HACKER Q&A
📣 andrewstuart

Does steep decline in CPU and GPU sales mean PC gaming is in decline?


“Desktop GPU sales are down almost 40% year-to-year CPU shipments also took a hefty dip.”

https://www.pcworld.com/article/1947496/oof-desktop-gpu-sales-are-down-almost-40-percent-year-to-year.html

Does this mean PC gaming is in decline. Does it mean consoles are becoming more popular?

  👤 Festro Accepted Answer ✓
COVID caused a spike, inflation is now causing a dip. It will recover just fine without anyone panicking.

The biggest reason for a short-term recovery is likely the planned obsolescence of the current generations of Nvidia cards. They have too little VRAM for the latest AAA console ports. The industry is moving towards needing more VRAM generally, badly ported games regardless.

Users have rejected Nvidia's pricing strategy for the 40 series, and have too little free cash for luxury GPUs. They'll save for the next gen and we'll see a resurgence.

👤 jtode
There is no reality where a desktop GPU is not a luxury item. If a society wants to sell a lot of luxury items, it needs to be prosperous.

Prosperity means lots of people have buying power. Right now we have the opposite of that and a lot of gaslighting about it, which is not the same thing, and the more they tighten their grip on control, the more prosperity will fall away from us all.

👤 mnky9800n
Maybe it's because people are realizing crypto is a scam so they don't need GPUs anymore.

Maybe it's because people are struggling to buy new hardware when inflation is being used as an excuse to price gouge everything.

Maybe console becoming more popular would be better represented by console sale numbers not something else.

👤 andrewstuart
The beatings from AMD and Nvidia will continue until morale improves.

Put another way,

“GPU prices will not be dropping so you’d better get used to it, and better start spending.”

- joint statement from Jensen Huang and Lisa Su.

👤 yuppie_scum
It means Crypto is in decline.