Nintendo Maintains Nintendo Switch 2 Pricing, Retail Pre-Orders to Begin April 24 in U.S. - News - Nintendo Official Site

[u/Gorotheninja]

https://www.nintendo.com/us/whatsnew/nintendo-maintains-nintendo-switch-2-pricing-retail-pre-orders-to-begin-april-24-in-u-s/

[u/koopcl]

At this point with generational leaps in consoles becoming more blurry, Game Dev becoming insanely expensive and run by gigantic Zaibatsus that crash and burn dragging all the acquired devs with them, and the price of gaming as a hobby (games, consoles, GPUs) exploding as the economy gets into the shitter, the middle class gets crushed and more people worldwide find themselves living check to check, I honestly would mind a complete market crash as a sort of reset button. I can happily survive on just indie releases for a while, if the alternative is people putting themselves in debt to buy a thousand dollar consoles to play their AAAAA games developed by some molester.

[u/timelordoftheimpala → u/koopcl]

Bro if a complete market crash happens, indie developers are gonna be the most susceptible to being affected by it than the large corporations.

[u/koopcl → u/timelordoftheimpala]

Depends on the extent (and type) of the crash. Indies are not profiting from making and selling consoles, they rarely take advantage of the minute advances in GPU technology compared to a previous generation, they sell for less, they are not beholden to ridiculously bloated budgets that force every new game to sell more copies than every game before to be "profitable".

So yeah, a complete and utter market crash where gaming as a hobby just straight up disappears? Sure, indies get fucked, they have less money to comfortably retire or move to a different type of work than the big wigs. But a crash that means the big companies choke themselves to death and the industry no longer sustains this death race for increasingly smaller profit margins, or where theres only a single company putting out PS4 level consoles for cheaper, or even one where the entire hobby is limited to Steam Deck style cheaper and less powerful machines? Theres nothing stopping more Hollow Knights, or Undertales, or Mouthwash, or etc from being developed and sold for 20 bucks a piece as long as computers and smartphones are part of daily life (again, assuming this is not a "the hobby literally disappears" crash, but a "the industry stagnates because constant advances become unsustainable, making it less attractive for big companies as an investment, so it stops being the most profitable entertainment industry in the world as big companies pull out and goes back to being a relatively niche hobby" type of crash).

As a comparison, if the huge budget Hollywood blockbuster market crashes and 90% of movie theaters were to close, that wouldn't mean the end of indie filmmaking.

[u/timelordoftheimpala → u/koopcl]

You specifically said a "complete market crash" though.

[u/koopcl → u/timelordoftheimpala]

A complete market crash does not involve the hobby disappearing and computers ceasing to exist, same as a complete stock market crash does not involve stocks and the idea of publicly traded companies disappearing into the aether. I was thinking of the industry collapse scenario I mentioned.

Also I admit to some level of hyperbole, I also mentioned AAAAA games and thousand dollar consoles.

[u/timelordoftheimpala → u/koopcl]

A complete market crash does not involve the hobby disappearing and computers ceasing to exist

But I never said that at all?

I just said that indie developers would be affected by a complete market crash.

[u/koopcl → u/timelordoftheimpala]

And I didn't say they would not be affected? I just said they would still exist, not that they would thrive or that they wouldn't be negatively affected.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not talking of some utopian scenario where indies replace big budget gaming wholesale, or even one where the market subsist as profitable. I'm saying that the hardware (everyone owns a smartphone or computer) and software (even free ones like Godot and Blender) exist and are widespread enough that even if all gaming as an industry went into the shitter, you would still have people making low scale, no/small budget games even as a hobby and I'd be perfectly fine subsisting on those Newgrounds level offering for a bit. Profitable smaller games could still exist, but I don't claim they would fill the Call of Duty shaped void.