Valve massively raised the prices for the Steam Deck:
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@Robbes0211 @masek unpopular opinion:
PC processors and GPUs have been good enough for years and the development slowdown/longer cycles aren't a bad thing. Games are not bound by the limitations of a mid-range CPU or GPU now, the choices the developer makes are much more impactful.
I use 4-8 year old hardware and barely notice the difference between it and the latest. My son has a fantastic gaming experience on a PC with similar specs to a Steam Machine Mk2.
Yes, the AI effects on the market suck, but the gamer culture of always wanting to build beefier rigs was getting toxically absurd and pointless. We don't need to double specs at the edge every two years anymore; we shouldn't even want to.
I feel the same way about the processing power in PCs. We just don't need office computers to have 32GB RAM and terabytes of fast storage. That stuff is fun, but what we need is for developers to target operating systems and software at reasonable levels and stop expecting the installed edge to ride Moore's Law forever.
@DarcMoughty @Robbes0211 @masek Agreed on the gamer take. My m4 mini rocks most games in even Crossover just fine.
But some office computers absolutely need RAM. One of our main systems is browser based and eats RAM alive. This is a major industry customer CRM, nothing crazy. It should probably be a much more efficient app but that wouldn’t be as updateable for them nor run on any OS so RAM is crucial for a smooth operation. All of our laptops have 32GB RAM to keep them going at full speed.
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Valve massively raised the prices for the Steam Deck:
- 1TB OLED $649 -> $949
- 512GB OLED $549 -> $789
The items are out of stock nonetheless.
Get used to the pattern: The unavailable hardware will become unaffordable
The supply chains will die, then the accessory industry will follow. Companies like FixIt may prosper as the PC has now to last a decade.
What remains of the industry will be handed over to China on a silver platter.
#gaming as we knew it is dead. Hope the software devs (or their AI agent) got the memo that their games have to run fine on older hardware.
@masek why? there will be more sensible and national security aware supply chaina. China can't produce yet what is being bought up by Datacenters (their own too). BUT they will and there will be a demand destruction by oversupply following a starvation... like Hormuz and most economies around the world will go back to the stone age if they don't ease up in few months.
There will be a sdram national memory company that goes IPO in Shanghai, it will look like a missile in the chart imo.
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Valve massively raised the prices for the Steam Deck:
- 1TB OLED $649 -> $949
- 512GB OLED $549 -> $789
The items are out of stock nonetheless.
Get used to the pattern: The unavailable hardware will become unaffordable
The supply chains will die, then the accessory industry will follow. Companies like FixIt may prosper as the PC has now to last a decade.
What remains of the industry will be handed over to China on a silver platter.
#gaming as we knew it is dead. Hope the software devs (or their AI agent) got the memo that their games have to run fine on older hardware.
@masek I was going to say 'that's ridiculous' but the price of a 1TB SN850X has gone from $60 (2023) to $273 (February, currently $222), ~$200 difference. I suppose other components have gone up too. It still seems damned expensive though, as they will get economies of scale
Very glad I bought a 4070 Super last year, and a second hand ten year old workstation with lots of memory to test things on.
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Valve massively raised the prices for the Steam Deck:
- 1TB OLED $649 -> $949
- 512GB OLED $549 -> $789
The items are out of stock nonetheless.
Get used to the pattern: The unavailable hardware will become unaffordable
The supply chains will die, then the accessory industry will follow. Companies like FixIt may prosper as the PC has now to last a decade.
What remains of the industry will be handed over to China on a silver platter.
#gaming as we knew it is dead. Hope the software devs (or their AI agent) got the memo that their games have to run fine on older hardware.
However the actual hardware in use is good enough for further software development for the next years, as it is massively oversized. Fixit becoming a major player is not a bad thing. And letting China taking over the hardware delivery in the next years is a political decision we are making by voting for politics which is far from society orientation.
As always we will get what the democratic majority votes for. -
@masek I found a Wii with a stack of games on the curb a few weeks ago. Gaming has never been so alive
@ascii158 LUCKY! The wii is surprisingly expensive 2nd hand these days... must be folks picking up "retro" consoles
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@masek
I recently purchased a used business PC from eBay. 12th gen Core i5, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, integrated graphics, for $200. Not a gaming rig, but I am not a gamer. This should keep me going for everything else I need a computer for until prices drop/the AI bubble bursts.@BoloMKXXVIII you could also hook up an external GPU , if the motherboard supports it.
