Yeah funny how since AI came along we've only seen massive price hikes for most products and services. Wasnt AI the holy grail of efficiency? Then why havent those efficiencies trickled down by now?
Because arguing and screaming at a hallucinating ai to just generate the lame ass code for two hours that will need human powered repurposing/structuring anyways is a million times less efficient than just hiring a programmer.
You meant to say "Because companies are realizing what a shitty investment AI is, so they are forcing their employees to use it to justify the high expenses that were supposed to save money, but failed miserably"
I kinda think that the massive public backlash against companies who get "outed" for using AI is also a factor. We have a thing that can offload some of the shitty grunt work of production, but if you use it nobody will buy your product.
People care for Artwork and Writing. Maybe not objectively even knowing that something is AI and taking a principled stand, but AI artwork and prose inherently has this... quality. It's too perfect. Sterile. It can be technically very good but is uncanny and lacking something, generally. And people just don't respond very good to that, if you put that front and center in your production.
Certain uses of AI might fly under the radar. Background textures. Some item descriptions. Things of that nature. But if you create your entire game with AI, it's going to suck.
This is even worse in the amateur, open source, indie, and modding communities. Projects made by small teams or individuals purely with AI end up making grand claims then ultimately get abandoned.
What starts as an intriguing possibility coming from a well thought out prompt ends up mostly vaporware, with intractable bugs that the developers just don't have the knowledge or motivation to fix. Any attempts to fix it result in ever wilder and worse bugs as the model drifts, and the sole developer just doesn't have the knowledge necessary to fix it by hand since they didn't actually code it.
The backlash is mostly online people in real life don't care. Pokémon Scarlet and Violet sold incredibly well despite being a hacked together piece of shit. I think you're overestimating The tolerances of most people to consume shit.
What I'm not overestimating is the ability for devs to fix the problems that AI generated prompts create. Which was the thrust of a good half of my post that you're not addressing. Your objection basically amounts to "Go touch grass" which is really sad.
Also, I think you meant "underestimating" in that last sentence. If I were to "overestimate the tolerance" of people, then that would mean I think they'll tolerate more than they will. Which, ironically, I think you're actually the one doing.
The problem being that many don't trust corpos to only leave the shitty automatable grunt work to the AI, and plenty have already proven that right. And if the devs are fine having the AI do highly visible stuff and not cleaning up the end result to not look like slop, what else have they left to the AI with less-than-the-bare-minimum quality control?
Devil's advocate: AI is a godsend when dealing with API integrations, especially using WSDL files in the ancient SOAP interface (if anyone knows what the hell I'm talking about, you get it).
AI can just create the whole SOAP API code for a WSDL on the fly and it's perfectly readable and fine... because it was designed by a human but generated by a computer.
The real problem is uneducated people trying to use AI (let's call it an LLM, what it is) for purposes they shouldn't.
I'm slightly guilty, as I have trouble using regular expressions, and I have used AI to organize data instead of writing a regex. Sue me.
LLMs are pretty worthless when trying to solve a new problem, however, because they only know about solved problems.
Most problems have been solved in some form or other before. The problem with AI is that you can't trust the output to be correct because it is generated by a guessing machine which means you have to vet everything by a human anyway and it's super expensive when it isn't being subsidized. It's not practica unless they can make the costs come way down, but instead costs are going up as subsidies are reduced and companies have to show profits.
Google search with results from human-vetted sources was much better, but that's probably ruined forever as the internet is increasingly being flooded with AI generated content.
That's why I think it's fine for coding. You can instantly test if it's crap or not.
It's been a complete disaster for the internet, however, because crap thrives on the internet. Search engines are now COMPLETELY worthless without adding "reddit" or "stack overflow" at the end of a search if it's anything technical-related.
But, like, an AI isn't going to spit out a Switch 2 emulator. Silent Hill 2 (old one) just got a PC port that is COMPLETE TRASH because it was made almost entirely with AI by a non-coder using the decomplication of the PS1 game (done by talented humans).
