Certainly, some will be interested in playing a back-catalog of games, particularly if they are interested in becoming a Game Pass subscriber and having access to them “for free”. But outside of that, for other consumers with different use-cases, again, this will be a sub-system as a feature that may offer little to them. They are interested in onboarding into gaming now and skating forward into the future. Additionally, if they wanted to play those old games, they can do so either via the massive markdowns on Steam, or wait for a sale in the Xbox Store; point being that either way there are plenty of those games that are available as a PC version. Frankly, any of them that really matter. So Xbox is asking those gamers to swallow buying an Xbox legacy sub-system that may be of no value to them in order to by an Xbox-branded COTS PC. And for that, a better alternative could be seen in just obtaining an entry level desktop gaming PC that is upgradable and not locked for the next seven years.
Consumer DIY ram prices peaked in 2018, and then fell to all-time lows, rising in 2020 and then stabilizing up to about 2022, remaining steady ever since. the current sticker shock in 2025/26 is more about feeling disrupted after a historical period of unprecedented value, but these prices, or rather the super-cycle of consumer DIY RAM kits, is not new.
While RAM prices have historically fluctuated, the current “sticker shock” in early 2026 represents a significant surge in comparison to the last 8 years or so; we had been lulled into sense of complacency and many younger builders who have not lived through and seen multiple cycles of the market are unaware and unprepared. No one ever said those budgetary lows would last forever. Although 2018 saw a notable peak, current prices for many consumer DDR4 and DDR5 kits have already doubled or tripled in just the last few months of 2025, with industry experts warning that these costs may reach record heights by mid-2026. Are you right to worry about how long this will last? Absolutely. Are you right to perceive that this is unprecedented? Absolutely not.
Contrary to the pricing bathtub the market has seen since 2022, the market is currently in a “memory crisis” or “super cycle”:
The 2025 Explosion: After a period of relative value, in early 2025, prices began to skyrocket in the second half of the year. For example, 32GB DDR5-6000 kits that cost approximately $120 in May 2025 rose to nearly $410 by December 2025. These kits can be found for ~$350 – $360 now, and that is not outside the thumbrules of pricing that characterized the post-disaster era (more on that later).
Current Sticker Shock: As of January 2026, prices for some high-end kits have increased by 100% to 169% in a matter of months. Entry-level 32GB DDR5 kits are frequently retailing for over $300. (Again, not outside historical pricing cycles).
Legacy DDR4 Impact: Production of DDR4 is being scaled back, leading to scarcity-driven price hikes even for older platforms. Some 16GB DDR4-3200 kits have jumped from ~$50 in mid-2025 to ~$120 by early 2026. And a lot of this is us, further driving the cycle, exacerbating the impact, by panic-buying.
The current pricing is driven by structural shifts rather than simple inflation:
AI Data Center Demand: Manufacturers are prioritizing production of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) and server DRAM for AI, which has severely restricted the supply of standard consumer DDR5.
Supply Crunch: Major manufacturers like Samsung have reportedly doubled contract prices recently due to “no stock” situations.
Manufacturer Strategy: Some vendors have stopped selling standalone RAM to ward off scalpers or are offering pre-built systems without modules to manage costs.
Anticipated Peak: Most analysts expect prices to continue rising at a rate of 30% to 50% per quarter through the first half of 2026.Ut AI data centers are not looking for 8GB, 16GB sticks, or even 32GB kits. Price watch those.
Stabilization Timelines: Relief is not expected until at least late 2026 or 2027, as new fabrication facilities (like Samsung’s P4 and SK Hynix’s M15X) take time to reach mass production and wholesale channels.
So. Good background info. But this return to and exceeding of the 2018 peak and higher prices, are not unprecedented especially when we consider consumer RAM prices in the era of RAMBUS, the Taiwan earthquake & Tsunami, and the Japanese nuclear disaster era stretching from 1999 – 2002, all of which impacted industry output and scarcity and drove RAM prices to high levels (along with the California gas crisis of 1999 – 2000)
The memory industry has faced similar supply shocks throughout its history. While current 2026 prices for consumer RAM are at a multi-year high, they follow a pattern of “super cycles” triggered by external disasters or radical technological shifts.
