Given that Xbox Magnus is rumoured to have 48gb of GDDR7 RAM I can see the next generation of consoles being prohibitively expensive..... i think most of us were expecting them to be more expensive than previous generations, but if hardware carries on like it is right now I just dont see how they make sense.
Both RAM and SDDs are increasing in price and with AI eating up nearly all of the production capacity its only a matter of time before GPUs and CPUs start to get hit too.
RAM prices are going to cripple literally everything in consumer electronics.
You know how we keep seeing the question "How do companies expect to make money when things keep getting more expensive, but no one is making more money?"
I feel like this is going to be a small scale version of that that we'll get to see played out.
If AI takes all the RAM, who actually is left to use it? AI is depending on commercial relevance, and im sure a lot of companies are willing to pay extra to obtain RAM for their own needs, but that still eats into profit margins.
But those companies still have to sell products to consumers, who probably dont have their capability of absorbing inflated RAM prices.
And like you said, this will be felt across not just consumer electronics, but anything to do with computing. Servers farms, heavy machinery, manufacturing, hell maybe even automotive again.
I'm a conspiracy theorist but companies are trying to push more remote computing. If they sell you a device and all the software to make the device work then that's a one time transaction. If they sell you a device that can ask a server to run the software then they can charge you rent.
I’ve been saying this for a while. The future of computing for these fuckhead executives is server side processing with subscription based consumer devices that will “stream” a computer experience. Basically like cloud gaming but for computing.
"RAM as a service" -- that's what these fuckers are planning...
Will I finally be able to download more RAM?
"That's right, boys, we're back in business!!!"
- SoftRAM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftRAM
Yeah, they just have to get through the technical wall to make it minimally viable. I guess ‘real’ computers will go back to being things institutions & universities have for technical work. Phones will be the only real hardware most in the future will have & I’d expect them to get more & more locked down. Can’t install a VPN or pirate on these sorts of psuedo-devices, too, and since you must be connected to the internet to do much of anything the surveillance state will love it. Good luck jailbreaking a locked down phone without an actual computer to connect it to
Bizarrely, I think Apple will be the one to keep making ‘real’ computers. They’ll just get pricier & pricier and be even more of a marker to upper middle class membership than ever before
No they don’t. If they make it impossible to have your own computer at home you will be forced to use their service even if it’s borderline unusable. That’s one of the main gambits for capitalists: we don’t have to offer something good if we’re the only game in town.
This is pretty much end game capitalism. Form a monopoly then charge whatever they want for whatever subpar service they provide because it’s the only option available. Capitalism only works if there is active regulation and antitrust legislation. Otherwise we’re speedrunning an oligarchical dystopia.
Capitalism doesn't even work in theory, even with regulation. Well, it works, but it works the way it's designed, not the way it's pitched to the commons.
Literally Shadowrun.
This is the plan across the board.
“You will own nothing and be happy.”
it is not in the interest of capitalists for the working class to own anything. if a worker can be self-sufficient, then they do not need to regularly buy things to line the pockets of business owners, which means the numbers cannot indefinitely grow
And even if they rent everything the capitalist still won't be happy because they're not making enough even with 100% of the population using their product.
They have to show growth every quarter or else their stock falls 0.0⁰⁰1% and the company has to get a US Government bailout
I have often joked that since Netflix always needs more subscribers eventually they will find anti-birth control candidates to help produce more future Netflix subscribers
You know how it took all the way until
GeraldHenry Ford for a capitalist to think "Huh, if I pay my workere more they can eventually reinvest their money on one of my cars."Turns out, that choice is probably the largest reason that we actually saw a long term improvement in conditions. Of course, someone else other than Ford may have done it, but capitalism was around for decades and it didn't happen.
When was the last time a capital owner talked about velocity of money. The best you get is politicians saying "Support local buisnesses" without even realizing how important it is to not let the vast majority of money spent be suctioned away from those who spend it into dragon hoards.
This was inevitable, its capitalism. Its not even like I don't see redeeming features in the system, but what I do see is that it can't be trusted to incentivize good behavior if profit isn't aligned with it.
Edit: HENRY oh god oh no i fucked up :)
Pretty sure you mean historic industrialist Henry Ford rather than former U.S. president Gerald Ford.
Ty, fixed
They say: ok. I don't pay more but the others will.
And we have a clear prisoner dilemma
Cynically, gamers kinda already accepted this at scale with the rise of digital distribution - especially spearheaded by steam.