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@DarcMoughty @Robbes0211 @masek Agreed on the gamer take. My m4 mini rocks most games in even Crossover just fine.
But some office computers absolutely need RAM. One of our main systems is browser based and eats RAM alive. This is a major industry customer CRM, nothing crazy. It should probably be a much more efficient app but that wouldn’t be as updateable for them nor run on any OS so RAM is crucial for a smooth operation. All of our laptops have 32GB RAM to keep them going at full speed.
@quarterswede @Robbes0211 @masek I know a lot of apps are inefficient, but what I'm saying is that the app you mention should be reworked so it doesn't just gobble what is now a precious resource. Office endpoints shouldn't need 32GB RAM the same way a good looking video game shouldn't need a $400 GPU. Windows shouldn't eat 10GB just to get to the desktop.
I'm normally in favor of the march of progress and an understanding that newer things are bigger, but several things have changed in the last five years that should have us re-examining our traditional patterns. I don't think the things operating system and app developers are delivering by targeting larger systems are... actually in anyone's best interest.
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@BoloMKXXVIII you could also hook up an external GPU , if the motherboard supports it.
@jessienab not a gamer, so not an issue.
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@masek I disagree strongly with the "gaming is dead" part.
Indy games that run on shitty hardware will persist, simply because they also can't afford better hardware to develop on.
AAA gaming is dead. Or will force you to use streaming services.
For me personally most AAA developers / publishers are already on a "no buy" list, so it's not really a change.@leberschnitzel @masek There are some ambitious indies who have made games that don't really work on older hardware: hardware from 2019, even. The point is that you need to have the knowledge and capabilities to make games that run on older hardware, and there ARE people with that knowledge. We just need to all share it with eachother, and I don't mean for those contributions to solely be a slide presentation/talk at some convention.
That being said, we have a huge archive of games even if people stop making as much, and we may need them to stop so everyone has time to strengthen their knowledge base.
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@quarterswede @Robbes0211 @masek I know a lot of apps are inefficient, but what I'm saying is that the app you mention should be reworked so it doesn't just gobble what is now a precious resource. Office endpoints shouldn't need 32GB RAM the same way a good looking video game shouldn't need a $400 GPU. Windows shouldn't eat 10GB just to get to the desktop.
I'm normally in favor of the march of progress and an understanding that newer things are bigger, but several things have changed in the last five years that should have us re-examining our traditional patterns. I don't think the things operating system and app developers are delivering by targeting larger systems are... actually in anyone's best interest.
@DarcMoughty @Robbes0211 @masek I don’t disagree. A webpage shouldn’t eat 1GB for each tab but when you’re dealing with massive (national level) SQL tables, that’s the reality. To be fair, this CRM was coded well before AI coding madness so is not inefficiencies from that. It’s more to do with, we have the space so why should we spend time on making the code smaller and more efficient, that I agree with.
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Valve massively raised the prices for the Steam Deck:
- 1TB OLED $649 -> $949
- 512GB OLED $549 -> $789
The items are out of stock nonetheless.
Get used to the pattern: The unavailable hardware will become unaffordable
The supply chains will die, then the accessory industry will follow. Companies like FixIt may prosper as the PC has now to last a decade.
What remains of the industry will be handed over to China on a silver platter.
#gaming as we knew it is dead. Hope the software devs (or their AI agent) got the memo that their games have to run fine on older hardware.
@masek I have seen one game announcement advertising the game having a "potato mode", so the memo might be making the rounds already.
At least I hope that's not a unique happening. -
@DarcMoughty @Robbes0211 @masek I don’t disagree. A webpage shouldn’t eat 1GB for each tab but when you’re dealing with massive (national level) SQL tables, that’s the reality. To be fair, this CRM was coded well before AI coding madness so is not inefficiencies from that. It’s more to do with, we have the space so why should we spend time on making the code smaller and more efficient, that I agree with.
@quarterswede @Robbes0211 @masek It's not quite related, but I used to work Endpoint, and I had a customer who was FURIOUS that their new laptop was the same speed as their old one at the thing they did most with it, which was managing an entire library of books in one spreadsheet. Turns out that the new laptop had basically the same per-core speed as their old one, and the spreadsheet was only using
200MB RAM, and the sort operation they were waiting on was single threaded.All that extra horsepower in a system that had 4x the specs of the previous were wasted. Just not even being tapped.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the coin, just booting Windows 11 with the basic corporate EDR and management stuff seems to use 10GB these days. I get that the software is probably better threaded, sitting on managed libraries, etc., but it's still pretty bonkers to see something like the Start Menu consuming hundreds of mega of memory and slamming multiple cores to do... whatever it is that it does these days.
