Every analyst I spoke to said that gaming hardware costs were only going to keep rising, with most analysts giving an estimate of somewhere between 2027 and 2029 before prices began to ease, if they eased at all. As Rhys Elliott, head of market analysis at Alinea Analytics, explains, “The increases happening now are lagging indicators, not the peak. Platform holders and manufacturers run on long-term supply contracts and inventory buffers that initially shielded retail pricing. As those contracts expire, companies are renegotiating component costs at today’s inflated rate, and that pressure is industry-wide.”
And there doesn’t seem to be a definitive ceiling for these prices. Elliott continues, saying that pricier hardware is only an issue for platform holders “when it chokes off a pipeline of new, spending users. And right now, that pipeline is still healthy. [PlayStation and Steam’s] ecosystems are still growing, and the PS5 generation will also be extended by a long cycle of cross-generation games.”
It’s a little different for handheld gaming, though, especially with Nintendo just having entered a new console cycle. “While console manufacturers can and will continue to subsidize the cost of their hardware, components costs continue to rise faster than the rate by which they are subsidizing – this is especially true for Nintendo,” says James McWhirter, senior analyst at Omdia. “We expect further increases to the price of Switch 2 in 2027.”
Mat Piscatella, senior director at Circana, says there is a price ceiling. It’s just that no one will really know what it is until someone hits it. “Some very tough choices with long-ranging impact will have to be made by all hardware manufacturers both now and in the coming months when it comes to pricing and production,” he says. “Yes, at some point there is a viable price cap. What that cap is, however, is still a bit of a mystery, and dependent upon numerous factors, both quantifiable and not so much. This market has never before been in this position, and we’re learning many things about it as we go.”
Shower thought: hardware capability hasn’t been a limiting factor for making good games in a long time.
good thing games have looked better than necessary for fun and enjoyment for ages now. Hopefully everyone has some still usable hardware around.
It is not just pricing, it is also that they will become less and less available in the future. All by design of the hardware manufacturers, who wants you to rent computers, and not own your own personal one.
They are creating artificial scarcity by simply stopping production of consumergrade hardware. Prices will not ease after 2029 unless the bubble has popped and those companies gone under, because that would undermine their plans. On the contrary new consumer grade hardware will simply cease to exist.
Why would hardware manufacturers want you to rent compute? They want to sell hardware, that’s what they do. Problem is AI tech bros are buying everything they can so that consumer fall short.
Because it’s far easier to sell millions of units to a single buyer, logistically, compared to thousands of units to thousands of buyers.
If everybody is forced to rent hardware time, hardware manufacturers will still need to sell their hardware. But rather than selling it to consumers they will just sell it all to a handful of providers.
Ok true that. Guess we’re supposed to be happy to be able to buy at least. What a crazy time…
In the future we’ll all be renting terminals while all processing is done on their hardware
They want to sell hardware to businesses where the orders will be large and predictable. Renting the compute to the rest of us is just they avenue to that. They actually don’t care if we have access to compute whatsoever.
Its never getting cheaper. Nothing is.
This is why open source video games are the future
I mean I love that idea, but doesn’t sound like it’s a solution to this problem. Hardware costs are the issue, and unfortunately even with the source code and plans, we cant compile our own GPUs and Ram
Yes but however though the ram shortage is only affecting certain types of ram and people are building their own TTL computers including CPUs and GPUs, anyone can get open source games to run on anything now and yes people are building their own ram.
The number of people doing this is so infinitesimally small that even within the most enthusiast circles, it’s practically unheard of. It’s a footnote of a footnote, at best.
