The gaming hardware landscape has been an endless font of news and speculation in recent years, with unprecedented technological advancements and existential supply crises in equal measure. The latest rumors surround Nvidia’s anticipated release of the RTX 4090, a top-end GPU expected to be orders of magnitude more powerful than its current world-beating offerings.
But with even mid-range 1080s impossible to find in the retail market, and the current top-range 3090 selling for nearly twice its MSRP of $1500 in second-hand stores, just how relevant is the next big piece of hardware to the gaming sphere as a whole? With many gamers priced out of the range, and much more content with basic hardware, where does the cutting edge of gaming technology sit in the industry?
The State of (Casual) Play
Despite growing audiences in the PC and console gaming market, much of the industry’s sudden growth in the last decade can in fact be attributed to mobile players – many of whom wouldn’t class themselves as “gamers” to begin with. These gamers span different areas of the gaming sphere. For example, the iGaming industry, in particular, has invested heavily in mobile, with a wide range of offerings on all smart devices enabling casual players to download live table games for Android and play slots for iPad devices. The device from Apple is now one of the most popular devices to play free slots and casino games. The accessibility of slot games and casino apps to a wide audience has had the effect of growing their audience, being convenient alternatives to in-person play.
Meanwhile, video-game developers target a different demographic to PC and console players by focusing on simple and accessible mobile gameplay, with the mobile arm of games developers Activision-Blizzard pulling in billions of dollars from microtransaction revenue each year. These forms of gaming are popular and demand little by the way of processing power, making them easy for the casual gamer to pick up and play even on older devices. While much of the industry is focused on squeezing the most out of new and exciting hardware, for many companies the real money is in accessible gaming.
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Appetite for New Hardware
With all that said, the appetite for new hardware is nonetheless demonstrably large. Demand for graphics cards like the RTX 3090 is through the roof, exacerbated by a global microchip shortage that has severely limited retail availability and inflated product prices significantly. The same behavior can be seen in console gaming, with the PS5 and Xbox Series X both facing equivalent shortages, and rampant scalping of stock to re-sell at increased prices in second-hand marketplaces. Despite the prohibitive pricing of new technology, there is an inarguable audience for it thanks to the gaming possibilities it represents.
As technology continues to power forward at a breakneck pace, arguments about the direction of the industry ultimately become moot. A gaming tech singularity is soon at hand, where the divide between the casual slots player and the avid PC gamer will narrow; further advancement of graphical and storage capabilities will result in faster and more powerful mobile devices, while growth in the game-streaming space will eventually limit boundaries set by hardware altogether. In time, we’ll be able to play anything, anywhere on any device – but in the meantime, stratified hardware pricing is the price to pay for a bright future.
