Gamers Got F*CKED OVER by Nvidia...

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:03]So, gamers have been betrayed by Nvidia.

[00:00:06]According to this article from Market Watch, they said, "Hardcore gamers nurtured Nvidia and the AI boom, and now they feel betrayed by big tech." And we've been talking about the cost of building a gaming PC in 2026, and it's not it's not great. Uh, in fact, I think these uh numbers are off. They're saying a budget tier according to Google's AI overview is $800 to $1,100. I don't know if I agree with that. I think it's it's more like $1,500, but we do know that uh you know GPUs and RAM and hard drives and all these things have gone up. Uh motherboards I think you can you can get pretty cheap now because nobody's able to afford the components. But yeah, it's a pretty interesting article cuz they said, you know, gamers were the ones who built Nvidia and then Nvidia turned around and uh stuck it to gamers by jacking the prices of their uh GPUs and basically freezing out consumers. And that's what a lot of these companies are doing now is they're kind of freezing out the average consumer, driving up the prices. You would be insane, I think, to to build a uh a gaming rig in 2026. But we're going to talk about this. Before we get into it any further, please subscribe for more pop culture news, views, and rants, guys. And if you want more Clownfish TV, that's more podcasts, more videos, things you will not find here on YouTube, go out to more m o.clownfishtv.com.

[00:01:29]That's more.clownfishtv.com.

[00:01:32]And thank you to our reapfers for making this episode possible. Again, this is coming from Market Watch. They said, "An ongoing culture war. AI is driving up the cost of key gaming components as big tech leaves the gaming industry once an inseparable ally in the dust. They said not all is well outside of this uh this player's Minecraft world. The PC is equipped with a central processing unit, graphics card, random access memory, and high capacity storage. Okay. Uh the way this gamer sees it, the AI boom is threatening the hobby that has shaped his life since he was 8 years old. Last fall, OpenAI Inc. deals with Samsung and SKH Highix to buy massive quantities of dynamic random access memory wafers for its Stargate data centers, contributing to a memory shortage. The average cost of the latest 32 gig RAM kit, which uh this gamer Weaver considers the baseline standard for modern PC gaming, has increased to $560 from $150 in just one year. Data from PC Part Picker shows a 64 gig RAM kit, a necessity for heavy game modders, developers, and diehard streamers, has surged to 1,000 from $250.

[00:02:40]Nvidia is slashing production of the company's consumer-facing GeForce graphics cards as it prioritizes delivering Blackwell and Reuben chips to its data center customers, reports suggest. So yeah, uh these companies were built off the backs of gamers and tech enthusiasts and now you can't get parts because they're selling to data centers. Nvidia did not respond to Market Watch requests for comment.

[00:03:04]They've taken the RAM that would have gone to consumers and flooded it into these data centers, said Weaver. Again, this is the guy who's uh playing Minecraft here, Jaden Weaver. Jaden Weaver, who lives in Dawsonville, Georgia. That leaves people like me who love building PCs paying an arm and a leg for a crucial component. He hasn't been able to purchase any new components since the price hikes. He said it's held me back from buying and building PCs.

[00:03:27]Yeah, I've talked about this before about how uh crazy expensive everything is. And we had uh an esports center, gaming center for about 5 years. And if I had to price out the equipment that we bought, and we bought mid to high range PCs, they would probably cost about three times as much as they cost us back then. I mean, it's it's it's crazy.

[00:03:48]Like, there's no way we would have been able to do it, right? Yeah. Nvidia not respond to Market Watch. They're not going to. They're not going to.

[00:03:54]Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft are planning to spend upwards of 700 billion on AI this year. We're going to talk about Microsoft and the actual cost of of AI. They said using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees.

[00:04:09]Um, big tech's obsession with AI infrastructures is starting to feel like a betrayal to the legions of gamers who nurtured some of the key companies and technologies driving the boom. Today, they're deeply frustrated with the results as the gaming industry stagnates and consumers face higher prices on everything from memory to storage drives and graphic cards. So, for decades, gaming subsidized artificial intelligence, forming the careers of today's AI visionaries. Advancements in machine learning in turn spurred more complex gameplay features. Jagged geometric shapes evolved into photorealistic video game characters thanks to increased memory and more efficient architecture. The most important chip company in AI, Nvidia, and its graphic uh processing units arguably would not exist if not for the gaming industry, which also spawned AI lab, Google DeepMind. Now, what's interesting is Nvidia is always at the center of this. Have you noticed that during the pandemic uh it was all about crypto? was all about mining Bitcoin. In fact, and you need a beefy GPU to do that. In fact, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. When we had this gaming center, we offset the cost because all of the computers were on 24/7 and they mine crypto at night. That's that's what we did for the first couple of years. We basically just left the computers on and the uh company that we worked with that had the shell that we used and it was, you know, all these esports centers use the same use pretty much use the same uh shell. Anyway, the company that has a shell, yeah, they let you offset cost by uh more or less taking control of your PCs at night and they would mine crypto.

