this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2025
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Data on GPU shipments and/or POS sales showing a decline would be much more reliable than a survey.
Surveys can at times suffer from showing what the respondents want to reply as opposed to what they do.
I mean, as written the headline statement is always true.
I am horrified by some of the other takeaways, though:
I'm sure we'd all switch to room temperature fusion for power if we could, too, or use superconductors in our electronics.
That's the problem with surveys, isn't it? What's "latency being eliminated"? On principle it'd be your streamed game responds as quickly as a local game, which is entirely achievable if your target is running a 30fps client on a handheld device versus streaming 60 fps gameplay from a much more powerful server. We can do that now.
But is that "latency free" if you're comparing it to running something at 240Hz in your gaming PC? With our without frame generation and upscaling? 120 Hz raw? 60Hz on console?
The question isn't can you get latency free, the question is at what point in that chain does the average survey-anwering gamer start believing the hype about "latency free streaming"?
Which is irrelevant to me, because the real problem with cloud gaming has zero to do with latency.
That last one is especially horrifying. You don't own games when you cloud game, you simply lease them. We all know what that's done for the preservation of games. Not to mention encouraging the massive amounts of shovel ware that we get flooded with.
That's also how it is with a game you purchased to play on your own PC, though. Unless you have it on physical media, your access could be revoked at any time.
I don't know that cloud gaming moves shovelware in either direction, but it really sucks to see the percentage of people that don't factor ownership into the process at all, at least on paper.
Pretty sure the scalper situation makes a lot of that data meaningless too. Also if they keep supply significantly lower than demand then it’s still going to sell out. The survey mentions one of the reasons people are skipping is supply issues.
That's why it's best to focus on absolute unit shipment numbers/POS.
If total units increased compared to the previous generation launch, then people are still buying GPUs.
Absolute numbers/POS is just going to tell you if supply is matching demand(it isn’t). The survey is telling us that demand is dropping off too. They’re losing from both sides. With the number of AI cards they’re selling by the pallet to data centers I don’t think they really care that much though.
Shipment/POS do not telling you anything about unfulfilled demand or "unrealized supply".
It's just how unit were shipped into the channel and sales at retail respectively.
These are the best data points that we have to understand demand dynamic.
Gamers are also a notoriously dramatic demography that often don't go through on what they say.
It really depends if they hired a professional cognitive psychologist to write the survey for them. I doubt they did...