Gaming Stagnation, AI Price Hikes, and Industry Shakeups: PC Building and Shooter News This Week

So once again, the boondoggle is always going to be this stupid upscaling that doesn't really do much.

And I think we've all kind of should collectively say just give us raw power.

It really does a better job than these machine learning AI upscaling.

It's just worthless.

But I think the main problem is that releasing it every year is not driving innovation, it's driving stagnation, which eventually will come to a head.

And I think it already has Village idiots or Fools because you cannot be this ignorant thinking that this will continue to happen.

Also, the AI companies are ignorant, stupider, ignorant, village idiots or fools because they buy RAM at premium prices.

Now we have Nvidia, who I don't know if I'll ever buy another GPU from them ever again because they're just awful with the consumer market now.

You cannot keep customers happy while screwing them over.

Hey there, glad you're tuning in to Digital Coffee Gaming Brew.

I'm your host Brett Dyster.

But before we dive in, get ready for a wild ride through this week's biggest gaming news.

We're talking about Razer bringing back their first mouse mansions in GTA Online, and AMD's latest updates to its GPUs.

Plus you'll hear about battles in Hell at Loose Vietnam, the shakeup with Col Duty releases, and why PC building is a nightmare right now thanks to insanely high RAM prices and a market that just feels upside down.

So kick back, relax and let's catch up on everything that's brewing in gaming.

Mmm, that's good.

And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Gaming Brew.

And I'm your host Brett Dyster.

And this week we're going to be talking about a slew of things with Razer bringing back their first mouse that they ever created, GTA Online, new DLC or update with, well, mansions you can buy, AMD launches their new drivers and FSR Redstone is also out as well and developer of Hell at Loose Vietnam kind of shows us a little bit more about what's going on with that specific game.

Looks very interesting as well.

And well, Activision is no longer going to be doing back to back titles from Modern Warfare and Black Ops series.

So it's not going to be Black Ops 6, Black Ops 7, Modern Warfare 2, Modern Warfare 3, it's going to be cut.

So it's going to be Modern Warfare 3, Black Ops, Modern Warfare Black Ops instead.

Also, CI Games, the developer of Lords of the Fallen, has released a new update and this is the final update for this game developer Asperian Media has delayed Deus example by the way, it's indefinitely so it should be interesting to talk about that.

And Battlefield 6 Winter Offensive update was released in, well, not going very well and then, well, Call of Duty titles are not doing so well as well for sales wise.

I'm gonna talk about that and then my final thing, we'll be talking about what is going on in the the PC building sector as RAM prices are through the roof.

GPU prices are still somewhat high depending on which one you get and also what the future of building a PC for gaming content creation is going to look like.

It doesn't look good for us unfortunately.

Thank you AI companies that don't have money and pretend they have money because they really don't have money anyways.

Let's get on the show.

All right, so first off, Razer is releasing a rebooted version of Boom Slang Sling Slang originally launched in 20 years ago, which was their first mouse.

The new one is going to have 45,000 DPI and 800Hz polling rate and optical switches with a lifespan of 100 million clicks.

The original mouse only had 2,000 DPI and a mechanical ball tracking with earlier versions featuring 1,000 DPI.

So we've come a long way since 20 years on the DPI but our screens have gotten higher resolution too in the 20 years.

So there you go on that one.

The new model is also wireless, includes a dock for next gen charging.

That's what they are claiming it is.

The design of the new mouse remains largely similar to the original with enhancements like the faux leather wrapped primary buttons and a nine zone Razer Chroma RGB lighting.

Razer is only producing little under 1500 or 1337 units for the 20th anniversary which will be uniquely serialized.

So get it as quickly as you can before the scalpers get it.

Because once the scalpers get it this is going to be inflated like no other.

So I don't really care to get it because I'm not going to deal with the scalpers anymore anyways.

GTA Online has released a new update title A Safe House in the Hills.

The update includes new luxury mansions for players aimed at those who have achieved high status in the game.