[00:05:44]We had certain hours that the the PCs would mine crypto. So, it did it did offset the cost, but we had to have uh certain certain caliber of machine to be able to do that. And it did work. It off it offset the cost and then the bottom kind of fell out of all that. But it was kind of funny because it was like, yeah, during the day we had the the gaming center open, everybody's playing games and at night the computers are still on and they're doing well, god knows what, but I know we didn't have to pay for everything. So, that was that was good.

[00:06:11]That punishing uh hangover from pandemic era overinvestment had already left the gaming industry reeling. Budgets initially ballooned as gaming studios raced to capture the attention of people stuck in their homes. As demand waned in the following years, companies conducted mass layoffs, leading private equity firms to swoop in and pick up the remains of distressed assets. Yeah, everybody overspent. Now they're laying everybody off and now they're blaming uh AI for that. But that's not actually what happened. Big tech corners the hardware market and drives up component prices. Gamers are worried that the AI gold rush is coming at their direct expense. Microsoft alone is expected to account for 190 billion of AI outlays this year on AI that nobody wants. By the way, they have to justify the expense. But nobody really wants C-pilot. They're being forced to use it.

[00:06:59]Nobody wants Google AI search. They're being forced to use it. said this fuels an infrastructure blitz anchored by a multi-billion dollar partnership with OpenAI that Saita Nadella kicked off in 2019. Weaver's concerned that the company's gaming portfolio home to massive properties such as Minecraft will suffer as a result. Already is too late too late. Uh they're already suffering.

[00:07:24]They're hurting their own console sales when they raise Xbox prices for a family that wants to play Xbox.

[00:07:30]Microsoft did not respond to Market Watch. Nvidia did not respond to market watch. Weaver has aired his frustrations through YouTube videos sparking a wave of agreement in the comments section.

[00:07:40]Steve Burke, editor-inchief of Gamers Nexus, has garnered millions of views on YouTube videos bearing incendiary titles such as Nvidia's AI bubble and the torture will continue until shareholder value improves. The data center boom is so lucrative that companies no longer need to cater to consumers as they did in the past. Burke told Market Watch, it's posed as an existential risk to gamers owning their computing devices.

[00:08:06]But worse than that, they don't want you owning your computers. I'm just going to stop right there. They don't want you owning your computers. Uh Amazon has said as much. They said eventually they want to lease you a box or uh you buy the box and it has access to computing in the cloud. They don't want you owning your computers. Even the desktop you buy now or the laptop that you buy now is an interface as far as like Microsoft is concerned to their cloud computing.

[00:08:33]That's what they want. They want you to, you know, do everything in the cloud where they've got complete control over you. They can monetize you. They can follow you around. Uh look at Google. We just did a video the other day that if you use Google Drive, well, it's not private. Google can get into it at any point in time. They're actually using AI to scan the contents of your drive. If they don't like what is there, they can shut your account down. And that happened to a manga artist. So, you're not going to own your computer eventually. That's that's what they're going to do. And I think that is the point. I think on some level I think the point is to make it so prohibitively expensive to buy or build your own computer that you're going to have to lease a computer or lease compute power from one of these major corporations.

[00:09:22]And once again, they lock you into a subscription model. That's what all this is about. You can't own your computer, get on the internet, just pay your internet bill, whatever. No, no, no. you have to lease your computer equipment and we're going to treat it like cable and you're going to uh have to purchase that equipment or lease that equipment and then all of your compute power, all of your storage, all that stuff is going to be online which a lot of people are doing already to their detriment and I think we're going to find out over the next uh couple of years why this is such a very very bad idea to have everything in the cloud.

[00:09:58]They said worse than the price hikes is the unsettling feeling that consumers are being gaslit by tech giants playing pay playing paying lip service to the gaming community while delaying product releases or peddling AI generated slot.

[00:10:09]That would be Nvidia's uh the hell is that thing called? The filter that supposedly upscaled games but basically just redrrew all the art. They said the gaming industry once a partner finds itself in the path of AI advances.

[00:10:23]uh they're talking they just have a bunch of stories here just talking about you know how the price of computers have have skyrocketed and components have skyrocketed. Uh we'll talk about this and this is what I think is going to happen eventually but I think it's going to be too little too late. Uh Microsoft reports are exposing AI's real cost problem. Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees.

