Episode 145 - Did COVID kill gaming? (Oh, and we bought a Steam Machine...)

This week on the Solid State Podcast things get a little… real. We know we talk about a lot of topics on this show, many of them relevant, timely technology stories and others… not so much.  This week, it couldn’t get more relevant. It couldn’t be more timely. And it honestly couldn’t… suck much more either.  See, one of our favorite corners of the industry, Gaming, is now long past a “state of flux”. You could be forgiven for describing more as in a state of free fall.  That’s not to say money isn’t being made… have you seen Nintendo’s Balance Sheet lately? But not all is well in the digital village, and the stakes are getting higher almost daily for some of gamings biggest names.  Studio upheavals, large scale layoffs, and fundamental near-tectonic shifts in how we buy, possess, and quote-unquote “own” our literal games are all changing in faster-than-real-time with genuinely no end in sight.  Prices continue to shift in a direction only “positive” for the chip makers themselves, and at the end of the day this has not-so-quietly graduated form nuisance, to concern, to existential threat to the state of the game.  Call me crazy, but picking up the physical cartridge of Goldeneye sitting next to me and slotting it satisfyingly into a Nintendo 64 has never felt more like comfort food than now. As always, we hunt for the silver linings on this show. Let’s see where this one is hiding…