The cheapest mansion, the Tongof Estate costs 11.5 million in game cash which can be reduced by 2 million in certain missions are completed.

A Shark card which provides 10 million in game cash costs $100 or €75 in real world currency.

The most expensive mansion, the Richmond Villa, cost $118,770,500 in game cash with all the add ons microtransactions are not only way to earn in game currencies, players players can also earn it through gameplay though starting with zero may require significant effort and players have expressed that match prices are way cheaper than imagined and that's actually quite cheap because if you've been playing GT A online for since it's inception then yes it would be cheap if you're starting out.

No, it's not that cheap.

But hey, it's good news that they keep on updating this as we're supposed to eventually get GTA 6 but with all the issues with trying to buy a graphics card, trying to buy ram, it may be the last game we ever get.

I don't know.

It's cr.

It's a crazy time.

2025 my bingo card was not RAM prices going through the roof and that's really wasn't on that at all.

Thank you AI companies.

You are crappy.

All right, AMD has launched the Adrenaline 2512.1 drivers.

These drivers include support for FSR Redstone features.

The update features ML based upscaling support.

The drivers are specifically for the Radeon RX 9000rdna 4 GPUs drivers are available for download and the Redstone looks like it has done a better job than FSR3 in some areas and not as good in other areas.

From the videos that I've seen about this one, it looks like overall it does a pretty good job of upscaling.

Unless you're really zoomed in and you see kind of the ghosting and the artifacting from upscaling.

But even Nvidia has its own issues with upscaling artifacting as well.

So once again the boondoggle is always going to be this stupid upscaling that doesn't really do much.

And I think we've all kind of should collectively say just give us raw power.

It really does a better job than these machine learning AI upscaling.

It's just worthless.

Fake frames are worthless.

It's just numbers that don't really matter.

And it's really getting to the point of like they're just doing this so they can pack in CUDA cores or tensor cores or whatever cores.

AMD has me like look it, you get better performance.

It's like no, not really because the latency gets longer.

So yay and nay for this.

But just give us raw computing power.

That's always going to be the best.

For now Everything can change.

But since AI is still way off from actually being original, creative or not effing up spelling, it's still a misnomer.

It can do a lot of great things, but what it can't do is it can't create anything original.

All right, so Developer Expression Games has released the first gameplay trailer of Hella Loose by Vietnam.

The game is a hardcore 50 versus 50 first person shooter set during the Vietnam War.

In the follow up of its 2021 hell at loose, which is based in or inspired by World War II, players must rely on tactical teamwork to survive the game.

Hell at Loose Vietnam will feature six maps at launch.

Described as a mix of dense jungle, twisting deltas and open areas.

The game includes military helicopters that serve various roles such as troop deployment, fire support, reconnaissance and tactical drops.

Players can engage in naval combat with heavily armored vehicles including the US patrol boat and the pbr.

Maps contain tunnel networks built by the North Vietnamese army, providing strategic advantages for surprise attacks and troop movements.

Away from World War II, but should be interesting to see what they come up with if it's good or if it's not so Activision has announced it will no longer release back to back titles of Modern Warfare in Black Ops series.

This means not two of them at the same time.

So it would be Modern Warfare, Black Ops, Modern Warfare Black Ops, not Modern Warfare, Modern Warfare Black Ops Black Ops.

They're not going to do that anymore.

It follows decision for the lukewarm response of Call of Duty Black Ops 7 and the negative response to Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3.

The previous title Black Ops 6 and Modern Warfare 2 were well received.

Activision aims to drive innovation that is meaningful and not incremental and to provide a unique experience each year.

The company is committed to supporting Black Ops 7 and has released its first major content update, Season 1, which includes new content for all modes.

Black Ops 7 will be available for free for limit time on multi platforms including PC and various PlayStation Xbox consoles.

Great.

It's still not that good.

I completed the single player, I just was never interested with the multiplayer.

