"These price increases have multiple intertwining causes, some direct and some less so: inflation, pandemic-era supply crunches, the unpredictable trade policies of the Trump administration, and a gradual shift among console makers away from selling hardware at a loss or breaking even in the hopes that game sales will subsidize the hardware. And you never want to rule out good old shareholder-prioritizing corporate greed.
But one major factor, both in the price increases and in the reduction in drastic “slim”-style redesigns, is technical: the death of Moore’s Law and a noticeable slowdown in the rate at which processors and graphics chips can improve."
While blaming anything and everything on “capitalism” is disingenuous, it really does have to do with a lack of competition in the space. None of the incumbents have any incentive to really put much effort into improving the performance of gaming GPUs. PC CPUs face a similar issue. They’re good enough for the vast majority of users. There is no sizable market that would justify spending huge amounts of money on developing new products. High end gaming PCs and media production workstations are niche products. The real money is made in data centre products.
I mean, when the definition of economy can be “how the species produces what it needs” then the answer to a problem is probably capitalism even if that answer explains very little