Business The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming? - Unless the AI bubble pops soon, gaming is going to change... and it won't be the same ever again.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3013044/the-post-geforce-era-what-if-nvidia-abandons-pc-gaming.html

Imagine it’s the year 2030 and Nvidia has just announced its newest RTX 7000-series graphics cards. But the cheapest of the cards is priced over $2,000 and the top model is nearly double that. The series offer minimal uplift on rendering performance, but they’re incredibly good at accelerated upscaling and frame generation. Plus, memory bandwidth is almost double over the last-gen models.

Let’s continue the hypothetical: Nvidia’s new xx60-series cards aren’t expected for months while Nvidia stockpiles enough defective GPUs. But don’t worry if you can’t afford these new cards or don’t want to wait. Why? Because GeForce Now offers the full upgrade right now for an “affordable” monthly fee, especially with an annual sub locked in.

I wrote the above as a nightmare scenario, but it’s odd how close it sounds to the launch of the RTX 50-series. It’s a history that seems likely to repeat and accelerate as Nvidia’s gaming division becomes an ever-more-minor side hustle to its AI initiatives.

Nvidia could effectively give up on gaming in the near future, and that might be the most financially sensible thing to do if the AI bubble doesn’t burst. But what would happen if they did?

Just follow the money​

The numbers behind my pessimistic prognosis paint a stark picture. Nvidia’s Q3 2025 revenue topped $57 billion. Guess how much of that money came from data centers? A whopping $51.2 billion. That’s just shy of 90% of its total revenue and represents a 25% increase over the previous quarter and a 66% increase year on year.

How much revenue do you think Nvidia pulled in from gaming? A measly $4.3 billion by comparison. That’s down 1% on the previous quarter, and that’s despite having the most powerful graphics cards available and with stock and prices being far more favorable than they were earlier in the year. It’s still up 30% on last year, but the difference in potential between data centers and gaming is staggering.



Indeed, gaming makes up less than 8% of Nvidia’s total revenue as of now, and although the overall income from gaming continues to increase, it’s miniscule in comparison to its data center take. Bullfincher highlights how quickly that’s changed, too: just a few years ago, gaming represented over 33% of Nvidia’s total revenue.

Where do you think it’s going to be in another five years? Assuming the AI bubble doesn’t pop as catastrophically as it could, gaming is going to become a tiny footnote on Nvidia’s balance sheet. Will Jensen Huang even bother doing gaming hardware keynotes at that point?



Nvidia might be the biggest megacorp in this space, but its contemporaries show similar gaming red flags on their balance sheets. AMD made just over $9 billion this past quarter, but $4.3 billion was from data center sales while only $1.3 billion came from gaming. That’s much better than last year—when data centers brought in $3.5 billion and gaming just $462 million—but data centers are still a far bigger portion of AMD’s revenue than gaming.

These numbers make a compelling case for giving up some interest and investment in gaming hardware development. It doesn’t mean they’re going to stop make gaming GPUs entirely. (Or does it?) But if you’re Jensen Huang facing off against shareholders who are demanding the revenue numbers go up as much as possible as fast as possible, what are you going to sell them on: a new gaming GPU that has historically low margins, or a new generation of data center hardware to feed into the accelerating AI bubble with untold potential?

You could even argue that Nvidia’s increasing focus over the past few years on DLSS and ray tracing over pure rasterization performance is an early sign of it putting its eggs in the data center basket.

A canary in the RAM mines​

The biggest side effect of all these new data center builds hasn’t been GPU scarcity, surprisingly. (At least, not to the degree we saw during the cryptocurrency craze.) Rather, it’s skyrocketing memory prices. RAM kits have increased in price by over 200 percent in some cases, making large capacity kits more costly than top-tier GPUs. Some modest RAM options are even more expensive than gaming consoles.

Consumer RAM is shooting up in price because all the major memory manufacturers are inundated with orders for data center memory, like HBM and LPDDR. Some have begun pivoting their fabrication lines to these higher-margin memory types, leading to shortages of NAND chips—and, consequently, shortages of consumer memory and SSDs.



Those shortages are making RAM and SSDs far more expensive. And yet, despite the increased margins and diminishing supply versus demand, Micron just closed its Crucial brand of consumer RAM and SSDs.

It was profitable, it was popular, it had a distinct market niche that served consumers and gamers for decades. But even Micron didn’t see the point of keeping it going when it could instead make heaps more cash from selling Micron NAND chips and server memory.

And if Micron is so willing to pull out of the consumer space due to AI-driven demand, how much more will Nvidia be tempted to do the same? What’s stopping Nvidia from reaching the same conclusion?

