It really makes me worried to be fair.

I'm not one to subscribe to conspiracy theories, I try to think myself as someone who can process information in an objective^1^ , level-headed, reasonable (scientific) manner. Occam's razor and all - and pretty much every theory fails these simple tests of logic.

(^1^Objective in thinking, not in opinion. Opinions are by definition subjective)

But I can't help coming back to the "forced no local computing" theory that's been going around for about two years, where people theorised that the entire DRAM/NAND/chip shortage is just a ploy to move computing power away from ownership by people and towards corporate hosted services.

Which is obviously dumb because what company would say "you know what, B2B is enough for us, why should we sell for B2C?", what company would axe half its market just so the other half can sell a service instead of a product?

Especially when you consider some of the heaviest computing dependent things: gaming being the foremost leader, followed by various other 3D rendering requisites (from artistic through engineering modelling, physics test frameworks for about a dozen major industries that use them indirectly, including construction, aerospace, radio technologies and so on), compute heavy processing of data, hell, code compilation or even complex map rendering...

But then all of a sudden the big gaming giants began faltering. Xbox had three layoffs from Xbox and a new one is rumoured as they're "restructuring" the department from gaming-focused work to 'digital media creation'... Sony is doing their best to lose customers, and Nintendo... well they didn't change a bit.

Every single major gaming studio/publisher seems to be running straight into the forest of dicks with a wide open mouth. And it can't just be greed and stupidity. Some companies doing this, I'd agree, but all the major ones, at the same time? This looks more and more like an intentional attempt at destroying the primary consumer market for high end computer hardware. Destroy the demand, wait 5-10 years, restart game studios (consolidated into 2-3 megacorps of course), and sell games as a service. No ownership, no modding, no piracy, no need for "loud and hot local hardware", just a display and a controller. Wet dream of business execs...