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> By that perspective NVIDIA can't really afford to sell cards to individual gamers They can't afford to continue profitable line of business that took them fr

> By that perspective NVIDIA can't really afford to sell cards to individual gamers They can't afford to continue profitable line of business that took them from nothing to multi-billion dollar corporation? This is not a new problem - why does Intel sell CPUs to gamers for $100 when theu can sell same CPU for servers for $1000? Narket segmentation, and you try to make sure these markets buy diffetent products that are priced differently. You artifically create differences in priducts. For example Intel withholds ECC memory from consumer products. Whether its rihht or wrong is debatable. But please let's not use language like 'we can't afford', It implies they are losing money and subsidising gamers. Whereas in reality they are very profitable and you are saying they could nickel and dime their customers even harder.

PaulHoule 4y ago
The majority of gamers might not need or desire better hardware, particularly if they have to pay for it. For that matter, game developers have very little reason to invest in games that require more capable hardware. There's the silly pretense now that people will use more capable hardware to play the same game in 4K, 8K, 16K, but the awful truth is that a lot of people would rather pay $45/month for 1 Mbps DSL than pay $50/month for 1 Gbps fiber, or would rather watch a terrible camera capture of a movie from the theater than wait for the Bluray to come out. Consider the success of the Nintendo switch. The dock for the switch was a bit of a Jedi mind trick, just like the Wiimote was for the Wii. In particular, it changed the competitive psychology of game producers to think that any "big game" that came out for the Playstation or Xbox would also be released for the Switch. Selling the switch as a hybrid device stops gamers and games company from realizing it is what is... the beginning of the end of the TV-attached console. The Steam Deck is a much more powerful machine for about the same price and it also has a very strong catalog. The Steam Deck can play Control natively and the Switch can't. Yet for the most part the industry is going to keep remaking the same old games and releasing them for the Switch, even most the innovative parts are going to be making games like Genshin Impact for midrange phones. Sales of the 4090 are driven by prestige, the pleasure you can get out of saying that you own the very best. They are not driven at all by the reality that you can have anywhere near 10x the pleasure from a $4000 gaming PC than from a $400 portable. However a business that revolves around neural networks very well might be able to generate 10x the revenue from a 10x faster graphics card. It's not a question of what "we" can afford but it is a function of what "they" can justify to their shareholders. I mean, the people in my town could afford 100% fiber optic internet, but the phone company can't afford to stop using the copper network when it can still charge people premium prices for subprime service. If we decided that $100 a month was a fair price for gigabit fiber and that price caps should be scaled accordingly, my telecom would quickly decide that it "can't afford" to offer DSL at $0.10 a month and would start tearing up that copper network pretty quickly.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  > the awful truth is that a lot of people would rather pay $45/month for 1 Mbps DSL than pay $50/month for 1 Gbps fiber I have never met these people, and my sample includes four grandmas that are 70 years old. Quality of videocalls so important that 1 Mbps internet is worth $0 to them. Gaming is leisure, that's different - some people buy $1000 golf clubs, and $5,000 bicycles, some don't know what to do with them. > I mean, the people in my town could afford 100% fiber optic internet, but the phone company can't afford to stop using the copper network when it can still charge people premium prices for subprime service. Sounds like a monopoly has your town by the balls, that's not a healthy state of capitalism / free market. These "artificial scarcity" techniques are cancerous tumours, if we allow them to fester and grow they will bring down the whole system.
  - PaulHoule 4y ago
    A few years ago we had the cheap oldsters showing up in droves at public meetings at meeting about improving our internet. I’d grant that video calling has gotten a lot more mainstream.
rektide 4y ago
Classic Clayton Christensen Innovator's Dilemna situation, with a constant disruption from below & shift upmarket. Chasing higher profitability segments while letting more and more of the market (the much bigger but lower profitability segmemt) go unserved.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  Today though we are seeing another patterns which is that a business which thinks it's main business is not fashionable enough (charitably, because investors don't reward it with a high enough multiple) will neglect it's currently profitable customers to chase shadows. For instance on a bad day it seems that Microsoft would be glad to pour lighter fluid all over the Windows ecosystem if it could get just have 10% of the success Android has had with phones. Or look at Meta neglecting it's current products (even market leading VR games) for the sake of one man's dystopian vision. A common factor in the above is a lack of competition. If Microsoft was really threatened by the Mac or Linux or if there was some real competition for Office, Microsoft wouldn't be able to neglect its customers in favor of daydreams... And the same is true for Facebook. If advertisers voted with their feet you'd see Zuckerberg burn all those VR headsets tomorrow.

