And this is combined with cutting Blackwell production by 40% and exacerbating a market already dominated by scalpers and AI data centers. Everything is getting enshittified, subscription just one component of it.

I've always held out for PCMR but these companies are making it near impossible - or just prohibitively expensive - to be a PC gamer.

You will own nothing and be happy.

Hanlon’s razor applies here. The margins for selling to datacenters are higher for the producers of RAM and GPU’s. The chance that it is some kind of conspiracy is very small.

Yes, but this only works if said concentrated manufacturer group also holds all IP and power means to prevent competition on the market they don't want filled.

It's like a monopoly protected by navy, something right out of 1600s, if such a state of things is established in some countries, all the others will have an advantageous route of peaceful development, except with higher risk of war and sabotage from the former group. Almost like colonial unpleasantness between Iberian monarchies on one side and England and Netherlands on the other. From the point of the former, they had the Papal blessing and divine ownership of the New World divided between them, and the latter were heretics and thieves. From the point of the latter, the former didn't have any exclusive rights to unpopulated by Europeans lands overseas. While the popular narrative (right out of Sabatini's books and such) portrays the former as bad and the latter as good, I'll notice that the former did less of racism and slavery and genocide, and their former colonies are culturally mixed unique nations. Unlike British colonies, which are all, even USA, sort of England overseas with diverged dialects.

The point is - there are legal arguments which might eventually become bigger conflicts.

So - you won't do anything to already consolidated power. This might become a new global split, in political dimension driven by economic interest. Already in testing, in fact, with Gaza and other recent conflicts. And it would be a shame if most western countries turned up on the wrong side, because that wouldn't make the other side better than it really is, but it really would have an advantage in development. You can forbid people to produce and own universal personal computers for all kinds of use only if they live under your control.

This is ultimately just punching sideways and down though.

These companies will win when your strategy is to simply shit on other people for existing.

You may not think that is what you're doing but it is. How so? Because while you care about this area of life enough to get into the details, for other people, their areas of care are completely different, and it is unreasonable for you to expect everyone to care about precisely what you care about.

As such, punching down and sideways only serves the purpose of making an environment where only the rich and powerful band together, and the poor (us) routinely infight and chop off our own legs rather than realizing that these megacorps hiring leagues of lobbyists, psychologists, marketers, etc know exactly how to push, and know that exactly the person you are bitching at will almost certainly never see your comment, or will consider it hostile and irrelevant so it wont matter either way.

At this point I scowel at any game with higher minimum hardware requirements than fallout 4. Like, come on, did you really need all that shit?

The excuse is, and has always been, "Because we can". Never think otherwise.

There is little difference between enshitificstion and being greedy dicks.

A shitton is not the amount they are aiming for. All is the goal.

They can’t even use the usual enshittification excuses, this is just being greedy dicks.

The usual enshitification excuses are companies just being greedy dicks, and more than anything, a lack of regulation enforcement existing to stop companies simply outspending other companies out of business.

I’m guessing they want to sell more computing power to AI bc they make more that way

100hours is quite a bit

Oh dear.. I was in hospital a few weeks ago and I’ve been recovering at home. In the last two weeks I’ve manly played three games: 64 hours in the first, 50 hours in the second, and 10 hours in the third (that one was all in one day)

I’d never use a thing like GeForce Now either way, but I’d be boned hahaha

Yeah that was basically my thought too. I probably do less than a quarter of that on average, but that’s not really the point. I should be allowed as much time as I want. Not that I use a Nvidia subscription anyway, but still. This makes me mad on behalf of other people.

Basically you rent NVIDIA's GPUs, they render the games, stream to you. This way you "save" money by not having to, heyoooo what a surprise, buy cards that have been getting more and more expensive over the years because of reasons that totally have nothing to do with GPU manufacturers.

It's game streaming, except you stream an entire PC.

No, not if you own your own card/gaming pc. This is about their cloud gaming service where the game is run on their servers and streamed to you.

Because some people have digital libraries but no hardware to run them on.

At the very least, this is a loss in gaming accessibility by cost since a month of GeForce Now used to be a decent gaming backup for when mygaming system was down (had to RMA GPU) or a friend wanted to test the PC gaming waters.