Well, the USD is worth 15% less today than it was when the consoles launched. As such, keeping the price the same is the same as discounting it with a stable currency. The price today is the same as $425 at launch, so prices have come down we just don’t see it reflected in the dollar price.
In addition to that we’ve passed that era of Moores law. New hardware is coming out with diminishing returns unless it’s big and expensive. We’re long past the era of every 2 years hardware is released with exponential returns in power and efficiency rendering everything that came before obsolete.
Hell even from an aesthetic point of view Red Dead Redemption 2 came out almost 5 years ago and with higher settings on PC still holds up as a pretty game. The biggest factor holding graphics back these days is development time and money.
Well I make 3% more now because companies refuse to give raises compensatory with inflation let alone actual raises, so actually it’s more expensive.
deleted by creator
I’ve been feeling like console generations don’t need to come as often as they do now and this only strenghtens my view. Rather than making new consoles as tech evolves, since we are facing diminishing returns, they are making them larger and more expensive. Given how the economy is, and how much people can afford, if they expect to keep making future consoles increasingly more expensive, they’ll find quickly that there is a limit to how much people are willing to pay for an entertainment device.
Not to mention that the production costs to keep up with the graphics potential of these extremely powerful consoles are also increasingly unsustainable. It’s time to focus on game design above anything else.
New consoles don’t come out in response to new technology, though. They never have. The next console generation comes when people stop buying the last one.
They are following the Apple playbook. Put out a new system every 2 years and eventually will find some arbitrary ways to force users to upgrade.
Apple doesn’t force you to upgrade. They have the longest support length in mobile. What they are fantastic at is convincing you that you need to upgrade.
Don’t they stop giving updates to slightly older devices. Also, I read reports of them slowing down older models as an incentive to upgrade. Late Stage Capitalism
They of course stop updating old devices. The 5 year old iPhone XR is getting updated to iOS 17 this month, and they are still putting out security updates to the 9 year old iPhone 5S.
They started limiting the CPU clock on older devices that had poor batteries in situations where it would try to draw more power than the battery could maintain. Identical devices with good batteries were not slowed down. Literally the opposite of planned obsolescence, but they failed to communicate what was happening which very likely lead people to buy new phones instead of getting their batteries replaced. At that time I had an iPhone for personal use and a Galaxy S5 for work. The S5 started doing the exact thing that Apple prevented when my battery started wearing out and random apps would crash the phone. However, unlike Apple where I could pay them $99 to fix it, Samsung and Verizon essentially told me to go pound sand and wouldn’t even sell us an official battery. We resorted to buying some sketchy thing off Amazon that never seemed to be as good. Kinda funny how Apple got all the hate, yet Samsung was the one that let me down.
