I think the data shows that advertisement is super effective, not that people prefer to be advertised. If people preferred advertising over a better product then games like Balatro, Vampire Survivors etc. literally couldn’t be successful, because those games had effectively zero marketing budget. Their success came from word-of-mouth because the game itself was great.
This is so petty it makes me wonder if someone got their feelings hurt by an LGBTQ person and is now having a vendetta against all of LGBTQ.
Steam hardware survey puts 4090 at 1.16% and 7900xtx at 0.54%. That means if we look at only the 4090s and 7900xtx-s then just between the two of them the 7900xtx makes up about a third of the cards. So yeah, you are a minority of a minority.
As for this number jargon. I’m not exactly sure what you’re trying to prove here but I’m sure you’re comparing an overclocked card to a stock card and if you’re saying it’s matching the 4090D then you’re not actually matching the 4090. 4090D is weaker than 4090, depending on the benchmark it ranges between 5% weaker to 30% weaker. If you were trying to prove that AMD cards can be as good as Nvidia cards then you’ve proven that even with overclocking the top of the line AMD card can’t beat a stock top of the line Nvidia card.
It’s already Nvidia or nothing. There’s no point fighting with Nvidia in the high end corner because unless you can beat Nvidia in performance there’s no winning with the high end cards. People who buy high end cards don’t care about a slightly worse and slightly cheaper card because they’ve already chosen to pay premium price for premium product. They want the best performance, not the best bang for the buck. The people who want the most bang for the buck at the high end are a minority of a minority.
But on the other hand, by dropping high end cards AMD can focus more on making their budget and mid-range cards better instead of diverting some of their focus on the high end cards that won’t sell anyway. It increases competition in the budget and mid-range section and mid-range absolutely needs stronger competition from AMD because Nvidia is slowly killing mid-range cards as well.
the high end crowd showed there’s no price competition, there’s only performance competition and they’re willing to pay whatever to get the latest and greatest. Nvidia isn’t putting a 2k pricetag on the top of the line card because it’s worth that much, they’re putting that pricetag because they know the high end crowd will buy it anyway. The high end crowd has caused this situation.
You call that a loss for the consumers, I’d say it’s a positive. The high end cards make up like 15% (and I’m probably being generous here) of the market. AMD dropping the high and focusing on mid-range and budget cards which is much more beneficial for most users. Budget and mid-range cards make up the majority of the PC users. If the mid-range and budget cards are affordable that’s much more worthwhile to most people than having high end cards “affordable”.
Actually AMD has said they’re ditching their high end options and will also focus on budget and midrange cards. AMD has also promised better raytracing performance (compared to their older cards) so I don’t think it will be the new norm if AMD also prices their cards competitively to Intel. The high end cards will be overpriced as it seems like the target audience doesn’t care that they’re paying shitton of money. But budget and midrange options might slip away from Nvidia and get cheaper, especially if the upscaler crutch breaks and devs have to start doing actual optimizations for their games.
Sure you can, because those are two different things. Feature creep applies to functionality that is there straight out the box. Add-ons are things that are built ontop of the out the box solution.
To put it in hardware, if you buy a PC then a PC is what you get out the box. If every PC had to come with a dedicated graphics card that would be a PC feature creep, because every PC doesn’t need a dedicated graphics card. However, that doesn’t mean you want mobo manufacturers to remove the PCIe slot, because you might want to add on (pun intended) a graphic card.
Just because I think something shouldn’t be in the baseline for everyone doesn’t mean I also don’t want to those things to be available for the people who do want those things in their system
Now that is actually irrelevant information. Nothing I said refutes what you’ve said and it refutes nothing I’ve said. It’s not even something I’ve overlooked because my example is built on the premise that the game is sold in both stores.
There are so many games that I don’t even care about all the games available on Steam (that I’d be willing to play). We have so many games coming out that I’d have to play game for a living to play all the games I want to play, and even then I’m not 100% sure I’d be able to play everything I’d be open to play. I have multiple games that I’ve purchased and installed thinking “I’ll get to them soon enough” and they’re just taking drive space. I also have multiple games on my wishlist that are “waiting for a discount” but I’m probably never going to pick them up because actually they’re waiting for my backlog to clear and it will never clear.