For further proof of this future, Nvidia is rumored to be cutting its gaming GPU supply in 2026 due to memory shortages. It’s especially notable how Nvidia appears to be cutting the more affordable mid-range graphics cards first, leaving ultra-budget and ultra-high-end lines intact for now. Is this just the first step in Nvidia leaving gamers behind?

Where things could go from here​

There are some intriguing comparisons to make between Nvidia and other big businesses that found growth and revenue in avenues that weren’t where they started. IBM went from being the name in computing hardware to one that largely runs in the background. It sold off its core hardware businesses and became a software and services company that’s still worth tens of billions of dollars. It recently spun off again, creating a separate company to handle IT services while the core business refocused on cloud computing and AI.

Nvidia could do that: spin or sell off its gaming divisions and license its GPU technology to that spun-or-sold-off subsidiary.


Notice the lack of graphics cards in this Nvidia promo image.

Perhaps Nvidia could even end up like Adobe. In the mid-2010s, the developer of Photoshop launched Creative Cloud and slowly pushed all its once-in-perpetuity software licenses into a subscription model that’s still going on today. Could that apply to Nvidia’s GeForce Now streaming service? It had 25 million subscribers as of 2023 and ran on GPUs designed for data center server racks. Nvidia could leave dedicated desktop and laptop GPUs behind entirely and pivot its gaming divisions into software/hardware-as-a-service firms.

If gaming goes a similar way to TV and movie streaming, it’s possible Nvidia could even pull a Netflix and slowly de-emphasize its DVD-like hardware business in favor of powering it all from the cloud.

Gaming won’t die, but it will change​

As much as this article is heavy on the doom, Nvidia is unlikely to exit gaming entirely. People want to play games and there’s money to be made there, so someone will keep tapping that market. But how that revenue is extracted may change—dramatically so.

Microsoft is already talking about making the next Xbox more of a PC/console hybrid. And with the latest Xbox consoles being the third wheel of this generation, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see the future of Xbox focus more on streaming games than buying/owning them. Xbox Game Pass already has over 37 million subscribers—that’s more than the number of Xbox Series X/S consoles sold this generation.

Nvidia could do something similar. Or it could spin off. Or it could stop making gaming GPUs entirely. The only thing we know for sure is this: when a gaming company starts making astronomical amounts of money due to AI-driven demand, it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t be tempted to dive head-first into an AI-first strategy at the expense of gaming.

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You all should check out the latest Tech Jesus video, he's dropping truth bombs left and right.

Gamers, we are cooked...

 

[Long Dong Silver 2025]

I would say someone will take the reigns from Nvidia and make game-centric cards, but this is globohomo economy we are talking about. What will happen is that every company will become cloud-centric to appease the beast systems faggots.

 

[Pattern Juggler]

Graphics cards stagnating hardly matters when graphics have stagnated. The promise of ray tracing simply hasn't come to pass, and Switch equivalent hardware is good enough for 90% of games anyway.

 

[The Backwards Man]

The bubble isn't going to pop because there is no bubble.

I just assume APU's are going to step up their game and replace the lower-end graphics card market.

 

[ZazietheBeast]

Looks like actual retro games are gonna come right back. Alot of old Snes, Genesis and PC games didn't require a fuckton of ram to even run. If anything, the problem of current year vidya is that so much games have become very bloated. In terms of storage space and memory capacity.

We need to go back to an age where you can run games with Pentium 4 processors.

 

[Ahriman]

I would say someone will take the reigns from Nvidia and make game-centric cards, but this is globohomo economy we are talking about. What will happen is that every company will become cloud-centric to appease the beast systems faggots.

It's quite hard to tell. In a way, this reminds me of the old 3dfx days.

I distinctly remember how they were untouchable, "too big to fail". Decades later and here we are, in a post-3dfx world.

 

[Zyklon Ben's Poison Pen]

Has there really been much difference between the 2000, 3000, 4000 & 5000 series? ooo 8K gaming wow ooo. I think the problem is that we can put more transistors on a chip than we can effectively use in a single PC and nVidia hit a wall and so found a new industry with a hunger with high density CUDA cores.
As long as there is demand there will be GPU's even if they become commoditized.

 

[Bonesjones]

Has there really been much difference between the 2000, 3000, 4000 & 5000 series? ooo 8K gaming wow ooo. I think the problem is that we can put more transistors on a chip than we can effectively use in a single PC and nVidia hit a wall and so found a new industry with a hunger with high density CUDA cores.
As long as there is demand there will be GPU's even if they become commoditized.