The end game for single player was interesting but not enough interesting.

There were zombies but I just never got to it because I just didn't really care about was a mediocre game with a very weird single player game that didn't really translate very well and that was a problem.

It was more about being an action adventure game than just a pure action Call of Duty game where you had boss fights with a lot of health and enemies just got or just became bullet sponges, which is another weird issue.

It just never really worked.

And so that's why a lot of people were like, you know what, I'm good, don't need to do this and I'm with them now.

Hopefully the new Call of Duty will be do a better job.

But I think the main problem is is that releasing it every year is not driving innovation, it's driving stagnation which eventually will come to a head.

And I think it already has.

And so what I think they need to do is to really look at and be like, look at we do have a really big franchise in title.

Why don't we just do two years for releases so we'll have a longer development cycle for the next game.

We'll also have longer content cycle for the current or whatever Call of Duty is going to be instead and you get the best of both worlds.

But doing one after another just doesn't work and I don't think it's going to continue to work.

I think people are a little frustrated with what Activision has done in the past and what it has is doing and Black Ops 6 is a prime example of doing too much and forgetting what the game's all about.

Don't really care about seeing American dad skins or rapper skins or anything like that.

It was a military shooter that you completely just went crazy with.

It wasn't didn't appeal to me.

I was like that's great, don't need to play this game.

I know they were scaling it back for this one, but it's like you guys should have known better and you didn't.

And so this is where we're at.

Alright, CI Games has announced the final update version for Lords of the fallen, which is 2.5, just hours before the sequel presentation at the Game Awards.

The game was launched in 2003 to mixed reviews, but improved player sentiment with major post launch patches.

The previous updates 2.0 and 1.5 were initially thought to be the last updates of the game, which was wrong.

And the version 2.5 update includes reworked enemy and boss behavior and adds a new difficulty option called Veteran Mode.

The creative strategist stated that the studio aims to prioritize player feedback and has made enhancements based on that feedback.

The update introduces new behavior and move sets for enemies and bosses, along with new rewards such as unique attack animations and a special breastplate for completing Veteran mode.

CI Games has promised to share significant news about Lords of the Fallen two during the game Awards, which is great.

I mean, I like to see A developer actually care about their games, not just no Man's sky, but also other ones and try to give significant updates to make the game last longer and have players happy.

And when you have players happy, they will more than likely buy the second game or the sequel or the prequel or whatever you guys plan or your new game if it's not in the same genre of it.

So I like that part.

I wish the game came out in a better state.

It is similar to Elden Ring, but not quite.

It does have its own style.

Now this game was a reboot of a previous game called Lords of the Fallen which was very Dark Souls like but instead they did it this way where they re launched it to a basically a brand new thing, new level or art design and everything.

And it didn't okay and then eventually did better because of all the updates that it had.

All right.

Were you looking forward to playing Deus Ex Remastered?

Well, I hate to inform you, but it has been indefinitely delayed, so the delay is intended to allow the team to deliver the best possible experience and meet fan expectation.

The game release date has been pushed back from February 5, 2026 and the developer will refund all preorders and express gratitude to fans for their patience and support.

This just looks like they're like, yeah, we need to really look at this and rework this because this is not looking good.

And everybody was complaining about it.

That looked plasticky.

Like it did look updated, but the, the human cyborg, whatever the character models just didn't look good.

It looked plasticky.

And that was people's main problems with the remastered version of the game.

Now the game itself, Deus Ex is a great game.

Hard game came out in the early 2000s and so you were never handheld or anything like that.

You really had to figure out how to deal with all of this crisis in the first part and it can get difficult.

You are advised to not really kill people, but knock them out.

And you can do that if you want to, but you don't have to.

You had choices and those choices led to good or bad outcomes.

But it was still great game.

So I'm glad that they're still doing the remastered version.

Unfortunately, we will.

We won't know when it comes out.

So Battlefield 6 released their Winter Offensive update and the update introduced new content and limited time events.

