When the PlayStation 5 launched almost five and a half years ago, it was listed at £449 in the UK. If you were to buy one at the recommended retail price today, it would be £569.99, or £789.99 for the updated Pro model. Sony has just raised the price of its console by another £90, the latest in a series of hikes. This is unprecedented: consoles have always decreased in price over time (until they become retro collectibles – the other day, I saw someone asking £200 for a SNES on Vinted). So, what’s going on?
Unfortunately, this is another case of artificial intelligence ruining things for everyone. AI data centres need lots and lots and lots of computing power to be able to present you with lies whenever you Google anything, and this has pushed up demand and pricing for RAM and storage. This isn’t the only reason prices are rising – the wars in Ukraine and Iran have caused global economic disruption, and rampant inflation has eaten into many companies’ bottom line. But AI is the cause that’s easiest to get angry about, because it doesn’t need to be this way.
As my former Kotaku colleague Chris Person memorably puts it (via Aftermath): “I’m tired of these useless jackasses making the computer expensive.” PC gamers have been hit hardest of all by recent tech industry insanity, as Nvidia suddenly became the most valuable company in the world off the back of AI investment (and, previously, crypto miners). In October, its market cap hit £5tn(!), while its top-range graphics cards now cost more than £1,000. Shareholders might be celebrating, but customers, who want to buy components for their computers in order to play video games, are getting shafted.
As Sony’s price rises prove, you don’t have to be a PC gamer to be affected. Valve has run out of Steam Decks and is struggling to make more. There’s widespread speculation that its nifty little Steam Machine may not even launch, because the very idea of making an affordable home gaming computer is now laughable. Nintendo is making fewer Switch 2 consoles, and has just raised the price of physical games by $10 in the US.
It’s not entirely fair to rag on Sony – this price rise is pretty much in line with general inflation in the past six years. But there has been an almost 30% rise in the cost of living in just over half a decade – and the AI bubble is helping fuel it. No single person or company can control global macropolitics, but it is undeniably true that a small number of extremely wealthy people are making a fortune by forcing technology that we don’t want into everything, while that which we do want is getting prohibitively expensive as a result. We are paying more for a PlayStation so that idiots can use ChatGPT to mislead people on dating apps.
These people do not love the computer, Person notes. “I grew up making computers,” he writes in his piece for Aftermath. “I enjoy jailbreaking closed hardware that would otherwise become e-waste, like robot vacuums and Amazon devices, and giving them a second life as something ethical … the rabid adherents of AI do not love computers; maybe they never did. They love money and having a mistake-prone LLM do their work for them.”
This isn’t about Sony’s greed. It’s an indication of the rot at the heart of big tech – a closed economic system predicated on making things worse for most of us, so that a very few people can make a lot of money.
What to play
A palate cleanser for you after my rant: Hozy is a soothing game about cleaning up, renovating and decorating a series of rooms. Think Unpacking, but with much prettier lighting effects and a better furniture catalogue. You begin each scenario by sweeping up trash and pulling up floorboards, and end by turning on the radio that you have placed on a cute table in a freshly painted nook. Do not expect the narrative punch of Unpacking – despite titbits of story context, it’s not clear why everyone in this town has let their house get into such a state – but if you enjoy arranging things, you’ll get a kick out of this. Right after I finished it, I downloaded Furnish Master, because Steam has a sale on boring games about playing with houses. I’m all about it.
Available on: PC
Estimated playtime: three hours
What to read
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The new Super Mario Galaxy Movie is out today – as expected, it is a bare-bones story supported by a cavalcade of Nintendo cameos and bright action scenes. Dubbed “a bland screensaver of a movie” by the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, expect smooth-brained entertainment for Nintendo enjoyers.
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This deeply reported story about speedrunning collective Awesome Games Done Quick shows that a better gaming world is possible.
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Did you know that there was a 90s adventure game about exploring the home of Prince?
What to click
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Sony to hike PS5 prices by $100 as AI and Iran war push up memory chip costs
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CEO of Epic Games apologises after laying off employee with terminal brain cancer
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ICYMI: What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government – podcast
Question Block
This week’s question comes from Graham:
“As a parent, like myself, I wondered where you stand on Roblox. Do you think it offers something positive for young gamers? A never-ending world of possibility and freedom? A good place to hang out online with friends? I feel an inherent negativity towards it, [largely] from People Make Games’s coverage of the exploitative environment for creators. Beyond this, I worry about who can talk to whom online, as well as a general view that the ‘experiences’ of Roblox are akin to virtual junk food. Am I being too narrow-minded, though?”
I recently wrote a column about whether online video games should be included in child social media bans, and Roblox comes up a lot in that conversation. (Roblox, for those blessed enough to be unfamiliar with it, is the most popular gaming platform in the world among children, and it offers players the tools to create and share whatever gaming experiences they want.) It keeps making headlines because of the reams of inappropriate, gross and even dangerous content that kids can access with minimal effort, and because of significant safety concerns. (Roblox has recently beefed up its child safety features in response.)
Millions of young people do have a lot of fun with Roblox, and some even get started with game development tools through this game. Clearly it does offer something positive. That said: I truly dislike Roblox, and I don’t let my kids play it. Not just because it’s impossible to ensure safe and appropriate content for kids on a platform where millions of people can make whatever they want, and not just because of safety concerns about talking to online strangers. I also think it’s bad. It looks bad, it’s infuriating to play, it uses exploitative engagement tricks. My feeling is that there are hundreds of actually good games that kids can play instead.
If you’ve got a question for Question Block – or anything else to say about the newsletter – hit reply or email us on pushingbuttons@theguardian.com.