“Nintendo aside, brand-new games from around a year ago are often heavily discounted,” he continues. “Buying new AAA titles at launch is becoming more of a luxury thing, but gaming’s accumulated back catalogue, mobile games, subscriptions, and heavy discounts on older titles mean games will always stay accessible to the masses.”
But then, others are a little more hopeful. Ahmad tells me that he expects mid-generation price bumps to go away as component costs settle over the next couple of years. So not exactly a return to cheaper prices, but at least a lack of ridiculous mid-gen spikes. And Toto had a slightly cheery take as well. “I believe in 2028 and beyond, components should become more readily available again,” he says. “I might be too optimistic here, but today reminds me of the supply crisis in the early COVID days when consoles were hard to get for months worldwide. Back then, it was also hard to imagine a world with PS5 or Xbox units piled up to the ceiling in retail stores – which became reality rather suddenly after the supply chain was fixed again.”
Crystal balls remain useless
I’ve done a lot of these pieces rounding up analyst thoughts on one thing or another over the years, and it’s been astounding to watch as the same group of analysts I’ve been speaking to for a long time has become collectively less and less certain about the future. The state of the world is such that, hard as even the experts try, there is genuinely no telling what could happen next. Any wild decision by a world government, a natural disaster, a company doing something surprising, a new technology debuting, or something becoming more or less popular than expected could shake everything entirely.
“The truly incredible bit of all this is that no one you ask will know what’s going to happen, and all forecasts at this point are nothing more than point-in-time estimates based on a set of assumptions that could be made void within a month, week, day or hour,” Piscatella says. “Anyone that says they know what happens next is either lying to themselves or trying to sell something. It’s the most hold-onto-your-butts moment I’ve seen in 20 years in the industry, and it both worries and saddens me.”