Unfortunately, the update caused significant gameplay issues affecting all platforms.

Specific problems include bugs in the Breakthrough and Portal modes and performance issues like stuttering on PC.

A main menu issue prevented some players from selecting and playing game modes the developer has postponed the one million dollar tournament series for Battlefield 6 due to these issues.

And the community update post has been released by the developer outlining known issues and planned updates before the holidays.

Yeah, it's not good.

I played it before the update and after and before the update it was fine.

After I've had issues where I got out of the game and just wouldn't go back to the loading screen or I switched characters to a recon and there was missing texture models looked very weird.

And the sound has gotten worse, which is weird because now I just hear it all and it feels like it's all close together, but it's not.

So it just was not a good update.

I think they should have postponed at least the updates to things a little bit farther down and just did the winter update.

But I applaud their willingness to try to fix issues.

The problem is that this created more issues than it actually fixed.

They do need to figure out the sound issue because it just isn't right.

And I think it's gotten worse overall.

But all in all, I still think Battlefield 6 is a good game.

It's one of the better optimized launches Battlefield games of the series.

And if they can figure out a better way of updating it without screwing everything up, it will still be a really good game.

But you can only screw up so many times and then people are like, I'm just gonna play something else because this is way too difficult to figure out and it's very annoying.

All right, moving on.

Call of Duty.

Now this is a heartbreak for a lot of you, but Call of Duty titles have been among the top selling games in the US for the past two decades.

Call of Duty Black Ops 7 has seen a decline in sales compared to Black Ops 6.

According to Alina analytics data reported by Game Industries biz, Black Ops 7 sold 401,000 copies on Steam in the first 26 days after its launch.

But while Black Ops 6 sold 2.3 million copies in the same period in 2024.

Oof.

That's not, that's not good at all.

That's.

That's way, way down.

That's.

That's really down.

And the fact that you had Arc Raiders and Battlefield 6 and Battlefield 6 sold really, really well on Steam.

We don't really know about the numbers of anywhere else.

It's easier to find Steam numbers than it is to find console numbers or even Battle Net because It was on Battle.net 2 or Xbox or any of the other ones.

Steam is a lot more forthcoming about its stats.

Video Game Insights reports that Black Ops 7 daily active users dropped to 18 million in November 2025, down from 36 million in December 2024.

Concurrent user counts for Black Ops 7 on Steam are currently estimated to be between 50,000 and 100,000 players.

So it's not as good or it's not as much as it once was.

This leads to what I've said before.

You missed what people liked about Call of Duty.

Yes, they like the spastic movement, the sliding, the slide canceling, the no scoping and that stuff.

But they also like it to be, at least from the skin perspective, a little bit more realistic to military shooters.

Not rappers, not Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, not Rick and Morty or American dad or whatever crazy thing Beavis and Butthead you can think of that detracted from it.

That's the issue.

The other issue is that Warzone has not been good for a while.

So new contenders can come in like Battlefield Red Sec and they can take market share away from you.

Plus, with Battlefield 6 actually being good and way better than Battlefield 2042, you actually have competition.

And then you have the release of Arc Raiders, which did amazingly well.

And people love it that people are like, you know what?

I don't really need to play Call of Duty.

It doesn't appeal to me anymore.

I'd rather go play these games instead.

So what you have is a dwindling player base because you didn't appeal to the player base.

Always appeal to the player base.

Don't do weird skins that really don't do anything for the player base.

Keep it to what it is.

Military shooter.

I know when the first skins came out Modern Warfare, it was Rambo and Die Hard.

That was fine because it still was more action movie esque.

And that was as far as you should have gone.

Once you started getting into the Beavis and Butthead and American dad thing, you went too far.

Once you started getting into Snoop Dogg and all the other rappers, you went too far.

Get back to what it was and that's how you will succeed.

Also, you gotta be innovative.

Make more destructible buildings, make it more tactical if you need to.

