The gaming industry is rapidly shifting towards cloud-based subscription models, potentially ending hardware and game ownership for consumers, with Valve and its Steam Machine positioned as the last significant obstacle to this trend.
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What if I told you right now that this may in fact be the last generation where you actually
own your hardware or even your video games? That's going to be an incredibly bold thing to say. But
I have a feeling that what we're going to be seeing after the next generation of consoles
and even graphics card hardware, you're going to be seeing a lot of companies and corporations,
especially in the gaming space move towards the more cloud-based subscription model,
where we're even going to be getting to the point where you're going to be renting your
own personal computer or even renting your own console. And the only company standing in the
way of all of this is someone that nobody actually ever expected. and that company is Valve. You see,
I personally think that people are getting the idea of the Steam Machine completely incorrect
and they're focusing on things that don't really make a lot of sense in the actual future. Sure,
they may make sense now, but when you're looking at things directly from what's happening right
now in the gaming space and even with AI and GPUs, this could be the one device, the one system that
really puts the entire ownership of video games back into the palm of your hand as an actual
consumer. And I've been critical of the Steam machine as well for two things specifically. One,
we don't know the price, and two, the 8 GB of VRAM on that simple device. The thing is though,
I think what we're going to be seeing is the Steam Machine and Valve being the only things left to
stand in the way between every other company, forcing you to have an online subscription to
actually play the games that you bought. Get ready to own nothing and be happy. According to
videocards.com, GeForce Now's 100hour monthly cap starts January 1st for everyone. A user's
chart shows what extra time would actually cost. That's right. If you're old like me,
you may in fact remember the days of having to go through the grocery store and find AOL online
discs where the actual access to the internet used to be charged by the minute. No. Yeah,
that was a fun one. By the way, you have x amount of minutes per month on your actual AOL usage to
go through and actually be online. Unlike today where it is completely unlimited, we are now going
backwards in technology. We're going backwards in space and time to where now subscriptions like
GeForce Now are adding specific time restrictions every single month for the services that you in
fact pay for. And trust me, where things are going and how I'm going to connect the pieces together,
this may in fact be the one tweet you never expected to rock the entire gaming industry. Now,
saying all that, I wanted to do a couple of things specifically. Let's go to the GeForce website
and see what they actually charge you for their service directly. The free tier model of GeForce
Now is AD supported. You can join for free, get access to 2,000 games with 1 hour gaming sessions,
up to 1080p resolution, and up to 60fps. Couple of things right off the bat. The up to means it's not
going to be 1080. It means that at some points when you stare at a wall or at a corner, it'll
hit 1080p or 60 fps on that device. Got to love it. What's the next tier? Oh, look at that. We've
got a halfp price holiday tier coming up. Ah, the $4.99 a month with no ads when it's actually $9.99
a month on the regular price. They decided to cut you a break for 50% off for the holidays. So nice
of you guys, Nvidia. Way to go. You get 4,000 games to access. You can install to play games,
which is a new feature. Really, we haven't had that before already. Sixh hour gaming sessions as
well. That's incredibly important, by the way. The game session time is also very important,
too. And you also get up to 1440p and 60fps. Then you've got the ultimate tier for $10 a month when
normally it is actually $19.99. Also with no ads apparently, 4,000 games. Install your games as
well. 8hour gaming sessions up to 4K and up to 240 FPS. Now, I know what you're thinking, Alex,
that's just a service. Why would that even impact me whatsoever? Why would I care about that at all?
And they even said they're going to be giving you the times in those tiers. The difference, though,
is that in those tiers, you only have a limit of 100 hours per month, which they don't tell you in
that specific tier. So, even if you pay for the actual $10 tier or $20 and you get either eight
hour or four hour gaming sessions, if you cross that 100 hour threshold per month, prices in
fact skyrocket exponentially. Somebody on Reddit find out exactly what you might in fact be paying.