Even the last bastions of physical media are falling now that Switch 2 game cards are just keys for most non-Nintendo titles
That is not the same thing. While you technically own only a license for games on digital platforms, you don’t need to pay more then once. Gamepass would be a more relevant example, but it’s not really taking on as much as MS hoped.
You still own the physical game data itself when you purchase on steam and through some trickery can run it without usage of steam.
At least as gaming goes that has been tried already. The idea of running a game remotely on a server so you can have fancy graphics on a cheap low power device (and charge a monthly fee for access) is not new.
Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, the idea smashes face first into raw physics for a lot of the most popular game genres. The speed of light getting your button presses from you to the server and back is enough to produce noticeable input lag that people who play things like FPS's would find unacceptable.
I guess people would be forced to find it acceptable if component prices are so high they cannot afford to purchase a pc or console…I could legitimately see 99% of people being semi permanently priced out of pc gaming, period. Consoles go back to being loss leaders but still see a jump to partially absorb component costs. Everyone else uses subscription services or mobile phones as companies keep trying to break through the technical wall to make cloud gaming minimally viable so it can be forced on everyonr
If it came down to that, I think what you would see is companies just making games where the input lag is acceptable. More turn based strategies and RPGs and much less FPS, MOBA and RTS where fast twitchy input is required.
Or games with retro graphics so that running them on old or low end hardware gets you enough performance to be competitive
This is the reason I despise cloud gaming. Nvidia GeForce now was the only thing that worked at all well enough, and then only during the beta, and I was able to play Warframe with it. But everyone I've tried since then? The lag makes it unplayable. Even turn based stuff, the input lag is so damned frustrating, I refuse to do it for long. Could gaming will never work until they can do something about the lag. And that... Well, physics isn't going to change.
Pretty sure that experiment was ran, it's called Google Stadia. It didn't do too good.
There is also Nvidia’s too
This is so much bigger than just gaming.
Easy: With their massive server farms that priced everyone out of personally owned electronics, they'll rent you a cloud computer, forever.
They already tried that with google stadia. Nobody cared.
The executives will have made their money and retired so they don’t care.
There are always folks that are greedy narcissists regardless of age. All we can do is hope that the number is decreasing.
I doubt it, takes a special kind of psychotic to be listed on the stock market and only pursue profits.
That thinking led to the Avondale Mine Disaster. Oligarchs can not die of old age faster than problems they inflict on the rest of us, only regulation with real teeth can.
That's why oligarchs have also been buying out government officials and defanging regulatory agencies since they were asked to share and failed to take over the government outright
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Dont worry you will get a cheap ass intel celeron pc with 521Mb of ram and all your computing is going to be done in a datacenter for only 59.99 a month.
Meanwhile windows 11 is being pushed on everyone and has a minimum of like 4GB
Cloud computing. They want all the computing centralized in data centers with subscriptions for access. All the results of the computing will get streamed to cheap ass devices.
Yeah a recent story on that front was Samsung's DRAM division refusing internal orders from Samsung's own smart phone division.
If Samsung can't even order memory from themselves, everyone else is fucked.
They refused a long term order, they didn’t refuse to supply them. So they refused to fix the price for as long as the other division wanted them to.
I'll take it one step further. It'll most likely cripple our entire economy.
Yeah fuck OpenAI for sucking up all the resources for nothing
13 billion dollars of expenditures this year.
Only 3 billion in revenue.
Net profit? Negative $10 billion this year.
That company is so fucked financially.
I hate CEO techbros investing in a worthless black hole. Pets.com 2.0 here we come!
Much of that expenditure is in R&D and doesn't represent the actual operating costs of their LLMs as-is.
And R&D is kinda a big deal when the endgame is to replace workers and build a superintelligent AGI model.
Cancer research eats up billions every year for an (actually) important cause and we have zero cure as of yet. R&D into a distant possible future is not something to build your entire economy around.
We most definitely not have zero cures for cancers A slew of new therapies are available today, that weren't a mere 5 years ago.
Including the -current- generation as soon as supplier contracts are up for renewal. Prices went up. They'll go up again.
Yep but they'll sure sell you the solution!! They want us to pay $800 for a gaming console with 8gb ddr4 RAM, $40/mo for their mega-super-awesome-AI (™️) remote streaming servers, and we'll get a product that's worse than anything on the market today! (Don't worry, Microsoft will make sure nothing runs properly on 64gb of RAM, even if you could afford that much! Big brother will do all the processing for you.)
