Hacker News Reader

Comment by onli | Hacker News Reader

You don't maximize profits long term by killing (parts of) the market you rely on. Sales are at an all-time low because of the high prices, and if they continue like that the whole PC gaming market will evaporate.

Companies are under no obligation to follow short term profits, that an US myth.

Also, if you are in a market with very few participants there is no healthy mechanism of offer and demand. These companies are able to dictate prices at will, and that can be price gouging (which is why Intel entering the gpu market with a competitive product would be so important, three vendors is better than two).

View on HN

The gaming market won't evaporate. If the market can't bear the new prices, Nvidia and AMD will just lower the prices.

A real example of price gouging would be a store charging a hundred dollars for bottled water after a hurricane, because people are desperate for it and can't get it elsewhere.

The situation in the gaming market is quite different. Gaming PCs in general, and high-end GPUs in particular, are luxury items, not necessities. There are no longer any meaningful GPU shortages, and there is an enormous secondary market that people can use if they don't want to pay the new prices.

Plus, these cards are the GPU equivalent of supercars -- looking at the Steam hardware survey, the number one GPU is the affordable RTX 1650, which only recently supplanted the 1060. Is Ferrari price-gouging because their cars cost more than Toyotas?

> ... the number one GPU is the affordable RTX 1650,...

I guess you mean GTX 1650.

"Affordable" is a relative and vague term; 200 EUR in my area for my target interest HDMI2 and DisplayPort (UHD 60fps HDR for video watching and desktop work).

I'm waiting for a price around 100 EUR.

But the "new version" of the GTX 1060 is a lot more expensive. That's why it's the GTX 1060 that remained so popular and not the RTX 2060 or 3060. The 1060 came out almost 7 years ago. (And the 1650 is even lower performance!)

Now you hear that GPU sales are hitting lows they haven't been at for a while. The fear is that making a PC game would be targeting an old market, meanwhile consoles are affordable. But if fewer games are made for PCs then there's less reason for people to get gaming PCs too.

Side note to that: The GTX 1650 is actually weaker than the GTX 1060 (benchmarks: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/gpu/compare?ids[... ). That it was able to overtake the 1060 is actually a really bad sign for the health of the market. It's also not really affordable, in that it is completely overpriced for the performance it offers.

> Companies are under no obligation to follow short term profits, that an US myth.

CEOs live and die by them though.

I doubt Jensen Huang or Lisa Su are going anywhere any time soon. They're very entrenched and respected in their companies.

Also, they have the perfect excuse now: "you see dear members of the board, we're in a global economic recession, that's why GPU sales are low, not that we priced them way too high compared to previous generations".

>the whole PC gaming market will evaporate. I'm not happy about the current GPU situation, but there's no way this is true. Will PC be impacted? I'm sure. Honestly, it might be for the better. My Steam Deck uses 15W, and the graphics it can put out are good enough for me. Improvement over time is nice, it doesn't have to be so fast. Gaming won't lose anything by slowing down its graphics cycles.

>Gaming won't lose anything by slowing down its graphics cycles.

It will miss that next generation of would be pc gamers. If the new gen is priced out, then consoles become more attractive, which means less games are made for PC, which then creates a chicken/egg problem.

And actually there’s significant lock-in effect - people don’t want to give up the games and in-game items they’ve bought on consoles, or stop playing with their friends they’ve made, just like pc gamers don’t want to give up their steam library or friends.

> Sales are at an all-time low...

Are they?

Yes, at least for the consumer gpus, which have hit a 20y low

Reply on news.ycombinator.com