The Era of the Gamecube, Xbox, and PS2 will forever be the best in terms of consumer value and choice and commitment to quality, followed by the Xbox360 Ps3 gen....Its been boiling the frog since end of PS4 and on, but I got out of the water by the PS5...xbox was boiled long ago and were the first to turn up the temp

The deal was they took everything from you… but at least you could buy electronics for cheap!

Now they don’t even let you have that.

Yeah, they've been explaining away inflation for decades by averaging housing with electronics. Yes your rent has tripled, but your TV is also 3 times as big and your gamebox has 1000 times the CPU so really, things have only gotten 2% more expensive, says the CPI calculation.

Now the politicians don't even have that excuse. I suppose they'll have to add AI tokens to CPI. Used to cost $1000 each, now $0.000002 each, average inflation is 2%.

Except they don't even have that because the recent FOMC meeting pretty much admitted inflation is 4% and they don't feel like doing anything to reduce it, but they're definitely committed to reducing it, they swear.

It’s because of the idiocy of p&l tracking. The hardware, store, and games all need to be independently profitable.

Once they are, they all need to be more and more profitable.

Finally when it’s no longer profitable fire half the people and strip it for parts.

They’re already dead, they just don’t know it yet.

> Sounds like an opportunity then for you to create a competing company that functions the way you feel it should function

Sure, if one has millions and millions in capital. Because why would an investor put a money in my company that works the way it “should” according to me if it produces lower profits as compared to my competitors?

Because buyers choose to spend less money.

There are reasons people don't start businesses. Besides all the regulations, there's the constant struggle to pay rent.

What people value is subject to marketing and long-term manipulation, not to mention a poverty of competition.

bizarrely self-destructive behavior from XBox. they've been shooting themselves in the foot for years; apparently they've decided to exchange the gun for a flamethrower in hopes of cauterizing the stump.

With all the other Xbox layoffs, shutdowns, price increases, rumors of pulling titles from Steam, what do they still expect from this brand?

Nothing. That’s why they gave it to a young woman with no achievements whatsoever in gaming and no reputation to build off of. Her job is to kill it in a way Satya can save face on so they can finish their push to everything in the cloud.

Curious that you focus so much on her gender.

I don’t pretend to know GP’s motives for putting it that way, but if I was going to put on my evil hat and kill off a gaming company/division I’d also put a woman in the hot seat. Not because I think women don’t understand gaming, they do; nor that I think women can’t run successful companies, they do; but because a large chunk of the gaming market is openly misogynistic and would root for the failure outcome I was orchestrating. Hell I’d even throw in some kind of golden parachute deal because that would enflame the trolls even more. People are easy to manipulate, and that’s quite possibly what’s happening here.

I didn't get the impression OP focused on the gender. Is it forbidden to mention a gender if it's female?

Seems to me the one focusing on the gender is you.

I think the point is that if it's irrelevant, why mention it?

Would you have responded similarly if the OP wrote:

> That’s why they gave it to a young man with no achievements whatsoever in gaming and no reputation to build off of

Valve’s gain.

I don’t blame them because I don’t know all the variables involved. Neither does the media reporting and we don’t know what a company of their size is going through with prices going up and suppliers being unwilling to sell parts needed to manufacture these things.

I bought a used Xbox one a few years back. I’m not a heavy gamer anymore so I usually buy the previous generation or even two generations ago hardware, get the games I want from eBay and I’m good. And I was looking forward to getting a Series X, but at this point it looks unlikely unless the brand completely tanks and they’re selling them off to get rid of inventory. Otherwise, my Xbox one is going to be worth more in the future than what I paid, and I don’t want that situation for anyone.

At this point, it’s the ExBox :(

Xbox is in complete disarray and is imploding. I haven’t owned a PlayStation in decades. If my son’s Xbox Series X (the worst naming ever) suddenly dies, we’ll either switch to PlayStation or build a PC.

I think that’s the really important implied question right now. Mostly everyone already has some form of device to play games on. What happens when they start to die off?

Xbox is in complete disarray because none of the people in charge seem like people who have played a single video game ever.

PS5 prices went up 35% in the past 2 years, and PC RAM went 5x. This is a global problem

Isn't playstation going download only way in a year or so, with no physical disks at all?

I'm sure it applies to Xbox too, but I priced out today's PS to the PS1 and it closely follows the inflation rate that M2 has undergone.

M2 expansion is the prime driver of prices, after supply & demand. Normalize SPX, gold/silver, etc, to M2 and see that they all run in fairly horizontal channels. You can even see nominal GDP normalized to M2 having been flat initially and then transitioning into a downward sloped curve for the last few decades.

By normalizing, I mean [in TradingView] doing SYMBOL*23.16*10^12/M2SL (conceptually SYMBOL*M2SL[0]/M2SL). Most important items track close to M2's roughly 6.5%-7% annualized force of interest inflation rate (the quotient of the natural log of the ratio of price now to historical price, over the elapsed time between the prices).

7% inflation (FoI) -> wealth halflife of cash ≈ 10 years.

Reading this made me question my own mental stability.

CPI replaces steak with hamburger or chicken once steak becomes unaffordable. It understates inflation.

He's basically saying the increase in prices has matched the increase in the money supply. Implying that we need to hold politicians accountable for the massive expansion in the money supply. Which is logic that's hard to fault. Also implying that inflation is under-measured, perhaps deliberately. Which definitely seems true for anyone who's experienced inflation.