Without knowing more about it, maybe that CRM software should do less in the browser and more on the back-end, where the resources between many connecting clients can be coalesced and cached, with the browser just showing what needs to be shown.
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R relay@relay.infosec.exchange shared this topic
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However the actual hardware in use is good enough for further software development for the next years, as it is massively oversized. Fixit becoming a major player is not a bad thing. And letting China taking over the hardware delivery in the next years is a political decision we are making by voting for politics which is far from society orientation.
As always we will get what the democratic majority votes for.@RyekDarkener@mastodon.social The politics in this game is only playing catch-up.
If you look at the complexity of the supply chain, it would be more difficult to build an iPhone in the U.S. than the Manhattan project was.
Perhaps not impossible, but prohibitively expensive.
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@masek why? there will be more sensible and national security aware supply chaina. China can't produce yet what is being bought up by Datacenters (their own too). BUT they will and there will be a demand destruction by oversupply following a starvation... like Hormuz and most economies around the world will go back to the stone age if they don't ease up in few months.
There will be a sdram national memory company that goes IPO in Shanghai, it will look like a missile in the chart imo.
@splinux The national sovereign IT supply chain is IMHO a myth. If China would disappear over night, once the stocks are empty there wouldn't be one single new car for months or years.
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@DarcMoughty @Robbes0211 @masek Agreed on the gamer take. My m4 mini rocks most games in even Crossover just fine.
But some office computers absolutely need RAM. One of our main systems is browser based and eats RAM alive. This is a major industry customer CRM, nothing crazy. It should probably be a much more efficient app but that wouldn’t be as updateable for them nor run on any OS so RAM is crucial for a smooth operation. All of our laptops have 32GB RAM to keep them going at full speed.
@quarterswede @DarcMoughty @Robbes0211 I have an M4 too. Great machines for gaming, but not dedicated gaming PCs.
As a gamer you have to play on whatever the mass markets supplies in the future.
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Valve massively raised the prices for the Steam Deck:
- 1TB OLED $649 -> $949
- 512GB OLED $549 -> $789
The items are out of stock nonetheless.
Get used to the pattern: The unavailable hardware will become unaffordable
The supply chains will die, then the accessory industry will follow. Companies like FixIt may prosper as the PC has now to last a decade.
What remains of the industry will be handed over to China on a silver platter.
#gaming as we knew it is dead. Hope the software devs (or their AI agent) got the memo that their games have to run fine on older hardware.
The last time RAM was this expensive per megabyte was... 2015.
"New luxury product dependent on expensive components becomes expensive" is not the death rattle of an industry. It's a blip. When the supply increases or demand drops, the market will correct.
By all means - vote with your pocketbook. But - the competition to the new OLED steam decks are *already* more expensive.
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@quarterswede @DarcMoughty @Robbes0211 I have an M4 too. Great machines for gaming, but not dedicated gaming PCs.
As a gamer you have to play on whatever the mass markets supplies in the future.
@masek @quarterswede @Robbes0211 I was very happy to see that the AMD Strix Halo and the recent Intel iGPUs are approaching the horsepower of the AMD RX 7600 that seems to be the sweet spot Steam is aiming for. I honestly don't see why any game would need much more than that after seeing what my son's experience is; he upscales 1080p to 4K and has a great experience with all sorts of games, and it seems like developers could do some really good stuff in the constraints of that level of hardware rather than making hardware that consumea more power than a toaster oven.
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The last time RAM was this expensive per megabyte was... 2015.
"New luxury product dependent on expensive components becomes expensive" is not the death rattle of an industry. It's a blip. When the supply increases or demand drops, the market will correct.
By all means - vote with your pocketbook. But - the competition to the new OLED steam decks are *already* more expensive.
@tbortels If you think that voting with the pocketbook works:
About 95% of all CPUs produced in 2025 ended up in a datacenter. 80+% with the big four.
The complete consumer and enterprise on-prem market is a pure afterthought for the manufacturers at the moment.
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@RyekDarkener@mastodon.social The politics in this game is only playing catch-up.
If you look at the complexity of the supply chain, it would be more difficult to build an iPhone in the U.S. than the Manhattan project was.
Perhaps not impossible, but prohibitively expensive.
Jep. And as long as we are thinking that money is the real existing problem, we will think that we can do nothing. How convenient.