The fact that a single company can just buy up 40% of the world’s supply of a critical product is asinine. That shouldn’t be legal
Steam Machine might be fucked before it even comes out at this rate
I’ve seen a lot of people say this. But why are people assuming that Valve hasn’t already secured contracts and started production?
Major hardware releases are typically finalized at least 6-12 months before release. This isn’t like a Kickstarter or Intellivision Amico. Valve is a proven company with billions of dollars. They can secure the contracts.
That said, it will be expensive. People will be upset. But valve did great with the Steam Deck. So I’m sure it will be worth it.
Hardware specs yes, but manufacturing of said hardware usually starts 3-6 months before release, with maybe a month of build up of stock. The Nintendo Switch 2 was an outlier with it being 6+ months before release.
Doesn't mean the contracts are guaranteed or future orders cannot be not accepted. Samsung Semiconductors recently said no to Samsung Electronics for a new order of RAM for their laptops and phones.
That must of been an awkward inter company board meeting
“Ok semiconductor division we need parts for the devices division”
‘No’
“What… what do you mean no, we need these parts for devices so we can sell them”
‘Nope, I’m selling to another now’
“But… we are both the same parent company, this will damage our production capacity”
‘Damage yours SUCKAH! IM BANK ROLLING ON THESE PRICES BITCHES’
Ends video call
“Those bastards…. I’m telling our dad…”
Well each division has the mandate to provide better profits so….
It is why massive parent companies eventually start producing slop. Sony is a prime example of how running departments as independent companies hurts the brand. Sony TV, Sony audio, and Sony camera departments could have combined to make Sony phones amazing. They didn't. Sony Entertainment both console and Films could have made Sony TV amazing. They didn't. Sony TVs should have become a standard setting device for gaming, LG and Samsung instead have dominated the best TVs for gaming for probably 15 years now.
What's the point of making mega corporations that monopolise tech if you're not even going to cooperate with yourself to build a better product.
Hell look at mircrosoft. The number of features that exist in one office program but not another, or function well in excel or horribly in word is astounding.
I constantly find myself asking if the people who run MS Office never actually use the other teams' products.
I read that at Samsung there's a culture of competition even between departments. They literally sabotage each other. It's insane.
And the parent company cares about most profit, so that route is probably the least risky most profitable way. Why bother making a product out of them and sell to a specific market when you can make the same, if not more eith less hassle and basically guaranteed sales
Because you might also be nuking your electronics division, costing yourself in the long run. What are they gonna do next, just turn Samsung into a semiconductor company because that's where the maximum profit margin exists?
Yes.
This happens all the time, and it's bad for everyone in the long run.
But those juicy short term profits though...
Your mistake is thinking about long term, next quarter is all that matters
I felt that “what do you mean no” lol, been on the receiving end a few times in my career
They said no because their contract ran out and Electronics wanted a long-term contract while Semiconductors were only willing to accept quarterly contracts, it's not like they refused to fulfill an existing contract.
If Samsung can't get Samsung to lock in a long term contract, what makes you think Valve can get third party memory manufacturers to lock in long term contracts?
Edit: lmao guy ended up blocking me because he can't handle getting called out for being wrong
Contracts can have force majeur clauses for just this type of situation. If they’re contracted to buy at $50 something that’s now shot up to $500 then that let the supplier out of the deal.
This is what I was looking for. Any supplier with half a brain cell will have language in their agreements that protect them from insane market conditions. Either to let them out of the deal or to increase pricing based on the market conditions. My company does this all the time and with the recent tariffs we protect ourselves from those too and pass them onto the customer via price increases, which we are able to do because it's in our agreements.
I've heard that it's even simpler than that, suppliers are just eating the financial penalty for breaking contracts rather than take the massive loss that they would from fulfilling them.
Entirely possible, especially if the financial penalties are already defined and quantified. Like you say: break the contract and then make that money back and then some by selling at market rates.
Because Valve isn’t expecting to sell 5 million of these in the first month, so whatever production contracts they got are probably just for the first run. The RAM manufacturers know that they could be making substantially more by selling to AI companies so they’re probably not looking to lock themselves in to any longterm discounted contracts.
This is exactly why Samsung said no to Samsung. Their electronics division wanted a 12 month production contract. Their semiconductor division said no, only giving them 3 months, because they realised they'd be charging way more to AI companies in 3 months, so prices would need to be renegotiated.
I'm sorry but this is an uniformed take. They have not secured anything beyond the first batch. No company ever does cause they could be screwing themselves over. No one expected this ram crisis, so no one stock piled RAM. The steam machine will either launch at a low price, and have to charge more for the models after the first batch, which I don't see them doing, or they'll have to charge a high price from the beginning. That's if they don't end up delaying it, or having it out of stock for a long time after they run out of affordable RAM.