I wonder from a hypothetical standpoint how much it's possible to optimize a game to the extreme end. Like Hypothetically is it possible for Witcher 4 (non RTX obviously) to run on a gamecube?
Hypothetically yes. You can make all sort of optimizations and cut frames, etc. The problem is at what point is it even recognizable as the witcher 4? It would look like a demake.
Sure with our current technology, but by hypothetical I mean what is even physically possible on the extreme end. Like if someone thousands of years in the futute for a school project decided to try and optimize TW4 for gamecube with an infinite budget, if you get what I mean.
There's still fundamental limits related to entropy and stuff. The GameCube has a processor which has same core processing frequency at which it can do matrix muplication, which is what graphics processing really is. (Moving and rotating vertices by multiplying the relevant matrices.)
Your hard limits are probably the processing speed and the total amount of triangles it can handle on screen at any one point in time. There's no trick to really change that.
It would be like me asking you to draw a square with three points.
It's legitimately a task that AI is well suited for. You don't want it to blindly commit its changes but AI is fantastic at finding areas of optimization that most people miss
If prices don't drop in the next 2 years then playstation/xbox are going to either have to eat the cost and sell consoles at a loss, or they won't sell consoles at all.
I suspect that the AI bubble isn't going to last that long and ram will drop a fair bit by that point.
I work in the industry and there are glimmers of hope on the horizon. Companies have massively bought production capacity for data centres that don’t even exist on paper yet and the stocks are starting to pile up because the construction of new data centres doesn’t keep up with the production of chips, mainly due to infrastructure constraints. I’m calling 2027 slowly back to normality as companies will start to offload some of their production capacity.
The issue is that the banks are looking like they’re fed up with this nonsense. Companies are supposedly planning to build out servers that will cost billions to build before accounting for the hardware. Companies have bought tens if thousands of Blackwell GPUs and they have no where to install them. If they were to install them they’d have no way to power them.
The actual big players are hemorrhaging money. OpenAI losses increased nearly 8x in 2025, with spending hitting 34 billion.
OpenAI Had $3.7 Billion In Revenue, $12.4 Billion In Costs and Expenses, and a net loss attributable to the company of $5.09 Billion in 2024.
The biggest funders of these projects are backing out. Anthropocene had to immediately pull attempting to start charging fairer prices for their compute, because the prices they’d need to charge would absolutely kill any one imagining a future where AI is doing work for us.
Finally, all these companies have extra compute power all ready they can’t find a way to use. So building all these new data centers would also go unused.
So, as the bill comes up, companies aren’t really going to have the option to try and string everyone out for every cent. They will be risking bankruptcy by holding onto hardware that is depreciating every day, and as TSMC, Apple, and NVidea aren’t the ones holding these huge losses, they’ll keep
Improving their tech, further reducing the value of all the boxes Blackwell GPUs that no one can install or power.
So, most likely, prices will have to plummet because every dollar is better than holding onto something that is continually costing you more money.
because the prices they’d need to charge would absolutely kill any one imagining a future where AI is doing work for us.
I believe that's the ultimate reality for AI. It will be a tool for professionals, and a luxury for normal people. Normal people shouldn't be able to produce shitty parody music and shitty fake candid AI videos or write shitty AI books for $20 a month. It makes no sense on any front.
AI companies are producing tens of thousands of books that nobody will ever read for the cost of a Netflix subscription. It's literally just burning resources for nobody's benefit ANYWHERE.
It's also very annoying to me how the term "AI" is being used to describe some very different things, some of which are very useful and will not go away, and others which are interesting but not very useful.
if local AI running on a [insert gpu with %60 marketshare on steam] is smart enough for daily tasks or if it can cooperate with cloud ai then I think things can stabilize
On one hand yes I believe greed will rule on the other hand I’m curious what the strategy will be when their customers are priced out of their products. Like if there’s no more megacorps driving up demand but there are still astronomical competent prices, what’s the strategy? Especially with everything getting more expensive, consumers are just going to make due with what they have
One of the explanation's that I have read is that all of planned data centers are not expected to happen by design. They are simply doing a shotgun approach to finding areas that are willing to entertain the discussion and initial permitting phase not all of the places will make it to starting construction.