PaulHoule 4y ago

The majority of gamers might not need or desire better hardware, particularly if they have to pay for it. For that matter, game developers have very little reason to invest in games that require more capable hardware. There's the silly pretense now that people will use more capable hardware to play the same game in 4K, 8K, 16K, but the awful truth is that a lot of people would rather pay $45/month for 1 Mbps DSL than pay $50/month for 1 Gbps fiber, or would rather watch a terrible camera capture of a movie from the theater than wait for the Bluray to come out. Consider the success of the Nintendo switch. The dock for the switch was a bit of a Jedi mind trick, just like the Wiimote was for the Wii. In particular, it changed the competitive psychology of game producers to think that any "big game" that came out for the Playstation or Xbox would also be released for the Switch. Selling the switch as a hybrid device stops gamers and games company from realizing it is what is... the beginning of the end of the TV-attached console. The Steam Deck is a much more powerful machine for about the same price and it also has a very strong catalog. The Steam Deck can play Control natively and the Switch can't. Yet for the most part the industry is going to keep remaking the same old games and releasing them for the Switch, even most the innovative parts are going to be making games like Genshin Impact for midrange phones. Sales of the 4090 are driven by prestige, the pleasure you can get out of saying that you own the very best. They are not driven at all by the reality that you can have anywhere near 10x the pleasure from a $4000 gaming PC than from a $400 portable. However a business that revolves around neural networks very well might be able to generate 10x the revenue from a 10x faster graphics card. It's not a question of what "we" can afford but it is a function of what "they" can justify to their shareholders. I mean, the people in my town could afford 100% fiber optic internet, but the phone company can't afford to stop using the copper network when it can still charge people premium prices for subprime service. If we decided that $100 a month was a fair price for gigabit fiber and that price caps should be scaled accordingly, my telecom would quickly decide that it "can't afford" to offer DSL at $0.10 a month and would start tearing up that copper network pretty quickly.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
> the awful truth is that a lot of people would rather pay $45/month for 1 Mbps DSL than pay $50/month for 1 Gbps fiber I have never met these people, and my sample includes four grandmas that are 70 years old. Quality of videocalls so important that 1 Mbps internet is worth $0 to them. Gaming is leisure, that's different - some people buy $1000 golf clubs, and $5,000 bicycles, some don't know what to do with them. > I mean, the people in my town could afford 100% fiber optic internet, but the phone company can't afford to stop using the copper network when it can still charge people premium prices for subprime service. Sounds like a monopoly has your town by the balls, that's not a healthy state of capitalism / free market. These "artificial scarcity" techniques are cancerous tumours, if we allow them to fester and grow they will bring down the whole system.
- PaulHoule 4y ago
  A few years ago we had the cheap oldsters showing up in droves at public meetings at meeting about improving our internet. I’d grant that video calling has gotten a lot more mainstream.

rektide 4y ago

Classic Clayton Christensen Innovator's Dilemna situation, with a constant disruption from below & shift upmarket. Chasing higher profitability segments while letting more and more of the market (the much bigger but lower profitability segmemt) go unserved.

PaulHoule 4y ago
Today though we are seeing another patterns which is that a business which thinks it's main business is not fashionable enough (charitably, because investors don't reward it with a high enough multiple) will neglect it's currently profitable customers to chase shadows. For instance on a bad day it seems that Microsoft would be glad to pour lighter fluid all over the Windows ecosystem if it could get just have 10% of the success Android has had with phones. Or look at Meta neglecting it's current products (even market leading VR games) for the sake of one man's dystopian vision. A common factor in the above is a lack of competition. If Microsoft was really threatened by the Mac or Linux or if there was some real competition for Office, Microsoft wouldn't be able to neglect its customers in favor of daydreams... And the same is true for Facebook. If advertisers voted with their feet you'd see Zuckerberg burn all those VR headsets tomorrow.