I'm not sure you understand what the memory market is like. Your "forecast"/"contract" isn't worth shit until you have the chips.
I work in data center supply chain and let me tell you, it's absolutely game of thrones right now. If you're just sitting there thinking that you have a contact and you're going to get your chips 😂
If you're lucky, the company might tell you every 2 months that your order is delayed by two months.
Executives can decide to use this to justify higher prices to offset possible gains of re selling the ram hardware
Because it’s going to be more expensive than a PS5 Pro and significantly slower. I have a Strix Halo box for TV gaming and it gets absolutely crushed at 4K on anything made in the last few years unless you set everything to Low, enable upscaling, or enable frame gen, sometimes all three.
At this point Valve need to invest in hardware manufacturing.
$1500 price let's gooooooo
$1500 is how much the RAM costs alone though lmao
I've been wondering this, but a thought occurred to say let's imagine they've already got their memory sourced, it would put them in a freakishly good position against anyone looking to buy a gaming PC.
Suddenly components cost through the roof for the foreseeable future, but hey this compact low cost gaming box is coming out! And they know their market isn't looking the biggest baddass dollar amount around, they want something that works and plays PC games.
I almost hope they offer a “barebones” kit without the ram so that if others want to source their own kits they can do so. It’s not like Valve has stated anything other than they are not planning to take a loss leader approach to eating the cost of the hardware, but if they have already secured enough stock/contracts for their initial rollout, they likely would still provide competitively priced components in their hardware.
It’s however all speculation until they come out with pricing early next year.
Especially because Valve probably won't get the best deals that console makers get. It's really sad, the Steam machine could have made gaming more accessible.
*PC gaming more accessible
PC gaming sure, but considering Valve has been very insistent that it’s a PC and not a console and how they’ve been acting in general I don’t think the Steam Machine was ever planned to be priced like a console
Consoles will always be more accessible.
Next gen consoles? its going to cripple current gent consoles. Its going to cripple anything currently being build that requires RAM.
This fucking AI bubble needs to pop yesterday.
AI feels like one of the worst things that could have ever been made.
The resources it needs make it incredibly wasteful. For what? So antisocial people can use it to pretend they've got a girlfriend or so people can use it to decide what to eat for lunch? Generate 'art' instead of using creative people?
Burn it to the ground.
AI could be great if there was any sort of plan or even a willingness to plan for a post scarcity society, but the fact is the same people who control AI are also the people who will lose the most in a PSS, so it’ll never happen. Instead billionaires will become trillionaires and the rest of us will crawl in the muck or die.
You forgot helping student cheat to earn worthless degrees.
Gonna hurt a lot of redditors feelings with these bonified facts.
Notice how several of the tech companies heavily invested in A.I also offer up some form of remote gaming platforms? It turns out they can offer up a solution to those exorbitant RAM prices, right off the bat.
They don't care about whether we can afford a console or personal computing. Pushing it out of the price range of your average user forces the consumer to rely even more heavily on the services they already provide. They gained increased control, and, over time, a user base increasingly dependent on the services they sell back to us for the problem they helped create.
This is a possibility, but it could also lead to a boom in less demanding (indie) games.
I mean gamers have already shown that they'll pay whatever for better shit. Look at the exorbitant prices that they pay for graphics cards since the pandemic
Some do, but most do not have a limitless budget. Exploding prices will also lead to more people keeping their old hardware for longer or to upgrade to slower hardware when they do upgrade.
Yeah people are paying $2-3k for 5090s and god knows how much for scalped cards. Gamers are their own worst enemy when it comes to holding these companies to account.
Remote gaming platform? I'm not familiar with this concept.
Wouldn't RAM still be needed for whatever platform is running the game?
Sorry, I meant streaming services. Amazon has Luna, Nvidia has Geforce Now. Currently, they run on existing cloud computing infrastructure, but that doesn't mean prices won't jump once the market is captured.
Remote gaming is a service where the company has the hardware running the game, and they stream it to you and you control it over the internet. It's like renting furniture or appliances; you might get something that's better than what you can afford all at once (in this case the graphics of the game) but it's basically a scam and over time it ends up costing you more.
It does still need RAM, but on their end, and instead of you spending $90 on a kit for your PC that lasts for years, you spend $20 a month to use their service.