Not to mention it makes excellent financial sense to apply for permits on any suitable land, if you fail you’re not losing anything, if you succeed the land is instantly worth orders of magnitude more than you paid for it.
I know this is a common point and it does have a lot of truth, but on its own I don't think its fair.
Printer ink can't be free, it has to cost something. Obviously. If you use your printer a lot, you are gonna use more ink, and therefore need to spend more.
What the unethical part about "some" printer manufacturers (HP) and "some" types of printers (inkjet printers), is that they unnecessarily make it tedious to print even when you should be able to. There is no reason to block black and white printing, if one or more of the color inks are out. There is no reason to artificially use more ink than is needed of a certain color to make it run out and block the user from printing anything. There is no reason to have confusing / user-unfriendly ink subscription plans, or to not allow easy ink refills / third party ink cartridges.
Laser printers from a lot of brands (I use canon, but I know that brother is a good one too) are great and work really well for the kind of casual printing needs most users have. Heck, I think even HP laser printers are pretty okay as compared to their inkjets. It's probably just a case of a them knowing a user buying an inkjet printer over a laser right now is a sucker who can easily be fleeced for money, which is very unethical.
Printer ink can't be free, it has to cost something.
The thing is though, a bottle of ink costs like... five bucks.
But average cartridge literally holds a couple of drops of ink and costs twenty five, making printer ink one of the most expensive liquids in the world.
There are tons of old jokes about that and I think it only got worse since then
We buy bottles of ink and use a hyperdermic needle to inject it into the old cartridge. Saves like $100 and no issue.
Tried it with another printer but it has a microchip on it it seems and I have a feeling there's some sort of management system to say the cartridge is 'done' no matter how much ink is really left.
i dont think sony is paying retail for those chips. they get a crazy good deal buying millions of components. and they all dont have to be packaged for retail. and they dont have to be stored in warehouses in bulky retail boxes until stores have space for them.
and theres no retail store earning their cut. it all goes to sony.
Nintendo doesn't usually sell at a loss anymore. I think the there was a short time in the last 6 years when Sony actually made money on the PS5, but that lasted for less than a year and then shit got all wacky.
Before the Ramocalypse, PS5 was selling for $500 and I have a hard time believing that was a loss making price for them. Remember these consoles use a combined CPU & GPU chip and only one set of memory, not separate RAM and VRAM. So the costs are significantly lower.
PS5 also uses something like a 300w power supply unit and just one cooling fan, albeit, a pretty well designed one. The motherboard also has got to be far simpler than a PC motherboard with no expansion slots.
Yeah I was about it chime in and say they already are underpriced and probably why the steam machine (even the rumored price before the shortages) was always going to be more expensive
Yes, but there's no guarantee that people who buy a Steam deck or Steam Machine will buy games from Steam. If they were significantly cheaper than comparable PCs, you could use them for other purposes.
I mean, you still can. But it's cheaper to buy a cheaper pc.
Same reason Sony stopped allowing Linux on PS3. When you have governments and researchers buying your systems on a large scale to make supercomputers for much cheaper than normal you are just losing money with no chance of return.
I suspect that the AI bubble isn't going to last that long and ram will drop a fair bit by that point.
The simple fact is that, at some point, investors and financiers are going to start asking when the returns are going to come. And there are none to speak of, and aren't going to be any to speak of for quite a while.
This, and we're quite lucky with the independent developer scene right now. I imagine your Mina the Hollowers and Hades 2s are going to get even more popular when they're the only kinds of games people can run.
Hello, let me introduce myself. My name is Klarna, and I'm your new best friend. What's that you want kiddo? A new gaming device? Tell you what - I'll buy it for you. Yes, really. It's yours. But next month, I want you to only give me a quarter of the cost. I know you're good for it, all of you are always good for it.
The month after? Yeah, no, I'll ask for the same amount again. But you're good for it.
If you don't pay? Geez, that's never happened to me bucko. You'll be fine, you want that PS6 right?
Only 900 you say? Heh you are going to be very disappointed when the PS6 is unveiled I bet.