According to Apple royals on Reddit, GeForce Now will universally limit play time to 100 hours per
month starting January 1st. Here's how much cloud gaming will cost you from now on. And this chart
is actually fantastic because a couple of things I want to point out on this directly. When you
look at the chart, you can see that after 3 hours of play time per day, you are already
at the 100 hour mark. Basically at the 99.99 mark for that actual month. The thing is though, once
you cross that threshold, prices in fact almost double. If you look at the total cost per month
on the performance and the ultimate tiers, you can see that once you cross the 4hour mark per day,
the price goes from $9.99 to $15.97 per month. On the ultimate tier, you went from $19.99 to
$31.97 per month. After you increase your play time every single hour, the price exponentially
increases as well. In fact, after one year of play time crossing the 3-hour per day mark, you have
spent $191 that year on the performance tier and $383 per year on the actual ultimate tier. After 5
years of the service, you are getting close to, in fact, $958 on the performance tier and $1,918.20
on the ultimate tier. Nvidia is moving everyone into this direction. In fact, they're not the only
one. There are specific reasons as to why. You see, when you buy a GPU, even if it is $2,000,
that is a product that is only purchased one time. And that revenue is only gained one time
after that product has been purchased. after logistics, after packaging, after marketing,
after getting on stage, after buying Jensen his leather jackets. All of those things come into
play for the price and cost of that product and how much revenue Nvidia is making on its
own return. The thing is though, what Nvidia is trying to do is in fact not sell you GPUs. No,
they want to rent you your own personal computer back to you by using their own AI data centers.
Yeah, I'm not kidding. The thing is though, Nvidia is not the only one to do this. Even though Xbox
has gone around and lost the console war, what you're seeing right now is a direct pivot into
what Xbox has been looking to do. Create Windows as an actual gaming platform. And the two things
they specifically did were basically add cloud gaming to every single Game Pass tier. And then
on top of that, they raised the price of Game Pass as well. In fact, you can clearly see from Xbox on
their own that Xbox cloud gaming with Game Pass went up 45% and is now available in 30 countries.
As an actual consumer perspective, who can't afford a lot of actual gaming consoles or systems
either because of just importing and other things as well due to actual prices increasing over time.
What you can clearly see are other access points and ways of companies trying to get more money
out of you. The difference though is it's not about reaching new customers and accessing them
directly because they can't afford to go ahead and buy a console. What they're doing right now
is removing the actual physical hardware from you as a customer and consumer, giving that hardware
to AI data center companies and then leaving the only thing left to you is to have cloud gaming
services at all. And then to make matters even worse, what will happen as well is that they'll
begin to introduce dynamic pricing. And we showed the actual usage of dynamic pricing in this video
just a few moments ago where Nvidia decided to say, "Hey, we want to have a little bit of a
sale for our actual online service." Even though we're going to be restricting the amount of hours
we can actually apply. Oh, hey, for the holiday, here's half off after the actual holiday and
the new year begins. We're going to increase the price by 25%. Got a new game coming out,
dynamic pricing. We're going to go ahead and increase the price for that month as well.
every single time you're going to be seeing those specific things happen and that dynamic pricing
rear its ugly head to then nickel and dime you in every possible sense and literally just go through
and ring you for as much money as they possibly can without breaking you pushing you closer to the
breaking point but not actually making you cross the line so you'll gladly still give them the
money you'll kind of feel somewhat burned but you won't feel all the way scammed and that's where
the real scam comes in and that's where things get real nasty and dirty in the gaming industry Indry,
you see, because even though Nvidia has the lion share of the PC gaming market, a couple
of things are in fact happening. They're focusing more on AI specifically. In fact, here is what's
happening with Nvidia right now and their current models of GPUs. As reported by Puberty on Twitter,
saying this, Nvidia is rumored to cut production of gaming GPUs by 30 to 40% in 2025 due to rising
memory prices and supply shortage. And the thing is, I've talked about this before and I called out
exactly what was going to be happening with the actual cutting of production of GPUs for gaming
in the first place and what tiers that Nvidia is going to be targeting. And it turns out that I
might have been right all along because according to videocards.com, the RTX 560Ti 16 GB could face
a production pause as GDR7 supply tightens. Oh, would you look at that? Would you look at that?