I don't know.

But you gotta figure out something.

Because Black Ops 7's single player was atrocious.

It was weird.

It didn't really belong in the Call of Duty game.

And that's the problem.

This has to be something that is Call of Duty.

I get that you want to try new things and find, but this one did not work.

I don't like Bolt sponges in single player games.

I don't like boss fights where I have to jump and do all this stuff that I don't care about.

Give me the Call of Duty experience.

That was not it.

I don't know if it was rushed or you just couldn't figure out something and you did this instead.

But it was not good.

Not one bit.

All right, so moving on to what in the world is going on with the PC gaming PC building industry.

We had Micron announce that they are no longer going to be well in the consumer industry anymore.

They're going to be just doing holy AI.

They have disbanded Crucial or basically done away with that company and it's over two decade of business.

They are done.

They are going to be all in on AI all the time.

We have Nvidia that seems to be like more cares more about AI than it does its consumer market because of the dwindling and very low quantity of GPUs that it has.

And so what is a gamer to do when it wants to build a computer?

Well, don't build it until, I hate to say this, until 2029.

Now most people are like, it'll bounce back in 2027.

I don't think it's going to bounce back that easy.

I think we're in for some real pain until a lot of these companies figure out all the fake money moving around in AI.

Because it seems like it's a lot of fake money is not.

AI is useful in some terms, but not useful on everything.

It can do great with repurposing your content.

It can be great with helping you cut things up.

It can be great with you directing it to create AI images, but it can't create anything original.

It often misspells a lot of words, can't spell correctly my last name for the life of it.

It's just not where it should be.

And a lot of these companies are overhyping it.

I know it gets better every time they come out with a new version of it.

But if you're solely an AI company, I highly doubt you're profitable in any sense of the word.

But we just have problems like you can't buy RAM at a reasonable price.

Everything is five times expensive than it was prior to June 2025.

GPU prices are going to go up after this month more than likely.

So you have that issue.

CPU prices may go up, motherboard prices may go up, all of it may go up.

I think the only things that aren't really going to go up is peripherals and that's hoping that they don't go up.

It just doesn't seem like a good time to build.

That's even after the pandemic.

And that was hard to do.

Extremely hard to do.

It was hard to find a cpu, it was hard to find a gpu and it's just not a good time now.

I'm hoping that the founders built in the United States will help this.

But my issue is, is that there's only three companies that build ram.

Micron, sk, Hynix, I probably mispronounced that.

And Samsung.

And Micron is third out of three.

It's last.

So it's not good when the three, the three players in the RAM space and one of them goes, I'm done, I'm not doing anymore.

We're all going into AI because somehow you think this industry is going to be forever profitable.

So here's a few things we have to consider.

One, higher ups at Micron are not smart.

They're more likely stupid, village idiots or fools because you cannot be this ignorant thinking that this will continue to happen.

Also, the air companies are ignorant, stupid or ignorant, village idiots or fools because they buy RAM at premium prices for God knows why.

Apparently no one told them how to actually try to wheel and deal.

No, we'll just buy them at a premium so everybody else suffers.

And so the ad companies are going to hate us, are going to have gamers hate them, which we already don't like them very much.

Now you really hate you.

We really don't like the RAM producers because they just don't produce enough for the consumer market because they get greedy.

And now one pulls out because, well, your money's not good enough, basically, is what they're saying.

I know they have a lot of PR talk in there and I did get a degree in pr, so I know when I'm getting PR talk to all of us know, but I really know when we're doing it and this is the time.

So here's my issue.

Once the bubble bursts, which it usually does, because every industry that is starting up, eventually it bursts.

Eventually we get down to normal levels and eventually businesses have to claw their way back into what they used to do.

Micron could have kept on doing the consumer market, but but had a primary focus on the AI market but not killed an entire business unit because it doesn't quote, unquote, make enough money for them, even though they make billions of dollars.

