They are, but they’re not beloved for it. The companies still selling to consumers now have less competition for fewer available parts, which is why prices are higher.

Depends on when precisely you’re in the market for a handheld, because if Valve is raising their prices, everyone will be eventually.

Just ad infinitum? If so, the most profitable venture for any human being to be involved in right now would be RAM production. All of those producers would be expanding, because there would be infinite demand. No, these purchases are capex costs; the kind that they have to do once or every so many years. And the only way it happens every so many years is if the companies currently buying these things survive long enough to replace those parts when they reach their end of life.

We’re in this place because AI companies are buying up all the supply, and in order to do that, they have to pay higher than market rates to buy what’s left of the supply available. That means their break-even point is now higher than it would be in a rational economy, and they’re already not profitable. That’s a bubble. It doesn’t matter if it’s tulip bulbs, a business with “dot com” on the end of its name, or a home that no one lives in; if you’re expecting to make money off of the next greater fool, it will pop.

But let’s say it doesn’t. The other way to meet the supply-demand curve and make money off of consumers like you and I who want to buy hardware at prices that we can afford is to increase production so that there’s more supply. If this is the new normal (it’s not), the component producers can increase their manufacturing capacity, and in a handful of years (pessimistically about a decade to build those sorts of factories, which would be brutal if true), they’ll have enough throughput to meet everyone’s demand. And I don’t think those producers are looking to scale up because they also don’t believe this is the new normal. If they believed that, then they’re leaving future profits on the table by not scaling up production to meet demand.

I think they lost the appetite for loss leading around the time the PS4 and Xbox One came out. I have no insider information, but this is what I tend to hear from those that do. Nintendo famously doesn’t loss lead, and that’s a long standing policy, but the latest word on Switch 2 is that their price increase keeps them profitable but with smaller margins than they had when it initially launched.

It’ll be a few years of pain, but once the bubble pops, we can start to return to normalcy. Take good care of the hardware you have in the meantime.

As I understand it, none of the consoles are loss leading these days.

AI might be a problem for this market with or without the US, but tariffs and a war with Iran that drives up oil prices (and therefore plastic and electronics manufacturing) sure is our fault.

Sure, but if the price is going up here, it’s the latest symptom of prices going up everywhere for this hobby.

Nah, that’s not true. All of these companies would absolutely love to charge less for the console up front so that they can get recurring payments out of you elsewhere. It was a regular occurrence for decades that console prices would drop dramatically over time.

If you like AC’s museum mode, you might be into Kingdom Come: Deliverance 1 and 2. The first game is a bit janky at times, and some of the characters are fictional, but there will be a pop-up video-esque prompt to let you know what the real history is, what they changed, and why.

Also, I haven’t gotten around to playing it yet myself, but I’ve seen people learn a lot about space missions second hand via Kerbal Space Program.

There’s about as much game in Witcher 3 as in all three Mass Effects combined, so it’s still a very good deal.

the creator is notorious for making games that take forever and succumbing to development hell before the studio steps in and finishes it for him

Including this one, it happened like twice. Prior to that, Irrational put out 5 games in 6 years, which was maybe a little faster than the industry cadence at the time.

What they’re doing is ambitious, but they could spend twenty more years trying to make it perfect (which it will never be) even though it was “good enough” a long time ago.

My friends list has a ton of people in it who put the game down at about the same spot, including me.

Most of what we’ve called indie has had publishers, which is how we’ve heard of those games in the first place.

One of the best lines from that entire series.

Thanks. I’ve been doing a lot of research, and the beginning of it took a while to stick, so it’s good to hear I’m not a complete idiot. What “multiple purposes” are you referring to that would make the VLAN setup less effective? Because I’ll acknowledge that this could lead to two devices being completely compromised if I’m breached, but that will only cost me time to get set back up, as opposed to compromising personal devices on the main VLAN.

I’ve got a firewall. I also have two managed switches to route the VLANs that I’ll be setting up in the coming days. I’ve got a handful of guides I’ve visited and will be revisiting in order to do it the way I want, which I believe will be a reasonable level of security. Acknowledging that you were just trying to be a friendly neighbor, does this plan still hold up to your wisdom thus far?

I expect it’s the same way game companies have gotten by with “licensing” games to us for so long and remotely disabling them with no recourse. And that’s only just now being fought legally. It’ll be another 15 years before we can expect the average politician to be a gamer the way that the average person watches TV and movies or listens to music.