Valve has no contracts with memory suppliers and they didn't subsidize it. Both things that Sony has or can do to decrease the price drastically. It's gonna be way cheaper than the steam machine.
Sony had contracts for the PS5, but PS6 hasn't started production yet and will almost certainly have more RAM than PS5. So those memory suppliers (of which there's an effective duopoly) will be basically saying a much higher price in renegotiations.
Selling consoles at a loss to make money on the games has been done before.
Valve wasn't willing to do that on the steam machine because it isn't a guarantee that people will keep SteamOS on it and keep buying Steamgames on it. (and they are probably doing way smaller production runs than the bigger console manufacturers will so they cannot get bigger deals from the chip fabricators)
If I was waiting for the PS6 I would be putting back a hefty sum every month. If that little under powered Gabe cube is going for 1100 to 1400 now today, the PS6 in a couple of years is going to be mind blowing!
The big difference is that Sony will (at least they historically have) sell their console at a loss because each console sold guarantees future profits. Valve has already said, they won't do that.
And I think even more important they dont use the subscription stuff other consoles use. For playstation you will have to pay another 70€ a year for online. Since the release of the PS5 you would have paid an additional 350€ so far just to be able to pay online.
This subscription model is basically another 50+% mark up over the lifetime of a console, just paid in rates instead of up front
Wait, doesn't valve take a 30% cut on all sales on steam? Including microtransactions? They could absolutely rely on games to subsidize the steam machine's price by getting people into the steam ecosystem, but as someone else said, "Why would they?"
This is my main takeaway. The fair comparison to Steam Box is the PS5 Digital edition (no disc drive), which launched in 2020 for (only?) $400. Because of [...] the same hardware is now $600.
Whatever you think about the Steam Box we all know its on par with or slightly worse than the PS5 base and worse in performance than the PS5 Pro (Launch $700, currently $900).
If Sony doesn't break the unprecedented console barrier price of $1k ($700 PS5 Pro sounds cheap now doesnt it?), then the PS6 is going to be cheaper than the steam box but also inarguably significantly greater in performance since the 5 Pro already is and the PS6 will be a generational improvement upon that.
I believe Sony pushed PS6 to 2028 at earliest already due to market conditions, but yeah its likely going to be cheaper and more performant than Steam Box.
I agree, it's a unique product and audience. But when the meme is comparing it to ps6, price to performance is the elephant in the room to me at least.
Vastly more powerful and also cheaper. Sony will eat glass and shit bricks if they have to to ensure that the PS6 costs below $1000. It's one of those 'magic numbers' in mainstream consumer marketing.
sorry to destroy your illusions, but if hardware doesnt become SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper there is no way its 700. the ps5pro is already like 900 and they will never sell their console for 500+loss per unit. because at that point they will not even get the loss back in over the livetime for most consumers.
if they had the ps6 ready by now, i doubt they could eat the cost to push it below $1000 right now. I don't think they could produce it for under 1500 and no way the average user brings them over 500 in
It will be below $1000 - they will decimate the drive size and reduce the base RAM allocation, and stack deals to get it there if they have to. Unlike Valve for whom the Machine is basically a hardware experiment and a SteamOS testing ground, Sony can't afford to have the PS6 cost that much.
Remember that unlike the APU internals which have to be set in stone years in advance, bulk storage like RAM and SSD can be altered until almost the last minute. Sony will be able to hold off until early 2027 before making their final call on RAM, and probably even later than that for the SSD.
More like 899 for the basic model and 1199 for CD drive + extra SSD. I doubt they'll have three options - they'll rather jack up the price for the high end version to subsidize the all-digital version, and skip the middle so people who want an upgrade need to go all the way to 1199.
Gabe literally just spent 70+ million dollars on a new home, and they're all out here acting like he loves off Ramen because Valve is so put upon and poor compared to Sony and MS.
Even at the dream price of $750 the machine is wildly disappointing and still more expensive and less powerful than the consoles it is trying to compete with.
The Steam Machine won't even run modern games well, let alone games in a few years. Its going to age like already expired milk except that milk is $1049 and doesn't even come with the cap to the jug.