In terms of real performance there's only a less than 50% gap between a 1080 and a 5080. They use "AI" frames and ray tracing units to hide the lack of increase in terms of real gains. Part of it is hitting the wall in terms of what we can do with silicon and part of it is the increase in cost has made it unworkable to put out $1000 consoles and graphics cards to normal consumers. Most of them have been scalped by coin miners and now AI servers, so gaming consumers are an afterthought since a sale is a sale on paper, even if you are actively building a bubble. No vision by morons in suits.

 

[George Lucas]

This article is based on a numerical fallacy that Nvidia’s newfound revenue source makes the old revenue source worthless. That doesn’t align with reality in any way.

Even if Nvidia decides to axe consumer cards, they’ll just sell it off or make it into its own company. That’s still billions of dollars in revenue. It doesn’t just disappear. Hewlett-Packard grew exponentially when they started selling PCs, but they are still making calculators to this day, considered the best calculators by many people.

ETA: The Micron situation is also completely different. RAM is RAM. You can easily switch from one market to another virtually overnight. It’s not comparable to GPUs.

 

[Smashed & Slamed]

Oh no Nvidia is charging too much for their cards. It's too bad that nobody else makes consumer grade GPUs for lower cost.

 

[Bonesjones]

This article is based on a numerical fallacy that Nvidia’s newfound revenue source makes the old revenue source worthless. That doesn’t align with reality in any way.

When you make GPUs and you stop making a large percentage of one for the other, you sre saying the old source is worthless. Part of it is the post COVID video game industry falling apart and not driving sales any more, the other part is that they've created a circulation of nonexistent futures. Is this 2030 you own nothing and your happy? Or the idea they can create demand by getting ahead of the curve? You don't know till everything crashes or you are enslaved by robots.

Hewlett-Packard grew exponentially when they started selling PCs, but they are still making calculators to this day, considered the best calculators by many people.

You do know HP made electrical engineering test equipment for decades before they ever started with PCs. Guess what they don't do any more?

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Graphics cards stagnating hardly matters when graphics have stagnated. The promise of ray tracing simply hasn't come to pass, and Switch equivalent hardware is good enough for 90% of games anyway.

I can barely tell the difference between RTX on and RTX off. Only semi-recent game where it's obvious is Cyberpunk 2077 and that's just because the lighting is less shiny.

 

[George Lucas]

When you make GPUs and you stop making a large percentage of one for the other, you sre saying the old source is worthless. Part of it is the post COVID video game industry falling apart and not driving sales any more, the other part is that they've created a circulation of nonexistent futures. Is this 2030 you own nothing and your happy? Or the idea they can create demand by getting ahead of the curve? You don't know till everything crashes or you are enslaved by robots.

You’re implying that consumer card production is down, but it’s not. It’s still growing.

You do know HP made electrical engineering test equipment for decades before they ever started with PCs. Guess what they don't do any more?

HP doesn’t do it but the industry never stopped existing and the division that was sold off from HP is now a successful company. What’s your point exactly? Wouldn’t Nvidia spinning off its consumer offerings to a smaller, more focused, consumer-oriented company be a good thing?

 

[Bonesjones]

You’re implying that consumer card production is down, but it’s not. It’s still growing.

It is down. That's why they make dual purpose GPUs. They are following speculative markets because they are real sales until they aren't, which will kill the company. Not that they care because the top brass will ride their golden parachutes to private islands.

HP doesn’t do it but the industry never stopped existing and the division that was sold off from HP is now a successful company. What’s your point exactly? Wouldn’t Nvidia spinning off its consumer offerings to a smaller, more focused, consumer-oriented company be a good thing?

You mean the HP that was forced to split into two companies in 2015?

 

[George Lucas]

It is down. That's why they make dual purpose GPUs. They are following speculative markets because they are real sales until they aren't, which will kill the company. Not that they care because the top brass will ride their golden parachutes to private islands.

If they die, it doesn’t mean the whole industry will go with it. Did Atari dying kill gaming? What about 3dfx? I think the post-Covid gaming PC boom is simply correcting itself and will be fine. Hell, look at SNK. It straight up DIED. Arcades DIED. And somehow we still have SNK and arcades today, albeit not anywhere near as popular. But if you want to play in an arcade, you can do it today, despite it hanging off a thread twenty years ago.

You mean the HP that was forced to split into two companies in 2015?

Yes? What’s your point? Companies split and merge all the time. Originally you were arguing that HP stopped selling electronic test equipment. I showed that you’re an idiot and wrong. Yeah ‘HP’ stopped, but they just spun off the division as Agilent making the same exact stuff in 1999, and then Keysight split from Agilent and is growing and making money. It’s a different brand but it’s the same industry, the same product lines, and I’m sure many of the employees carried over across the rebrandings. That’s just how business works. IBM stopped making keyboards a long time ago, but you can still buy keyboards of the same spec and from the same production line as those old keyboards to this day. I have a Unicomp keyboard. Aside from some appearance differences it’s the same damn keyboard as the one I was using for DOS in the 80s and 90s because people still like the keyboards and buy them. If there is demand, the market finds a way.

