but gaming business craters
No wonder. Since the whales (AAA studios) who make most of the turnover are delivering worse quality in all catwgories each year.
While I’m happy that AMD remains a viable competitor, their absolutely anemic competition with nVidia in the PC gaming segment is very disturbing. This means that nVidia’s still showing a 9% revenue increase YoY, and still getting an impressive rate of return for their gaming investments despite their horrendous price gouging and large number of customers exiting the PC gaming segment.
The fact that the console revenue isn’t making up for the loss of PC customers means Radeon just abandoned post in the PC gaming segment overall, with the public news that AMD isn’t even going to target performance oriented price-insensitive customers anymore at all, and not even trying to increase the TAM.
What I just heard was “We kept ourselves just slightly cheaper than nVidia, and don’t really care about bringing value back into the TAM for PC hardware, so we’re just going to focus our efforts on console-only going forward in the pipeline, and customers can join us there”.
That means as a customer in the PC hardware space, we all just ultimately lost, and it’s a single-vendor market now going forward.
Fuck.
I believe it’s even more bleak than that. My theory/prediction:
Once these companies manage to make game streaming a reality, my guess is that they will scale back their consumer GPU divisions without hesitation. The goal is for us to ultimately own nothing. Software is already leased to us (you don’t technically own the games in your steam or epic library). The end game is for hardware to be that way as well.Until then, we’re going to see most people priced out of consumer hardware.
If game streaming services become a reality (I’m talking about a situation where latency and data transfer are less of an issue), they will be positioned as a revolution in entertainment that deliver high-end gaming performance to the masses. As the technology matures, we will see multiple services take hold. It will be like Netflix/Hulu/prime/peacock/etc. but Blizzard/Steam/Epic/Ubisoft/etc. Essentially we will have to pay the equivalent of a new PC/Console price tag every year to rent hardware.
Ironically, what holds this back in today’s world is the greed and shitty infrastructure that’s offered by US ISPs.
Dumping an inane amount of R&D into a 4090 competitor that nobody asked for would have improved their bottom line how exactly?
And not just AMD makes most of their revenue outside the gaming space nowadays. This is even more true for Nvidia thanks to the AI craze. I’m sorry but your first paragraph is completely self-centered and the economic conclusions just don’t check out.
Are people exiting PC gaming or do they already have gaming PCs with competent hardware?
I suspect the market is saturated.
Regardless of whether the gaming market itself is growing or not you can sell compare to Nvidia to see how AMD is doing within that environment. If no one was buying any GPUs Nvidia would also be showing a dip, but they’re not.