Or they could have focused in on that industry, made really good RAM for the consumer market and profited off that too.

It's not like the N word making money off us.

They weren't making enough money to them.

Now we have Nvidia who I don't know if I'll ever buy another GPU from them ever again because they're just awful with the consumer market now told their third party vendors to find their own VRAMs because they aren't going to do it anymore.

Care more about AI.

Really don't ship enough GPUs to help make a healthy market in the GPU space which is then hard to find any GPUs for them that isn't at MSRP or close to it.

So you have to buy from scalpers who highly inflate them.

Buy a 5090 that is ridiculously expensive.

There's no way most people are going to buy it or try to buy a 5080 and get as close as you can get to to that MSRP of $1,000.

Nothing looks good.

AMD has already said that they're going to raise prices.

Nvidia is not even going to do their super cards anymore.

I don't think AMD is going to do any new cards for a little bit until prices can come way down.

The Steam machine is probably going to be more expensive than it was going to be originally because of RAM prices.

So the best option for us is to wait it out.

What you have is what you have for two to three to four years and that's all you're going to have.

And you got to be content with it because either buy your GPU now or wait three to four years because there is no other option unless you want to buy inflated prices.

So like I said before, in a few episodes, this hobby is becoming ridiculously expensive which is not going to help the gaming industry whatsoever.

The more expensive it is to game, the less likely we're going to be buying games.

Even new games.

We'll be playing our old games because we know they work.

We know that we can play them on our system now.

If AMD can figure out how to make their 9070 XT really good for productivity and gaming, they have a really good shot of unseating Nvidia, maybe in their next version of their card whenever that comes out.

Right now there's no reason for you to buy anything really in RAM for a while.

Buyer GPU now and wait because right now it's not looking good.

Maybe your CPU by now.

There's a lot of good deals going on, but December is kind of the cutoff date for non inflated prices.

Because once that hits, I don't know what else is going to be inflated, but it seems like just about every little component is going to be inflated thanks to AI.

Thanks to these greedy companies, which, when it's only three companies, you gotta wonder what collusion they're doing with each other.

Because all of a sudden it's like, ooh, AI.

I mean, we've had AI for, since 2021.

All of a sudden all these AI companies need all these.

All this RAM.

It's looking a little suspicious.

I mean, it's like good luck trying to find any good RAM at any good price.

It's not 500 to $1,000 or more.

So what I think is going to happen is they want us to live in an AI world where we don't build our own computers and we're just told what to play, think, feel, taste, because that makes it easier for them.

But no.

I want my computer, dang it.

I want to build my computer, dang it.

Stop giving me overinflated prices.

You cannot keep customers happy while screwing them over.

And I feel like screwed over by especially Micron, which once I know it's made by Micron.

Nope, not anymore.

Screw you.

I don't know.

It's a weird time and I really wish it wasn't.

Since 2020 it's been weird times.

Like five years of weird and gaming has only gotten worse.

I think now is like the bright spot where we have a lot of good games coming out.

But still, I mean, it took five years for them to figure it out and now they figured it out a little too late.

We've got EA going private.

You have Ubisoft, looks like it'll be bought out.

And I mean the gaming industry is just consolidating like crazy because game.

Well, to them, games are getting more expensive to produce, but they're not producing it correctly.

They're being fools and so is the peripheral side of it.

So all we can do is wait, hope leveler heads or even wiser heads come to the forefront and be like, this isn't sustainable.

We get back to what it was, or at least close to what it was.

Because right now I don't liking this.

I want to get off.

I want to play a new game.

Well, what do you think?

Do you think I'm off?

Are you just as upset as I am about the prices going for PC components?

Let me know in the comments below.

But thank you for listening to Digital Coffee Gaming.

We really do appreciate it.

Please subscribe to this podcast on your favorite podcasting apps and join me next week as I talk about what's going on in the gaming news.

All right, guys, stay safe.

Get to not looking at any prices for PC parts.

I'll see you next week.

Later.