Does it suck that Alan Wake is Epic exclusive. Sure. Does it really matter to me? Not really because I’m oversaturated with games I want to play. Missing one great game doesn’t matter when I already have a backlog of great games I won’t purchase because I have a backlog of great games I’ve purchased that I won’t play because I have a backlog of great games I really want to play.
You wanted to know why there aren’t all time lows on other stores. You agree that the lower the price gets the more people are likely to purchase it. But then you think userbase is irrelevant?
Let’s say there are 10 million gamers in the entire world, 90% use steam 10% use Epic. Not that it matters but I’ll add it anyway to further prove the point, Epic takes 10% and Steam takes 30%. You make a game that 50% of all the gamers in the world want to buy at a certain price. Let’s say you have no issues selling on Epic and you sell at full price ($60) to the 50% of Epic customers. You make $60 * 0.9 * 1 mil * 0.5 = $27 million. On Steam your game doesn’t sell at all on full price but at 50% off all potential customers will buy the game. So with a 50% discount on Steam you will make $60 * 0.5 * 0.7 * 9 mil * 0.5 = $94.5 million.
You can literally have Steam take a bigger cut than Epic and sell the game for half a price and still make more money on Steam because the userbase plays a huge role in how much money you’ll actually make. That is why you see all time lows on Steam, because you can sell your game for cheaper than any other store and still make more money on Steam.
How much RAM do you imagine internet cafe machines use? 8gb? 16gb? 32gb?
You can check yourself. I’m pretty sure the “cafe cards” amount to around 3-8% of the lowest end cards depending on whether we consider 1650 and 1060 as cafe cards. Obviously also excluding integrated cards because those I didn’t consider in the first place. On the other hand the current gen and last gen low end cards (xx50 and xx60) make up 25-28% of the market.
Also I don’t understand why you’d want to exclude cafe’s from the potential market? It’s not like internet cafes don’t upgrade their hardware. When they do upgrade they’re definitely going with the low end cards.
If the userbase is irrelevant then X per game is also irrelevant. X per game matters only in the context of how many sales you’ll make. There’s a strong correlation between sales and userbase because more users means more potential sales.
And which platform has the most potential buyers, by a long shot? Steam. That’s why you’re usually seeing all time lows on the Steam platform, because the sheer amount of buyers outweighs the per sale loss.
Honestly, I hope AMD-s shift to focus on lower end cards is successful. It should be considering the xx60 series (and performance equivalent) cards make up like 50% of the entire consumer GPU hardware? At least I think it was around 50 the last time I tried to sum up all the percentages of the Steam hardware survey. There’s definitely a huge market they can tap if they can bang-per-buck outprice Nvidia (and I guess also Intel). Maybe even bring down the ridiculous pricing of modern GPU-s.
And? If they sell at the same price as Steam but with the store taking a smaller cut they’ll make more money per sale.
Why should we see that?
I think that’s really the issue with Ubisoft, they just don’t make “must play” games anymore. Seriously, what’s the last universally liked Ubisoft game that everyone wanted to play? Far Cry 3. Close second is probably AC: Black flag but that was already suffering from AC fatigue and its critical acclaim has come retroactively. Those games are over a decade old. Ubisoft hasn’t released anything in the last decade where the mainstream gaming goes “We must play that”. Ubisoft simply doesn’t make exciting games anymore. They make games that are for everyone which also means they’re for no-one.
Selling literal shit at a restaurant also isn’t unfeasible if the customer doesn’t care about eating shit. But nobody is going to eat shit and nobody (normal) is going to pay $10+ a month to get mostly gimmick features. At a glance there’s barely anything useful in the API.
Obviously. You could be the next Phil Harrison. Failed with Atari, got picked up by MS to lead Xbox. Failed with Xbox One, got picked up by Google to lead Stadia. Failed with Stadia and is currently keeping a low profile because he probably understood that failing any higher than Google is going to be a long shot.