[00:10:45]Yeah, this is actually a thing that is happening that we are going to see that a lot of these companies that are investing everything in AI. They're betting the farm on AI, they're going to find out that the AI is more expensive overall than just hiring a human to do it. And it's it's less competent than hiring a human. I I do believe and I've said before and I know I have to keep restating this because I'm not anti-AI. I'm not even pro AAI doing everything. I I fully believe in competent humans using AI as a tool, but it needs a babysitter. Even the most advanced AI models out there are making stupid mistakes because it's not good enough. And I think investors are going to look at this and they're going to be like, "Okay, we just spent a ton of money. You just spent a ton of shareholder dollars on what exactly?"

[00:11:39]you know, it's an AI model that can't even get basic facts and math right. I mean, come on. So, this come from Fortune, and this is where I think it's all going to go. I think I think the bottom is going to fall out of this notion of AI doing everything, and they're going to panic, start hiring humans back. They're going to start dumping all these components on the market. I think they're going to flood the market. So, if you wait a couple of years, I mean, if if they don't try to rope you into leasing your computer equipment, maybe you'll be able to maybe you'll be able to build a gaming PC pretty cheap. I don't know. Uh, Fortune has this. Microsoft Wh Microsoft reports are exposing AI's real cost problem using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees. He said, "Microsoft reportedly began cancelling most of its direct Cloud Code licenses, according to The Verge, instead of moving engineers toward using GitHub Copilot CLI. That comes 6 months after the firm first opened up access to Claude Code, encouraging thousands of its developers, project managers, designers, and other employees to experiment with coding. The tech became popular fast. Perhaps too popular, the scale at which employees use it now is prompting the firm to reverse course on a tool its own engineers had come to rely on. Yeah, this is probably why Windows 11 is such dog right now.

[00:12:51]It's all vibecoded. Canceling claw code licenses won't affect Microsoft's foundry deal. Um, they have a $30 billion commitment to purchase Azure compute capacity. Microsoft isn't the only company scaling back its internal AI use. They're finding out it's not as good as they thought it was.

[00:13:08]They said uh Uber's CTO told the information in April that the firm had already burnt through its entire 2026 AI coding tool budget in just four months.

[00:13:17]That comes after the company had actively incentivized adoption through internal leaderboard ranking systems. So they wanted everybody to use AI.

[00:13:24]Everybody started using AI and now they're like burning through credits. Is that what's going on? They said the reports may throw cold water on the bets tech uh the bets tech biggest firms have placed on technology while some cling to the promise of of AI. uh having a renaissance or revolution, the cost of adoption is proving a stubborn bottleneck. These developments also suggest the economics of replacing or augmenting human labor with AI may be more complicated than some early forecasts originally implied. That echoes what Brian uh Kadenzaro, vice president of deep learning at NVIDIA said in an interview with Axios. For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the cost of the employees.

[00:14:03]And Enthropic didn't respond to fortune.

[00:14:05]Microsoft didn't provide a comment. Uh yeah, so they said it's emerging paradox. Cheaper tokens, bigger bills.

[00:14:12]Yeah. So they're building all these data centers. They're gobbling up all these components and they're finding out that the AI is not as good as they thought it was. Actually, I'm going to say not only is the AI not as good as they thought it was, but they're giving a flamethrower to a monkey, right? They're they're basically all these companies think if they just throw AI at their existing employees that they're going to make it sing. They're going to be able to use it really well. And that makes about as much sense as setting up grandma with Photoshop. Like here, grandma, you've got Photoshop now.

[00:14:44]You can you can make, you know, worldclass award-winning photographs and she's not going to know what to do with it. And I think that's happening with a lot of these employees. They're like, "Use some AI." Well, if they're not anti- AI, they may they may not understand how to prompt it to get it to do what you want it to do. They may not understand you have to have checks and balances. You have to double check the work. They may not understand what the machine needs to maximize the output.

[00:15:11]And for that, you really do need um somebody who thinks like a coder because the machine is is is a machine. It's very very literal. So you have to really be very very specific as to what you're looking for. And just like coding, if you're, you know, off by one character, it can screw the whole thing up. It it is kind of that way with AI, too. It doesn't it doesn't get jokes. It doesn't get it. You know what I'm saying? Like you have to be very specific. And I think that people are doing rolls and rerolls and rerolls and re-rerolls. And so it is costing them a lot of money. So maybe maybe the components will come down. I just think it's very funny that uh all these media outlets are like, "Yeah, gamers are getting screwed, aren't they?" It's like, "You guys were trying to screw gamers for years." I mean, not literally, but you you really were throwing shade at gamers for years.

[00:16:00]Now they're like, "Look, guys, you know, Nvidia hates you, too." It's like, uh, anyway. Anyway, I'm going to wrap this one up. Uh, just a very interesting turn of events. Uh, I would just hang tight.

[00:16:11]I think the cost of components are going to come down, uh, within the next 6 months. That's just my personal opinion.

[00:16:17]Uh, please subscribe for more pop culture news, views, and rants. We'll talk later.