Well, imagine if every pc component cost $1000 each. Like, individually. Suddenly a subscription service isn’t just more appealing, it’s all that’s within the average consumer’s reach if they would like to play new games. Also, if they catch on then it’s very possible buying games as a concept will go the way of the dodo bird. When’s the last time you’ve actually purchased a movie or show? Real purchasing not like thru Amazon Prime where it’s just renting-but-longer-maybe.
If people have what amounts to displays with the capability of connecting to servers without much internal functionality, no more pirating or just downloading in general. Imagine a chromebook but even more limited & 100% nonfunctional without multiple subscriptions. That is what they want.
Not heard of geforce now (nvidia), amazon luna or microsoft play anywhere (or whatever they call it on game pass). There are others too but those three own the datacenters where the games are played and streamed from. They already have the ram!
Is there any reason for next gen? I feel like the software does not catch the hardware currently. We are getting worse looking games that needs stronger hardware because of poor optimization. This is road to nowhere.
Right? I think we've hit a plateau
Example: UE5. Great tech demos, but as you notice, they're all small. Developers that make use of it say it's unscalable, and software house are opting for their in-house engines rather than going for UE5. Gotta get back to the basics and start optimizing, hardware right now is not utilized efficiently.
Except CD Projekt RED dropped their amazing RED engine to swap to UE5.
And Halo Studios dropped their Slipspace engine to go to UE5.
Which software houses are opting for their own?
The reasons for that probably aren't because it's a better engine, it's because it's an industry standard, and you can hire temp workers/contractors and lay them off afterwards. That's more of a product of capitalism and western game design structure than fitting the needs of the games themselves.
Japanese devs will use their own, your Nintendos and Capcoms, but they also keep their employees for decades as well.
I think those 2 software houses are so big, that they can afford to spend countless hours optimizing UE5. Other SH can't, and opt for other engines or build their own. This is the news I'm referencing: https://www.pcgamesn.com/the-wayward-realms/new-engine-ditches-unreal-engine-5
Well those are Bethesda veterans. Of course they don't know how to optimize an engine.
It would take more resources to build and maintain an engine from scratch than it would to learn UE5.
But they won't because not doing anything is more profitable
Any that aren't stupid.
Name an Unreal Engine 5 game that doesn't run like shit. The only two I can think of are Fortnite (made by the creators of the engine) and Clair Obscur Expedition 33. Others have been plagued by performance issues galore.
I wouldn't be shocked if The Witcher 4 has serious performance issues on launch.
Also, 343i/Halo Studios haven't made a single good Halo game, and that gives me very little hope for Campaign Evolved. It even took them nearly a decade of post-launch support to improve the Master Chief Collection to a half-decent state.
Ark Raiders
Avowed
Black Myth: Wukong
The Finals
Marvel Rivals
Gears of War Reloaded
Hellblade 2
Valorant
Tekken 8
And probably more that I don't care to look up and confirm they run well.
Marvel Rivals is pretty bad optimized. It was better at start, but now much worse.
UE5 scales amazingly. Fortnite works very well both on mobile and on high end PCs. Most AAA developers not getting funds for optimization efforts, so their games run like ass.
Fortnite, The Talos Principle 2, Tempest Rising, Titan Quest II, Avowed, Ark: Survival Ascended, StormGate, Subnautica 2, Stalker 2, Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds, Riven, Palworld, MechWarrior 5, InZOI, Frostpunk, Everspace 2, Manor Lords, Borderlands 4, Immortals of Aveum, The First Descendant, Dune: Awakening, Satisfactory
Also, 95% of the time UE5 games look like there's vaseline smeared across my screen.
It's not like they will get better at optimization, nothing really suggests that. So more raw power is the only easy answer.
And yeah, RAM and SSD are gonna hit the final price quite hard if AI bubble doesn't burst in the next couple of years.
I get that it is easier to producers to just ask for more RAM/VRAM instead of do the job well and optimize the game. But is it really good direction to just accept that? We can vote with our wallets.
Oh, the direction we're moving in is completely fucked either way.
Games also cost more now, remember? And our wallet-voting didn't really help with that.
When games take half a decade to develop, hardware being out for a little over half a decade seems kinda silly
From the rumor, PS6 is focused on "affordability" or best you could get for $500 something.
the target apparently 3x of PS5 render capability, 5~10x raytracing capability, 5~10x ai upscaling capability at lower wattage than PS5.
they reason being, most PS6 would be on 4K 60 fps TV and with new gen render capability + newer upscaling capability, it should be easily reachable. so they focused on how to make that "power" as cheap as possible.