the GPU that basically everybody would prefer to buy because it has 16 gigs of VRAM on the card
and performs infinitely better than the actual 560 which only has 8 GB of VRAM. The 16 gig version,
that's the one that's going to be held on pause as production titans for memory. Even
though Nvidia is the one going around and causing that production tightening in the first place,
their incessant use of trying to push forward on AI on every conceivable level is exactly what's
causing these memory shortages. going around and pushing their products onto every single
company and large language models going through and deciding what's going to happen in the actual
gaming space. Which means that once GPUs become more scarce to the actual memory shortages,
which causes an actual feedback loop, going around and saying, "Hey, well, even these GPUs are going
to be costing more money because they're harder to find because all the AI companies are gobbling
them up." And since ad companies are gobbling them up and they're paying more money for all those
GPUs and even for that VRAM itself, it's going to cost more money for the actual customer consumer
in the first place, leaving you with nowhere else to go. But the only way to play video games would
be to sign up for the actual [ __ ] service. Welcome to cloud gaming, everybody. The scam
that every single gaming company is not trying to place on to you because you weren't giving them
enough money in the first place. And you know what? They're not the only one. Because when
you see who's actually buying the GPUs, you're going to get even angrier. That's because Mark
Zuckerberg looks to double Meta's GPU stock to 1.3 million GPUs for AI training. Zuckerberg announces
the effort as Elon Musk is upgrading his Colossus Supercomput and Sam Alman partners to dump $500
billion into Project Stargate. When people are talking about competition in the gaming space now,
we're not talking about Xbox versus PlayStation. We're not talking about Nintendo Switch versus
everybody else. We're not talking about AMD versus Nvidia. We're talking about major conglomerate
corporations versus you, the actual consumer. They are literally trying to privatize actual
personal computing. And we're not talking about just the hobbyist builders. We're talking about
every single way that you access video games and play them in the gaming space right now. And in
the future, it's going to completely evaporate and disappear because these companies will be more
than happy to buy up every single GPU, leave you with nothing, make you subscribe to their online
cloud streaming service, use those AI data centers that they bought and paid for, which you have
to subscribe to now to go ahead and feed you the actual game over the internet as a cloud streaming
platform that you signed up for that you pay for now on a monthly recurring revenue stream to play
the video game, which they can dynamically control the price of whenever a new game comes out.
It's Has it clicked yet? And it turns out that all these companies doing this are also
putting people like Valve and you in a precarious situation because according to Insider Gaming,
Valve is quietly ending production of the most affordable Steam Deck. That's right. Apparently,
it's getting too expensive for Valve to make the LCD model of this Steam Deck. and they've
completely stopped production. If you have an LCD model, you literally have an actual piece
of history in the gaming space. And I think this is where exactly the Steam Machine is going to
fit into this slot. Do I think it's going to be the price of the LCD model? Absolutely not.
What I think is going to happen though is when we're talking about actual power of computing,
Steam seems to be the one odd man out. They are a private company. They're the only ones possibly
standing in the way in front of companies like Nvidia, AMD, Open AI, Facebook, Grock,
everything else standing in the way of trying to stop you from owning actual computer games
and owning video games in general while we see even other companies like PlayStation and
Xbox move towards more cloud gaming services and subscriptions. And even then, after all of that,
companies like Nintendo are not even safe either. Because according to WCCF Tech, a report showing
that Nintendo now has to spend 41% more on the 12 GB RAM chips that it uses to make Nintendo Switch
2 consoles. Guess who makes the actual board for the Nintendo Switch 2 consoles? It's Nvidia. So
now even corporations aren't safe. Corporations aren't incredibly successful. corporations that
make the most revenue and money on the face of the earth in the video game marketplace. No one
is going to be safe from this. And again, like I said before, the Steam Machine, the Steam frame,
and Valve themselves may be the one last hope we have in the video game space to actually have a
piece of ownership directly for video games and even personal computing hardware themselves. And
even though I'm saying this right now, I've been critical of the fact that 16 gigs of VRAM is not
inside the Steam machine itself. it stuck with eight. And even we've seen actual Valve engineers
say that the Steam machine is better than 70% of the hardware on the Steam market survey. So,
you can clearly see what Valve is looking to do. They're looking to make sure that their entire
user base doesn't simply move to a cloud-based solution. Valve is not doing this out of wanting
to provide you a cool little device. No, Valve is doing this because they see the writing on
the wall. They need to provide you, the consumer and customer, a way to access your Steam library
and to play your games on any specific device, regardless of how they actually do it. They need a
way to provide you with actual personal computing power in your hands locally to give you access to
