One of the most prominent features of this year’s spate of graphics card launches—from both AMD and Nvidia—is the pricing issues they’ve faced. Due to various factors, GPUs that launched at modest MSRPs are selling with price tags several hundred dollars beyond.
Though some newer and more affordable cards are bucking the trend, like AMD’s Radeon RX 9060 XT, most gamers are simply being priced out by the latest GPUs. Anyone looking to upgrade is likely having a hard time, and a new study by Liquid Web suggests these prices are sending gamers toward cloud gaming in greater numbers than ever before.
Liquid Web (admittedly a cloud hosting company) polled 1,000 gamers of various ages and backgrounds on their recent PC upgrade interests and intentions. Some of the results are quite stark.
PC gamers are being priced out
Over half of all polled gamers said they had been so affected by price hikes and scalping on GPUs that they’d been forced to delay—or even cancel—their PC upgrading plans altogether. In fact, 43% of respondents said that life expenses (e.g., rent and bills) had forced them to skip graphics card purchases. You have to imagine there’s a lot of crossover there.
Foundry
That’s no surprise considering the sky-high graphics card prices we’re seeing. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 was supposed to sell at $2,000, but it quickly rocketed to over $3,000 at most retailers. Even much-more-affordable cards, like the RTX 5070 Ti and 5070, ended up retailing for hundreds of dollars north of their MSRP in the weeks following launch.
The downside of rapidly rising GPU prices isn’t just that PC gamers miss out on next-generation gaming experiences—it disillusions them to the idea of upgrading at all. Among gamers who were ready to upgrade, 39% said they would wait at least another one to two years to upgrade their graphics cards, while a further 37% said they’d run what they have into the ground and only replace it when it dies.
Then again, maybe by that time they won’t feel the need to upgrade anymore. Liquid Web’s study also shed insight on gamers switching to cloud gaming, where upgrades aren’t dependent on hardware availability or retail pricing. And there were an impressive number of respondents who were keen on the idea.
Will the cloud replace hardware?
Cloud gaming has come a long way over the past decade, and today it’s a relatively solid alternative to native play. Geforce Now, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus—they all offer relatively affordable options for playing large libraries of PC and console games without needing to own the proper hardware… or, in some cases, even the games.
As of this writing, cloud gaming is far from replacing local gaming. There are a number of factors as to why that is, but for the gamers in this study, it’s mainly due to latency problems. 62% of respondents (mostly Millenial and Gen Z) said they would switch to cloud gaming full-time instead of playing on their own hardware if latency were “eliminated.”
Unfortunately, that’s just not going to happen. While modern hardware and networking is fast, there’s just no beating the physical immediacy of local rendering on your own machine.
However, when the question was asked more broadly of respondents, a sizeable number (42%) said they’d skip upgrading their graphics cards if “their needs were met” with either cloud gaming or AI upscaling. That’s a much more achievable goal for cloud providers who want to deliver a premium remote gaming experience.
Around 20% of Millennial and Gen Z gamers believe that high-end GPUs will become less essential in the next three years because of cloud gaming and the growing improvements to AI upscaling like DLSS and FSR. Meanwhile, nearly 60% who are still holding out for a GPU upgrade to improve their gaming experience.
I’m not entirely sold on the idea of AI upscaling being everything, but frame generation has made some impressive leaps lately. If Nvidia keeps its focus on AI and can’t figure out how to keep its GPUs in better stock, we may all be relying on more cloud and AI features before long.