It seems like you want to find patterns that show that Nvidia will kill consumer gaming and we’re all going to own nothing and be happy. Your assumptions are bad and stupid. When has ‘globohomo’ ever sucessfully gotten anyone to own nothing and be happy? It didn’t work in Russia. It didn’t work in China. There’s no way it’s going to work in America of all places.

 

[grump]

The annoying part is that theres an untold fortune to be made on regular consumers just sitting on the ground right in front of everyone ready to be taken not to mention sitting right on top of this giant pile is a ticket to becoming a beloved folk hero. But to take that mountain of cash right in front of you, you have to be someone able to marshal in the realm of billions of dollars to cross the velvet rope. Everybody else who can make it across the rope is racing for an even bigger mountain of money in the distance and has no interest in it.

 

[Bonesjones]

If they die, it doesn’t mean the whole industry will go with it. Did Atari dying kill gaming? What about 3dfx? I think the post-Covid gaming PC boom is simply correcting itself and will be fine. Hell, look at SNK. It straight up DIED. Arcades DIED. And somehow we still have SNK and arcades today, albeit not anywhere near as popular. But if you want to play in an arcade, you can do it today, despite it hanging off a thread twenty years ago.

Atari dying killed one form of gaming, the corporate driven profit above all else form. There was enough other companies in strong enough positions to fill that gap. We aren't always so lucky. Arcades are dead, there are no new game only arcades, there are retroarcades selling nostalgia and pinball and also beer. The market is nothing like it was 20 to 30 years ago.

Yes? What’s your point?

The point is that HP sold off their main division and then died. That isn't spinning off something and having two successful companies.

It seems like you want to find patterns that show that Nvidia will kill consumer gaming and we’re all going to own nothing and be happy. Your assumptions are bad and stupid. When has ‘globohomo’ ever sucessfully gotten anyone to own nothing and be happy? It didn’t work in Russia. It didn’t work in China. There’s no way it’s going to work in America of all places.

That's literally the goal. They said it years ago the year is 2030, you own nothing and you are happy. That's something they are actively working towards. They've been selling subscription services and gacha and anything else they can to get people to buy into the idea that they don't need to own or have control of anything they do, it can be better done by someone else. A service Nvidia actively provides.

 

[Pedophobe]

What about 3dfx?

Defeated on the field of business by a more capable rival (Nvidia) unlike Nvidia who are being driven out of the market by... Nvidia.

This article is based on a numerical fallacy that Nvidia’s newfound revenue source makes the old revenue source worthless. That doesn’t align with reality in any way.

It aligns with the way a lot of companies think. Abandoning a profitable market in favor of an even more profitable market is a recurring problem with modern capitalism.

 

[Maurice Maine]

Gaming's done for. The software sucks and the hardware is going back to pre 1990s level of accessibility.

 

[George Lucas]

Atari dying killed one form of gaming, the corporate driven profit above all else form. There was enough other companies in strong enough positions to fill that gap. We aren't always so lucky. Arcades are dead, there are no new game only arcades, there are retroarcades selling nostalgia and pinball and also beer. The market is nothing like it was 20 to 30 years ago.

You’re just desperately grasping at straws in a futile attempt to look like less of an idiot. The subject at hand is Nvidia killing consumer gaming hardware. What do either of those things have to do with the subject? I am showing how a company dying doesn’t lead to an industry dying. You’re just spewing facts that don’t form any coherent thoughts.

The point is that HP sold off their main division and then died. That isn't spinning off something and having two successful companies.

Bruh what are you even talking about? The electronic test equipment division at HP never died. It exists to this day as Keysight Technologies. Did you not read the fucking link I sent you? It has been in operation continuously since its founding. Most of HP’s other product lines also still exist: calculators, computers, printers, servers. What part of HP has died exactly? Those HP branded mice? You got me there.

That's literally the goal. They said it years ago the year is 2030, you own nothing and you are happy. That's something they are actively working towards. They've been selling subscription services and gacha and anything else they can to get people to buy into the idea that they don't need to own or have control of anything they do, it can be better done by someone else. A service Nvidia actively provides.

If that’s the case then the product will have to be better than what competitors can provide or the government has to literally force us at gunpoint to use it instead. Nvidia isn’t the one with the guns. Remember when Google was the big scary company of the day? What happened with Stadia again?