By Joao Wilhelms
The gaming industry is in a very mixed state when it comes to the current economy, business decisions, and game production. These decisions and outcomes had many people either be very or not very pleased with the decisions companies like Nintendo, Valve, Microsoft, and Sony are making towards their platforms which has been questionable or favorable to most of their audiences.
Nintendo has been having a very neutral middle ground when it comes to pleasing and not pleasing their audience. Ever since their most recent Home Console release–The Nintendo Switch 2–A large portion of the community has been mad at Nintendo for the price of the console, which during launch was $499.99 USD. If the Mario Kart World Bundle Version was purchased, which a lot of people thought was too expensive since they are aware that Nintendo doesn’t really do Ultra Realistic Graphics instead more Cartoony due to them making Family-Friendly Games. When more research was done, it turned out that the production of AI data centers. Most producers of RAM have turned to producing AI systems data centers, which made them so expensive to manufacture that a lot of electronic companies had to up prices of their items due to RAM slowly becoming too expensive for mass production. At first Nintendo were doing their hardest to not instantly up the prices of their consoles due to market pressures; but on May 7th 2026 they announced that unfortunately the price of the Nintendo Switch 2 System will increase, they said that the Switch 2 will become $499.99 USD by September 1st 2026–Around a 4 month gap–This announcement shocked some people that Nintendo was able to hold onto increasing the price for 4 months compared to other companies where they announce their price increase and it takes effect the same day, or in 2-3 days. Overall Nintendo seems to be doing pretty well as of right now.
Playstation has been as of recently only disappointing their player base with every new announcement they’ve been making; and it’s only making their company “shoot themselves in the foot.” The start of the downfall of Playstation slowly started around the announcement of the Playstation 5 Pro back in September of 2024, when they revealed the specs of the console, it was naturally just a regular Playstation 5 system but the only difference was that the console had a different base design and had an Artificial Intelligence Upscale feature; The worst part about it is that it costed $699.99 USD, an OUTRAGEOUS price for what is considered an upgrade, the backlash it received was also incredibly justified because after a while the company kept increasing the price of the console due to the RAM shortages.
In the beginning of the current year Playstation was considered to be one of the best platforms to play out there. Until July 1st 2026, they announced that they will stop the production of physical discs by January of 2028. Which caused the most backlash ever known towards the company; Recently one of the backlashes that the community attempted to do so was start a “blackout” which means that the community is encouraging others to cancel their subscriptions, and not log into any online services for a whole week and only buy physical games to prove that physical media is very important.
Xbox has recently had a major comeback after the old CEO, Phil Spencer, retired from his division since his start back in 2014, with the new CEO, Asha Sharma, doing some major improvements towards the company. Before Asha Sharma became CEO, Phil Spencer was leading these business decisions that Playstation has been copying, with many of these include increasing prices of the console three times, doubling the price of their subscription which caused their websites to crash due to many people cancelling their subscription at the same time and this was such a bad impact for Xbox, but when Asha came around to fill in the shoes as the CEO of the company, she has only been doing major improvements, these include adjusting the way people pay for their subscriptions, attempting to lower console prices, and even pressuring game studios to actually start production on games the fans want, she cut off horrible deals Phill Spencer made and just over all saving the company from total humiliation. The biggest change she made for the company is the addition of their new digital game license, where you can legitimately own your digital games.
The way the system works is that every time you insert a disc of a new game a digital copy of the game included like a key-card for the game, but you can still be able to play the game even if the disc for it is not in the console, and if you shared this disc around with someone else like a friend, or other relative this digital copy is transferred to their console and will stay there until the disc is inserted into another person’s console or the original owner which means that anyone can own their games as long as the person has the disc game.
For being the most praised game company of all time, they have been just fine. Steam hasn’t gone through any major changes or price increases, with the sole exception of the price increase of the steam deck due to the RAM shortages, and some lawsuits that don’t make sense for the company to be sued by it instead of the developers of the game to cause the lawsuit. But overall Steam seems to be pretty comfortable with their decisions and upcoming releases, such as the Steam Machine.
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