---
on the other hand, Xbox Magnus, the PC-Xbox hybrid going to target premium pre-built PC, or best you could get for a $800~1200. it could easily be twice the price of ps6 but early estimate it would only be around 30% stronger than PS6.
---
to ground all of that, based on the "leaked" chip schematics, Kepler L2 estimate PS6 is somewhere around 9070XT in raw power and XBox Magnus should be around 5080 in raw power, both will came with better raytracing and upscaler.
FYI these are estimated to be late 2027 hardware.
Prices have gotten so out of control in the last five or six years that's not even premium anymore, that's more like entry level.
It's wild to me that there's less than 2 years left on current gen consoles and there hasn't really been many high profile releases this generation compared to previous gens.
What has PS5 had? Spiderman 2, astrobot, ghost of yotei, demon souls, death stranding 2? What else? God of war and horizon was on ps4.
The consoles 5 years old and has had like 5 big exclusives.
I mean that's basically because game development timelines have lengthened like crazy. That's really all it is, which if anything means console cycles should run longer.
Or alternatively game development needs to get shorter by minimizing the need for bigger and bigger worlds etc.
One of the largest gaming trilogies of the last twenty years was the Mass Effect series. Those three games got released in 4.5 years and they got better in how they looked and their size but not drastically.
And mostly people were more than happy with the quality of the games (if not the story in the third).
Would be impressive at this point to see a single sequel or follow up released in 4.5 years let alone a whole Trilogy.
By the time the next Horizon comes out I will have no memory at all about what happened this time around.
This also means obviously you have to release lots of the games for the prior console as well.
Why does this only ever matter for sony systems? I never see anyone discredit botw because it was on wii u.
Or PC (with less or more capable graphics cards).
It's simply a platform warriors talking point.
Wii u is a strange case because that console barely sold any units, so for the vast majority they played it first on switch.
But I agree, I wouldn't consider BOTW one of the switch exclusives. But switch has tons of exclusives
They wasted a ton of money on failed service games, because big ticket single player games don't make much profit any more.
3x PS5 render capability would be in the 30 TFLOPS range (RTX 5070)
no way a console with that compute is coming in at $500 without Sony taking a 50% or greater loss out the door.
This is 2027 we're talking about, RTX 6000 should be out and in theory the 6060Ti should match or beat the 5070 at like $400-450 range, not unreasonable for consoles to have that kinda of power.
PS5 launched at $400 for digital edition while packing a GPU closest to 6600XT which was $380 MSRP and launched a whole year after PS5. Sony will probably get rid of the disc drive and only sell digital editions at $500, seems very viable to me so long as no other economic crisis strikes.
I was about to comment exactly on this. Which games are actually worth the hardware upgrade? Exactly one out of the GOTY nominees (E33) benefits from a high end GPU. Also it's because that game is terribly optimised on UE5.
You can run most of the games on 1080p/60 with an entry level machine. It makes zero sense to upgrade, and that too paying egregious prices.
Even the current gen has largely failed to justify the need for current consoles.
Few games meet what red dead redemption 2 did almost 10 years ago.
COD is 500Gb minimum and they do nothing about it (except increase it), yet HellDivers recent patch increased its size to 120Gb, but the dev team optimized it down to less than 30Gb. The big company’s need a wake up call honestly, sort of like Ubisoft.
It's because modern game engines are ass.
Unreal engine 5 is substantially worse than unreal 4 for optimisation.
We can get games like ghost of yotei drop with great graphics on a console, but then get borderlands 4 that can't even get stable fps on a maxed out pc on launch.
If developers can commit to making a high end game. It’s been 5/6 years and games are still being developed to play on ps4 and 5, Xbone and series x/s.
Honestly I think the switch holds everything back just as much. There’s a lot of money on the table if the switch could also run your game
But I find this as advantage. I don't feel the urge to change the hardware every year.
It’s been 6 years. That’s not every year. A 1/2 year window of overlap is expected.
Name a single multi-plat that was "held back" by Switch. I'll wait.
Yep. PCs, Consoles, Phones, Cars - anything with a CPU needs ram and they're all going to get a lot more expensive if the AI bubble doesn't implode soon.
And conversely all of their prices, plus the price of electricity, will plummet when the bubble bursts.
The best thing we can possibly for our hobbys and the planet is to boycott the AI corps.
Yep and no manufacturer is going to ramp up memory chip production in case AI bubble pops and they are left as the bagholder with warehouses full of stock.
Probably going to cripple the Steam Machine. If only we had a government who could regulate.