your library as well. And they also want to make sure that you have access to go ahead and buy more
games on their storefront and keep that company rolling in the dough. This isn't Valve trying to
be nice. This is Valve going around and doing this out of actual preservation. And honestly,
it seems like this may be the right call moving forward. We may be seeing a time where we're
going to be regressing back in technology and power being owned as an actual customer and
consumer. And this is where things are going to get really sticky. Are you going to see the most
high-end next generation games be only able to be played via cloud services because the actual GPUs
are not available for customers and consumers and only to those massive AI data centers as well? Are
you going to be seeing exclusive games on cloud services simply because locallyowned hardware is
not powerful enough to play those games natively on that actual device and the only way to do so
is to sign up for that cloud service. this could spiral the video game industry into something that
no one was actually expecting. We've seen so many people talk about actual ownership in games. Well,
that ownership is evaporating in front of everyone. And instead of people just going
around and seeing what's actually happening, they're too busy console worrying about how
many PS5 sales were done in November. And if you think I'm being hyperbolic about the entire thing,
I want you to look at this specifically because here's one article that really shocked me to the
core when I saw what happened. And when you see this too, things are going to get really weird
in the next couple of years. Open AI's Stargate project is set to consume up to 40% of global
DRAM output. It incinex to the tune of up to 900,000 wafers per month. I want you to think
about the words that I just said, especially those last three words, wafers per month.
We're not talking about actual chiplets. We're talking about wafers. Things that even the Open AI
team and the data centers cannot even use because those wafers have not been processed. Open AAI is
not buying all this RAM to make chat GPT better. Open AAI is buying all these wafers of RAM to
go through and stop the competition from having access to it as well. Literally starving everybody
out. And then at the same time, once those wafers are used and then turn into chiplets, you can't
even use it as an actual consumer because it's been processed far too much. So even then,
it all becomes actual e-waste. At the end of the day, you have massive companies working against
you in every single facet of the imagination you could possibly see in the gaming industry.
You have AI companies literally buying up literal wafers, 900,000 of them per month in order to go
through and stifle actual competition, restrict product in the actual space and then stop you as
a customer and consumer from owning any personal computing power at all. thereby forcing you as
a customer and consumer where the only way you can actually own your entertainment or
even have some sort of entertainment is to simply access by paying that cloud service into that AI
data center every single month through their own dynamic pricing so you can go through and play a
[ __ ] video game in the first place. One of two things are going to happen. either a the AI bubble
is going to completely explode and all these companies will come crawling back to customers
and consumers or b it's going to get exponentially worse and people are not going to be looking to
play newer video games at all. They're going to be looking towards retro and emulation and going
back in time to play all the older games in their library. Even Steam said it themselves. Only 14%
of players played new games. Everybody else was stuck playing the old stuff. But that doesn't help
companies like Valve at all, especially if there's no computing power left for anyone to even buy a
game to play natively locally on their hardware in the first place. And that is why I feel that
right now Valve is literally the only company standing in the way of you actually owning your
video games even though they are digital licenses. Even though I'm going to have somebody in the
comment section go, "Oh, you don't actually own them. You own the license to them." Yeah,
okay. We get it. You can tip your fedora all day long, but I'm not talking about ownership
in terms of ownership and licensing. I'm talking about ownership in playing your video game locally
on the hardware that you purchase that you have. Cuz soon, you're not going to have any hardware
whatsoever. It's just going to be an app on your TV with a Bluetooth controller that you connect
to and a service that you pay monthly for as they time restrict you. And if you go over that time,
they'll be more than happy to charge you more. Valve and Steam, in my opinion, are the last
bastions of video games. And I really hope the Steam Machine will be so successful, it'll be
the one thing standing in the way of this insane industry. But you know what? I want to hear what
you guys have to say about this in the comments section down below. Do you think Valve and Steam
are going to be successful? Do you think the AI bubble is going to pop? Or do you think things
could in fact possibly maybe even get better or maybe worse? I want to hear what you guys
have to say. If you want to see more of this kind of content though, more gaming news, more PC port
reviews, Steam Deck videos, emulation content, fanboy videos, and hotics of the gaming industry,
subscribe to the channel. We're on our way to 100K. And I just want to say thank you guys so
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guys so much for watching. Hope you have a great one and I'll see you gooners next time. Peace.
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