Last month, November, was a shockingly terrible month for video game sales in the U.S. While we traditionally think of November as a huge sales month what with Black Friday and all, November 2025 was the worst November in video game hardware unit sales, and the worst in physical software dollar sales the U.S. has seen since 1995.
Good, maybe now prices for them will finally come back down to reality. $500 for a switch is bonkers and $800 for an Xbox of any variety is outright criminal.
Actually, I have bad news for you… prices are likely going to go up from the AI bubble plus the upcoming RAM shortage.
Prices won’t fall, not until the AI bubble bursts and the related industries shift focus back to consumer-level goods.
At best, you could hope prices remain steady for a few years and real-world incomes slowly rise to match this new normal.
And how is this going to happen when nobody has any money?
The principal of supply and demand still applies, they will cut prices up until the point they either go out of business or they find a sufficient number of buyers.
Companies like Nvidia, Micron and Samsung are currently chasing massive profits off enterprise customers, but will come crawling back to consumers once the AI bubble bursts (assuming they survive the resulting market collapse).
As an example, if Nvidia can turn one TSMC wafter into one AI accelerator that they can sell for $40K, or into ~5 RTX 5090s they can sell for $2K/ea - they will sell as many of the $40K cards as they can, and only use failed wafers to try and satiate RTX 5090 demand.
But if there are no more AI customers, they will be forced to drop prices in order to shift more volume. If they can’t drop prices further due to wafer costs, then they will pass up wafer allocations from TSMC.
If TSMC sees too many wafers free up - they will be forced to drop prices to all customers (AMD, Apple etc.) to try and pick up the slack. They in turn will need to drop prices in order to try and increase sales volumes.
This will have a downwards pressure on prices and a “return to the mean” moment for tech prices. It will just be a painful couple of years until we get to that point, and honestly with the way things are currently going - it will be the least of our worries.
You think prices will fall now that there are giant new capable data centers everywhere? AAA Gaming will become synonymous with cloud gaming and the hardware to run games at home won‘t be produced anymore. They’ll build even more data centers instead. It‘s a much more useful business model to establish tech feudalism for the overly rich.
Data centres aren’t run by hardware manufacturers. When Nvidia/Micron/Samsung run out of enterprise corporations to bilge funds out of, they will return back to selling to consumers.
Does this mean that things will 100% return to how they were in the ‘Before Times’? No, let’s be real - the surplus of under-used data centres will definitely result in a push towards cloud gaming, online experiences and the like - but in an ideal scenario we would end up with more choice and not less.
But again, this all hinges on the current AI bubble bursting in the near future - followed by a pretty bad recession/depression.
Prices are not going to come down. If they could get a Switch 2 in your home for $300, they would. The component parts are too expensive.
X (doubt)
They’re too greedy to let things go at cost now, they know parents and fans will get it anyway. Look at parking alone for disney world, like $175.
Greed has ruined companies. Nintendo won’t sell bubble bobble for NES, I have to find a used cartridge or do without. They don’t sell nor support it. So I use a rom and they cry about that. They don’t get it both ways, fuck Nintendo. I’ll never stop seeding/sharing my massive rom collection, switch games included.
The funny thing about Disney, and believe me, I don’t want to defend them here, is that they’ve found ways to admit and fit far more people into the park as demand rose for a thing that inherently has fixed supply. More or less the same thing is happening with GPUs and memory right now as AI demand is sucking up so much supply and they can’t be produced any faster. The supply can’t increase, so the prices go up. They have to. Nintendo and Sony both know they stand to make more money after the fact if they sell you a cheaper console, but they can’t lose $200 per unit either, or there’s very little chance they make a profit on it ever.
Unless you have insider information/proof, this is just speculation and I don’t believe it based on their past greedy little money grabs. They’re going to milk it until everyone has one. There are people who have multiple switch 1s, different switches for certain games, colors, modded ones, customized ones. The list goes on. The goal is to extract money from your account to theirs any way possible.
I mean, $7/month just to backup your games. Why is there no local way to copy a fucking file?
As far as Disney, don’t care. Unless there is armed security guarding your shit, $175 is just extortion.
Insider information of what? Increases for memory and GPUs are covered by basically every news outlet that covers tech right now. That $7 to copy a file is exactly why they’d want to get a Switch into your home for cheaper if they could. You get multiple Switches in the same home by making it accessibly priced, and Nintendo knows that. Walled gardens suck, and that’s where their money is made. Right now, Nintendo is absorbing some extra costs above and beyond where they expected (like tariffs) by charging more for accessories rather than raising the price of the base unit, but there’s a good chance they lose their stomach for keeping the Switch 2 price where it is as we run into more of these supply issues.
Even ignoring the fact that cars and parking them is about the least efficient use of land you can have, the only alternative is that they keep prices low but then there’s a lottery or a waiting list to get in. No secret as to why prices just went up.
Feel like you just want to argue, I’m gonna leave now.
And by proof, show that they are not making profit on sales of the hardware. I assert they absolutely are and will just for $$$.
Weird you’re defending $175 parking lmao.
We all want things to cost less, but as adults, there are realities to acknowledge as to why they can’t. I never said they’re not making profit on their hardware, but their actions (announcing prices and then raising them above their competitors after tariffs were revealed) indicate that their margins are probably not very high; marketing one price and then changing it is a tangible expense that companies don’t like to do if they don’t have to. This report that we’re commenting on shows that even being the only new console this year is not enough to make it a hot holiday item.
Switch 2 has a much healthier margin than Switch. Nintendo is actually making money on the hardware this time. They don’t have the lineup or the services to justify the hardware being a loss leader and won’t until probably 2027.
Here’s to hoping the Steam Machine is $799 or less.
The Steam Machine is just about the only “Console” that can not be a loss leader because it’s just a PC.
If it’s too good of a deal - people will just buy them for offices.
I was looking at getting a Switch 2 MicroSD card for a gift and shit’s bonkers, yo.
I get they changed the standard for the Switch 2, but $300 for 1TB?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FQJBDLZY
I don’t think its necessarily the prices that are the issue but what you’re getting for it. Games have historically not kept up with inflation and still cost less than what we were paying for SNES carts in the 90s, but now they’re the 15th sequel of some franchise and are only half finished so there isn’t much draw for customers.