Comparing the current 2025–2026 surge to those historical eras provides critical context:
Historical High-Price Eras vs. 2026
The 1999 Taiwan Earthquake: This event remains one of the most drastic short-term spikes in memory history. Following the 7.6-magnitude quake in September 1999, spot prices for 64-Mbit DRAM modules jumped five times their July levels within months. A 128MB module that cost $150 at the start of the month doubled to $300.
The Rambus (RDRAM) Era (1999–2002): Intel’s exclusive support for high-bandwidth RDRAM created a period of extreme “sticker shock”. Because RDRAM was significantly more expensive to manufacture than standard SDRAM, consumers in the early 2000s often paid a 3x to 4x premiumfor memory compared to just a year prior.
The 2011 Triple Disaster: The earthquake, tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear disaster in Japan disrupted the global supply of silicon wafers and NAND flash. This led to a period of volatility that lasted through 2012, as manufacturers like Samsung and Hynix temporarily stopped providing spot market price quotes due to extreme scarcity.
The 2026 “AI Super Cycle”: Current pricing is driven not by a single natural disaster, but by a structural shift where manufacturers are prioritizing High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) for AI data centers over consumer DDR5. This has caused DDR5 prices to surge by 171% year-over-year as of late 2025.
Is 2026 “Unprecedented”?
While the dollar amount per gigabyte is lower than in the early 2000s, the rate of increase in 2025–2026 is what many find unprecedented for the modern era:
Price Normalization: Historically, RAM prices have fallen by approximately 33–36% per year. The 2025–2026 cycle has completely reversed this trend, with prices for common 32GB kits rising from ~$120 to over $400 in just seven months.
The Scarcity Factor: Similar to the 1999 quake, 2026 has seen “panic buying” and lean inventory. Some vendors have even stopped selling standalone RAM to prioritize their own pre-built systems.
This isn’t new. And it is not driven buy disasters and acts of God. It is recoverable. And there is an equilibrium that the market will find. That it is currently seeking. People want to sell RAM to consumers. Maybe not the people who you have always been used to. But there is money to made in exchange for goods. And the market will find a way.
“Given that Bungie‘s upcoming Xbox, PC, and PS5 sci-fi FPS Marathon is itself an extraction shooter, you’d be forgiven for thinking that its main source of inspiration came from established and popular entries in the genre like Escape from Tarkov or Hunt: Showdown. According to the game’s former director, however, this actually isn’t the case.
Ex-Bungie executive Christopher Barrett — a longtime developer at the studio that majorly contributed to Halo, Destiny, and Marathon before he was fired last year due to a dispute over complaints of inappropriate workplace behavior — has revealed that the original idea behind Marathon actually stemmed from an MMO my parents played 20 years ago: Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC).
I have fond memories of watching my family enjoy the acclaimed 2001 title when I was a kid, and even dabbled in it myself a bit when I grew older, but I haven’t heard it mentioned by anyone for years. Thus, to learn that it was primary inspiration for Marathon came as quite a surprise. After reading why, though, I immediately understood.
“The original inspiration was not Tarkov or extraction shooters. It was Dark Age of Camelot. A tense living world experience filled with co-op player stories and the potential danger of other players,” wrote Barrett in a post on social media. “Extraction was just a convenient mechanic leveraged to create a ~15 minute game loop where players in the same session have multiple opportunities to succeed or fail.””
In his Twitter post, Barrett goes on to then discuss other elements of his original design concept and there are several that elicit thoughts on the potential of Marathon, which may be things that we will see and some we may not, given the game’s divergence since he was fired from Bungie. Some of those also popped into my head because I am currently revisiting Destiny 2 with new characters and attempting to run the available legacy campaigns and catch up to present-day:
“Living world: focus on emergent dynamic events, long tail aspirational content, and evolving player driven content.” => makes me think Public Events in Destiny 2, with some type of Alert System or map icon to advertise that there is a thing going on or about to happen that you can jump into if you hurry up and gear up fast enough; player-driven content could be available Strikes or Raid-like events that could be triggered by a squad or meta-squads working together and that could then also be joined by others.
“Focus on player stories. PVE encounters, survival, teamwork, exploration, discoveries, and a unique experience every run.” => Potentially thematic seasons; small adventures of multiple missions strung together culminating in a climatic endgame with rewards?