I don’t think our country is ever going to recover from this administration. Things in the tech industry are moving so fast and all of the fiction about 3-4 giant corporations that own everything are getting closer and closer every single day.
You'd need a world government if you want to regulate such a globalised industry. And what would those regulations be? That you have to sell at a lower price than you can get so Reddit can get their video games?
Honestly, why do we need a next gen so soon? The current one got off to a slow start for reasons, and being that we're still carrying last gen I doubt we've pushed the current ones to their limit. Then if any of you are like me, there's 3 or 4 years worth of games on the backlog.
People can only afford so much so is there a point to pushing new hardware that can't be reasonably priced?
Yeah with the lead-time of game development ballooning to unsustainable levels, we don't need a new console gen right now.
Although it would be good for PC users: it would probably encourage PC GPU manufacturers to make either a bigger performance leap, or keep the prices from skyrocketing too much in the mid-range.
Hopefully my 3080 can weather the AI storm until it settles 😭
GTA6 says "get ready"
I'm still running a 2080ti and averaging 70-80fps on the vast majority of my games on high settings.
I'm sure you'll be fine.
I think so too. Although I may have to go from 4k/DLSS-Perf to 1440p in the coming years. 10GB of GPU memory is getting rough.
My main concern is the card failing in the middle of a price crisis. Fingers crossed!
Obviously, yes.
Guess developers have to learn to optimize games for memory....
Major ram manufacturers have announced they are restricting supplies to prevent “oversupply” this is corporate speak for they have plenty to sell but want to cash in on higher prices. They can meet demand for large costumers and at prices far below what consumers pay.
Where did you hear this? Source please or BS
consumers are always the first to get hit with pice hikes like these, but if these market conditions hold up (AI companies / data centers hogging all the supply) for a while, not even big players like Microsoft or Sony will be able to avoid price hikes.
PC gaming will be hit immediately, but console gamers will feel the pain as well and it likely won't just be in next-gen consoles either. If you're considering buying anything right now, just bite the bullet and do it because prices aren't going down anymore... at least not for a few years.
Don't price hikes hit the suppliers first?
do you think they're gonna do you a favor and take the hit instead of passing that on to you?
That just means both get hit. It doesn’t mean the consumer gets hit first, just because they get hit eventually too.
Jepp. Prices are already spiking for PC. I really wanted to wait until New Year to order a new PC but until than the prices will only rise again and I estimate that they won't fall until 2027.
Well, guess I will have a new PC this weekend
I haven't heard a single good reason why we need new consoles anytime this decade. Hopefully this shortage has Sony rework their timetable rather than trying to push out the PS6 already in 2027-2028 like many rumors suggest.
The next gen is pretty much dead.
AI needs to be stopped.
Where is that rumour coming from and is this person at all reliable?
Even with normal prices 48gb ddr7 sound like massive overkill for a console. With prices the way they are now you better be happy with 16gb.
Consoles always have less ram than the typical gaming PC build of the same era, I'd say 8GB VRAM and 16GB for non graphics purposes would be about right for the next few years.
Meanwhile I guess I shall be stretching my current PC a bit further...
Right like that is more ram than a 5090 I don’t buy that rumor
The rumors I've seen are that the next Xbox will essentially just be a highish end computer. So 48gb is ram for an actual computer sounds right. Especially when that'll probably be shared memory
I may sound like an old man yelling at kids on my lawn but... Avoid AI. Make decisions to not use or support AI. Don't buy any games/media that use AI in production. Don't support businesses that use AI to automate jobs that a human used to do. I know we will never get rid of AI, but if the demand for AI decreases, I honestly think it is better for humanity.
Depends on if the new consoles come out before or after the AI crash.
Unless they can secure a good deal yeah this could be a problem
Eventually there wont be consoles, you'll just stream the game remotely
I feel that if it has ram, it's gonna be affected
It's already crippling current consoles
We are completely fucked man. At least until the AI bubble pops.
No phones, no computers, no consoles. Everything is fucked. :)
It's going to cripple everything that has RAM in it.
FUCK AI
Hell yes I love AI it has done nothing but make my life worse with the promise of one day making my life even worse fuck yeah!!!
No need to be so doom and gloom - we’ll just got back to the days of the early 2000s when you could just download more RAM. /s
Well, at least we can have early 2000s ram prices, if nothing else.
I personally believe we are gonna soon see a shift in the computer market.
Only oem integrators Will have access to certain parts and the purchase power to buy them.
OEM and integrator will take control of the market and dictate their price.
