> We'll have a demand crunch

This is what I'm afraid of. As more stuff moves to the cloud helped in part by the current prices of HW, the demand for consumer hardware will drop. This will keep turning the vicious cycle of rising consumer HW prices and more moves to the cloud.

I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform. If a GPU is so expensive, you move to a rental model and the subsequent drop in demand will make GPUs even more expensive. They're far from the only ones with dollar signs in their eyes, between the money and total control over customers this future could bring.

Being entirely reliant on someone else's software and hardware is a bleak thought for a person used to some degree of independence and self sufficiency in the tech world.

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HKH2 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> I can already see Nvidia rubbing their hands together in expectation of the massive influx of customers to their cloud gaming platform.

Roblox is not popular because of its graphics. Younger gamers care more about having fun than having an immersive experience.

	▲	close04 7 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I think we're talking about 2 different things. I'm not sure where Roblox fits into what I said. Nvidia was just an example of this because they stand out. GPUs are so expensive now that many gamers were eying GeForce Now as a viable long term solution for gaming. Just recently there was a discussion on HN about GeForce Now where a lot of comments were "I can pay for 10 years of GeForce Now with the price of a 5090, and that's before counting electricity". All upsides, right? In parallel Nvidia is probably seeing more money in the datacenter market so would rather focus the available production capacity there. Once enough gamers move away from local compute, the demand is unlikely to come back so future generations of GPUs would get more and more expensive to cater for an ever shrinking market. This is the vicious cycle. Expensive GPU + cheap cloud gaming > shrinking GPU market and higher GPU prices > more of step 1. Roblox is one example of a game, there are many popular games that aren't graphics intensive or don't rely on eye candy. But what about all the other games that require beefy GPU to run? Gamers will want to play them, and Nvidia like most other companies sees more value in recurring revenue than in one time sales. A GPU you own won't bring Nvidia money later, a subscription keeps doing that.
	▲	hombre_fatal 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Yeah, this gamer conspiracy theory never made sense to me. Also, if gamers demand infinitely improving graphics so much that they would rather pay for cloud gaming than relax their expectations and be happy with, say, current gen graphics, then that is more a claim about modern self-pwned gamer behavior than megacorp conspiracy. But I don't buy that either. The biggest games on Steam Charts and Twitch aren't AAA RTX 5090 games.
	▲	foobarian 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I love it when I get my Robloxhead daughter to test drive some of the games I play on my 5090 box. "Ooooh these graphics are unreal" "Can we stop for just a moment and admire this grass" :-D