“Survival elements like broken limbs, leaking air tanks, mental paranoia – ensuring every run creates unique player stories and clever adaptation leading to success (or failure).” => in Arena Breakout: Infinite, one of the key prep dynamics is how you decide to mix-and-match the different kinds of heals. Larger kits allow you to address broken limbs, but take up more space, limiting your total available loot capacity. Smaller health packs give more space, but a broken limb leads to permanent debuffs if they can not be splinted; pain relievers help, as do first aid kits, but they don’t fully heal and worse, exerting yourself with a broken limb can lead to MORE damage over time. And the randomness of encounters and dealing with contingencies yields campfire-style stories in the tales to tell after.
“A narrative rich PVP/competitive game featuring deep lore, corporations, and an evolving story with mysteries to discover. “ => this is probably the biggest “deep thought” trigger for me, because it relates to what I see going on in ARC Raiders right now; there is a very contentious push-pull between the community forces of those who wanted a Destiny 2-like PvE experience, vs those coming from a more EVE OnLine, seal-clubbing mentality. And, I don’t know, but that dynamic working itself out may be the thing that determines if the game will have staying power or if the fracturing of those forces will cause the game to break as a going concern. In EVE the solution to this became player-organized corporations; alliances, small companies, gangs, etc to a lesser extent. And those corporations have even given rise to wholesale cartels made up of multiple corporations banding together to lead an incursion, insurrection, offensive, or other player-led initiative. Some of this is in the very early, single-cell organism kind of uprise now in ARC Raiders. I am interested to see how much further it progresses.
“Seasonal aspirations and resets built into the core game design.” => I don’t normally like the idea of resets in an online game, BUT, in a game like this where one group can become OP and can just never be caught, I am more inclined to give grace if this happens. And I often say that a key element for a GAAS game’s longevity when it is PvP or has a very heavy PvP element, is that it has to facilitate a means for inviting onboarding that does not immediately turn new players off. Resets is one way to do that.
“Partnerships and collaborations built into core aesthetic and content strategy.” => I’m guessing this was intended to be a meta-verse play. Lots of things in this world and the gameplay context make sense. I could see a Running Man or even, get this way-back, a Logan’s Run content play. But please, the Schwarzenegger Running Man, not that Edgar Wright remake.
Now, it should be understood that I don’t pay close attention to games until they get closer to launch. I just don’t believe in expending a lot of my time and pinning hopes and dreams to a thing when delays and major changes are likely. We’re in a comfortable window now, and so I am actually willing to start reading about Marathon. To-date it has just been a line-item on my watchlist. So with that, let’s run down a basic fact-sheet of the game.
Marathon was a trilogy that existed on the Mac in the 1990’s. This reboot will be $40 at launch, which will be sometime in March of 2026. A month that 007 First Light just moved out of, into May, creating even more competitive space for Marathon. On pricing, Bungie says:
“Purchasing Marathon will give you full access to the game, including a roadmap of free gameplay updates as the year progresses,” Bungie said. “This will include new maps, new Runner shells, events, and more, starting with the exploration of UESC Marathon’s Cryo Archive in Season 1.” The developers have also confirmed that the game’s reward passes will not expire, meaning there won’t be any pressure to grind through them.”
…so taking a page from Halo Infinite’s book there. Imagine what an amazing world in GAAS games it would be if that became the norm?
The background of Marathon’s story is that humanity attempted to settle Tau Ceti IV, but that went sideways and the colonist population is gone; mysteriously disappeared. All that remains are Runners, which are cybernetic shells that human consciousnesses were transferred to. The Runners are mercenaries, picking over what remains of Tau Ceti IV’s resources and available plunder.
The game structure will be oriented around seasonal content, which will also expand on its narrative construct. There will be 4 maps at launch, with a 5th area accessible as some kind of Seasonal endgame. There will be 7 classes, and 3 factions to take your jobs and missions from. Bungie has promised an array of missions, and accommodation of different gameplay styles, meaning you won’t always be ratcheted into hardcore PvP in order to extract (see what I did there?) some level of enjoyment out of the game.
There is no question that the strong launch of ARC Raiders, and maybe to a lesser extent, the slippage of footing in Call of Duty, has led to a window of opportunity for extraction shooters, and more specifically Marathon, that I would not have predicted 6 months ago. But even I have been enticed to onboard to a few, including Delta Force, Arena Breakout: Infinite, ARC Raiders, and I need to check back into Escape from Tarkov, which I bought a license to in early access but never played. It’s an interesting time on the landscape of FPS’ and PvP and I’m excited to see how the wheel turns in 2026.
Rounding Off Infinity 