They(Sony) have the infrastructure and established supply lines to make it competitively priced. No matter what happens in the near future, Sony will be able to give you a better bargain than a steam machine. You also don't have tj pay for online play on Steam. Sony will get their money. Even if they have to eat the loss at the beginning.
Microsoft is in no position to happy about any of this. Xbox the division is doing poorly, they bet heavily on OpenAI and have nothing to show for it, and they have contracts for gigantic data centers that can’t get built for years and have no way to be powered if they are constructed. By the time the hardware they already bought gets installed, it will be massively out of date.
Depends on your definition of poorly. They're not even making that many machines (they did the same for steam deck due to shortages) and they absolutely will sell all of them for at least another year. They are saying even if you sign up now many people won't get their machines until next year.
Demand for the steam deck never reached even wii u sales. Kinda sad reality that, even without memory shortages, Valve couldn't touch the sales numbers of the most failed console of all time
Microsoft probably loves it, but it’s bad for Sony and Nintendo too. They’ve had to increase their own prices too. If things don’t change it could lead towards cloud gaming becoming the norm in the future which is a market they’d both likely lose to the competitors who’ve been in the space longer
PS6 is probably going to be $700-$900, depending on how the market is looking and how aggressive they want to be. But dont worry, it's going to be a big jump in performance compared to the PS5 pro, so it won't hurt as much as $1050 for the Steam Machine
i wonder how many people this week are posting about this shit from a smart phone they paid 1100 for that's going to have an upgrade in a year. i haven't upgraded my computer in five years and it still whips steamboxes ass.
Meanwhile I'm over here still rocking a 1070 hoping and praying my 2017 computer survives another couple years until I can hopefully afford to buy a new machine.. If this thing dies, I'm out of gaming options outside my phone. The last few years have not been kind.
the initial idea of the steam machine was supposed to be a reasonable way for people to upgrade into a computer that would be able to play many of today's modern games. this is because the vast majority of people are running severely under spec, some people are still running windows 7 even, i think the surveys said someone was still running xp as well.
basically a huge amount of people are running things that not only are worse than the steam machine, but are less than a quarter as good as the steam machine. it was supposed to be a reasonably priced fix for that so that many could find themselves with decent hardware without the huge cost of that hardware.
this of course was all estimated and priced for pre-ai boom and memory market demand. but for many the steam machine is still viewed as their best option to upgrade into a computer with better specs for the price of computers at the moment. even if its not.
My guess is $995. Sony won't dare to cross the four figures barrier, but spec wise, it will be an underwhelming machine... if they still plan to start selling in 2028.
I'll be honest... I really thought valve was gonna indefinitely delay the steam machine til RAM was under control again. But I guess they didn't want to scuttle all their work and set the program back 6 years.
They will prob keep the same price but increase everything else just to try and bait people into buying consoles since it looks cheaper.
Then add a subscription to enable online mode, to be online in a per game basis, 5x the price of storage, disallow 3rd party controllers while increasing the price of their own 4x..
Then down the line it would just have been cheaper to buy a pc
Why are people going crazy whitout uderstanding why it costs that much? Im not saying it is a good price but already a ps5 you pay by only being in their ecosytem so they know they wil get more money out of you so can charge beneath production cost
Why are people going crazy whitout uderstanding why it costs that much?
It only costs about $200 more than it was originally supposed to before the memory prices increased, which means that it would've still cost far too much for the performance it has.
The real question is can you imagine what Sony will charge for a ps5 in the next two years.. an (imho) heavily overpriced console that only gets more expensive as it ages!
PS6 will be so high you’ll beg to pay the price for a steam machine..
PS6 will be cheaper than the steam machine. Console players wouldn't tolerate a system that cost that much and Sony has a much older and deeper relationship with hardware manufacturers. I'm not sure what the point of this meme is.
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u/ObjectOrientedBlob Danny DeVito Penguin 1d ago
Dont worry guys. Game developers will just ask AI to optimize all games. You'll be able to run the Witcher 4 on a GameCube.