Next gen consoles are 2027 at the earliest. The market now is not the market they'll launch in. What will be affected are products in the market now or on the horizon, like the steam machine.
What slaphead said 48GB utter bullshit.
It absolutely will. Anything with RAM will be affected in one way or another, from custom PC parts (already happening) to pre-built desktops, laptops, consoles, phones, you name it.
The bubble will burst before the next generation of console drops.
It probably already has. It's probably why the steam machine price wasn't announced right away too.
If they don't start making better games, who cares?
The consumer tech market could crash if the prices aren’t brought under control.
Ram shortage is gonna fuck everything lol
Yes…and No. this stuff is cyclical, meaning prices could be down in a year, etc.
But the real deal is that Somy or Nintendo secure prices with manufacturers, just like airlines with fuel; this is why i say Yes and No.
Guess who did not secure their ram prices for their console?
I hope so. We need a longer console generation this time as I feel that we haven’t really got a sufficient increase in performance and graphics. If this generation can hold out till 2030 then it will mean that the PS6 will be a substantial upgrade like the jump from PS1 to PS2 was
I was with you until the end. That's not ever happening ever again, unless there's a radical new discovery. You need to look up relative speeds as a multiplier for each generation.
48GB of GDDR7 and people took that leak seriously? I doubt it would have even close to 24GB combined memory between graphics and cpu.
If they go for more memory they will be going for an old memory to avoid the competition to purchase.
Don’t worry we are several years away.
The AI bubble will hopefully pop by then. And ram prices will crash as there are too much ram available in the market.
I'd like to see the return upgrade options we had back in the 90s for consoles if these machines end up lacking enough hardware at launch.
N64 had a ram upgrade cart. The Snes has the superfx chip and the genesis had the 32x. It would be wild to see this style of upgrade coming back.
The reason ram is getting expensive is because big time data centers are using so much of it so the logical result of that is that you can expect full on cloud gaming to become more of a thing, where a great deal of the games actually run on the server side and your "console" is more of a client that doesn't need as much ram as you might expect, not to run those type of games anyway.
Also you might be wise to stop thinking about Xbox as a "console" - I've gotten downvoted for telling people this in the past but it's becoming increasingly obvious that Microsoft is trying to rebrand Windows gaming in general as "Xbox" and their "consoles" are going to be specific configurations of PC hardware in much the same way as Steam Deck has successfully done and they will compete with one another - it sounds like the Steam Cube or whatever is coming out will be lower spec than that new Xbox, from your description.
This is the endgame of capitalism. The industry gatekeeping hardware and service behind a subscription rather than letting people buy it outright.
Fuck all the millions of people who have a questionable internet connection I guess
"You will own nothing, and you will be happy"
pets all my old consoles and games
Ram prices are going to go up because people are talking about ram prices going up.
So the people selling ram can increase the prices because the people buying ram are worried about them going up, which confirms that they were right. This makes the price of ram go up.
Is AI involved? I mean sure, there is some increased demand.
But really this is just a super convenient way to do another rocket and feather price explosion.
We will see the end of it, just like we survived the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020!
Microsoft won't take a hit on hardware anymore so the gap between the next Xbox and PS will be even wider. The more expensive the components get, the more ridiculous will be the next Xbox offer. The rumored next Xbox will be some kind of "higher end" PC which meant $1500 easy... before the RAM shortages. It is already questionable at best how could Microsoft sell those boxes when half of their current userbase is on Series S they bought for less than $300.
No if only Sony/MS have already finished the hardware design and made contracts with the manufacturers/suppliers before the current nonsense. The cpu/gpu/ram/storage decisions should be done long before release. Last year or so probably spent on the PCB design finalization at most, firmware and OS optimization, & getting the dev kits into the hands of the major publishers & studios.
console manufacturers doesnt pay shelf prices. they get RAM and SSDs directly from the manufacturers, probably around the "normal" price. whenever Xbox or PlayStation are making a new generation of console the manufacturers most definitely wants a piece of the action, especially considering the amount of consoles sold each gen
Who knows but definitely won’t stop Microsoft from skyrocketing console prices anyways. By this time next year I expect consoles to jump 200+ and gamepass to be $40+ a month
48GB????
On a console? If we wanted confirmation that the next XBox would be some kind of pc hybrid. This would be it. The only thing you would need 48GB for is to be able to run some next gen windows in a somewhat smooth way.
If it was to run some local AI we would probably be looking at least at the double.
The interesting part of that spec, will be to see how much is dedicated to the actual game running.