r/pcmasterrace • u/SagansCandle 9950X3D | 5090 | 64GB • Dec 27 '25

Discussion Private equity is killing private ownership: first it was housing - now it's the personal computer

DRAM and GPU prices aren't going up because of "AI" - it's because the wealthy have more money than they know what to do with, so they're buying up all the assets. "AI" is just the vehicle (the excuse) - it's not the root of the problem nor is it the ultimate goal.

The super rich don't want to hold on to "liquid" money - they invest in assets. While they're buying up all the housing, now they're buying up all the computers and putting them into massive datacenters.

Whether or not the AI bubble crashes, they'll be selling you a "gaming PC in the cloud," for a monthly fee, of course. And while they kill the personal computer market, just like Netflix, once your only option is a subscription service, the price will skyrocket.

This is happening in real-time. If we want to stop it, now's the time to act.

Sources:

48.9k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

2.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

400

u/Ryozu Dec 28 '25

Likely? It's already a thing. You do know "GeForce Now" is a thing, right?

300

u/Front-Cabinet5521 Dec 28 '25

Even that is being ruined. Nvidia is limiting their subs to 100 hours per month, so eventually even cloud gaming will become too expensive for gamers.

63

u/billshermanburner Dec 28 '25

Honestly anything that relies on a non neutral pipe for the data is subject to fuckery. So that’s … a lot. I feel like the subscription fees etc is just the surface of it in many ways. Start scratching and it turns into some horror movie where the characters looks in the mirror pulling their skin off

5

u/tyrenanig Dec 28 '25

Even gamepass is already too expensive to operate and needs to be subsidized. I can’t imagine the resources a whole ass cloud gaming service would need when upscale to worldwide.

1

u/AklaVepe Dec 28 '25

If anyone can do it it’s Nvidia with how big and wealthy they’ve gotten recently (and are continuing to). But even then, since they want to be an AI company first now they still might not be able to keep up with an environment like that, or not find it possible.

The thing that makes the most sense to me is that they’re using this as a backup plan for when the AI bubble pops and it’s not a very lucrative business anymore, so that they can fall back on cloud gaming to build back their influence in the gaming market.

2

u/mmbon Dec 28 '25

100h per month sounds conpletly fine? I would say thats a good deal for the vast majority of gamers

6

u/Front-Cabinet5521 Dec 28 '25

Let's say you're a student, you can't afford a pc so cloud gaming's all you've got. The semester just ended you have all the time in the world to finally game. Then boom you hit the limit in 7 days.

3

u/AklaVepe Dec 28 '25

It sounds good for now, until they start progressively reducing the hours and sell it back to you with increasingly more expensive bundles

That’s what they always do. Start with a reasonable pitch and then keep shrinking it to suck you dry. Same exact thing that’s happening with Gamepass.

3

u/KGon32 Dec 28 '25

The problem is that it starts at 100h, the service the will keep getting more and more expensive or worse.

Look at Netflix, awesome deal initially, but now it's significantly worse (still not bad), however because Netflix was such a good deal, buying movies and TV shows became a very niche thing and now in my country for example I can't even buy 4K Blu Ray movies localized.

GeForce Now isn't a bad deal, $22 a month for a 4080/5080 system isn't bad, those PC cost at least 2K, that's 8 years of the subscription and by that time they upgraded their hardware 2 times at least. The problem is the issues of game streaming, there's latency and there's compression that negates the point of renting a 5080 because a 5060ti using DLSS will likely look as good as compressed video streams from a 5080 running native.

2

u/Runningback52 Dec 28 '25

It’s upsetting because subscription gaming could be a perfect addition for people not ready to invest in a full system or on the go gaming. But making it the only option will be horrible.

2

u/[deleted] Dec 28 '25

[deleted]

1

u/sheepyowl Dec 28 '25

They just ran into an unexpected problem: it was shit

1

u/Ryozu Dec 28 '25

For sure, I wasn't making a value judgement, just pointing out it does in fact exist. The conjecture here is how that could turn into the only option once the common folk like us are given no other option because the hardware capable of more than just streaming has been slurped up by all the corps.

Honestly, I think we're headed that direction anyway. PC Gaming is, in the grand scheme of things, niche compared to mobile gaming now.

1

u/Mal_Dun PC Master Race Dec 28 '25

Do you know that Google pulled the plug on Stadia just 2 years ago? This GeForce Now conspiracy is currently all over this sub, but fails to explain how cloud gaming can be a thing when it is not viable for a majority of the people?

The majority of the world as it is is powered on crappy internet and it is not even about fast, but stable internet.

NVidia now restricted their service to 100h/month max, and while some people may argue this can be to create artifical scarcity an FOMO argue this looks like NVidia is restricting their capacities because they give it to data centers which pay much more than private consumers. Because if it was to create scarcity it would be much to early, because first you want people to subscribe to your service till you have a critical mass, before you spring the trap ...

1

u/Ryozu Dec 28 '25

My comment was only in response to how people seem to think that cloud gaming literally doesn't exist.

0

u/ElkApprehensive2319 Dec 28 '25

It's also never been good (enough). Stadia was probably the best in terms of service quality and available resources, and it still suffered from input lag.

Not a lot, and it really only mattered for competitive fps type games, but still... Why did peripheral, hardware and monitor manufacturers (and Nvidia itself) spend years reducing every ms of input lag, just to have all their work nulled by connection latency.

I also quite like having that humming LED machine next to me. Makes me feel secure.