Does anyone else hate that cheaply priced, well made, unpopular things are so hard to come by?

[Anonymous]

Supply and demand effect prices, so initially a good product becomes cheaper as the demand increases. But becoming popular also eventually reduces product quality over time as companies prioritize the new (less picky) customers over the original customer base that prefers quality. So it goes from good and expensive, to good and cheap, to just being cheap garbage.

I hate it so much! Its such a corrupt way to run a business.

[Sasquach]

If you want unpopular and cheap hit up garage sales. If you want unpopular, cheap, and novel hit up etsy.

It's real easy to find products that are neither popular nor mass produced. Absurdly so, the thing is most people call those types of products, 'junk' or 'trinkets'

[Asker]

I love garage sales and etsy for collectables and craftmanship quality goods. But I was more referencing how technology has gone down the shitter while the prices go up and up because they are popular.

During the 90s and early 2000s, you could get cheaply priced devices, software, games etc that offered quality experiences. Now games have microtransactions, everything needs internet to work, nothing is durable, and phones cost more than a gaming console despite doing less.

I know power has improved, but everything else is worse.

[Sasquach]

No, those experiences can still be found very easily. Games were just easy to produce back and customer expectations were always set low. Today it's the opposite, big studios can only bet on tried and true because customer expectations are too high; people want full realism in games, variable choices that lead to variable endings, etc. Nobody wants the cookie cutter game where you follow a scripted progression on graphics a middle schooler could have crafted

[Sasquach]

itch. io has what you want

[Asker]

Its really hard to respond to that because there are too many things wrong with what you said and too many angles to start from.

Itch. io kinda sucks tbh.
Steam is better for game quality, but still not ideal because it needs internet and it forces updates and has no physical media and has microtransactions, dlc, etc.

Games are easier to produce than ever, and customer expectations are at an all time low, and thats actually part the problem.

Too many companies aren't doing in house engines, and customers buy games (and systems) that rip them off (and they don't even own a physical copy of them). Graphics have also stayed the same for about a decade or longer now, so the upgrade culture for more power is wasted on things that look like older games but feel dumbed down and bloated.

Modern consoles lack user freedoms, and modern PCs cost too much for little to no improvement each year, and both require internet to even work.

I want graphics that are better than ps5/pc/xbox series x (lying) cinematic trailers, on a 60 dollar physical game, with no paid dlc, no internet needed, and gameplay like ps2 action titles. And I think this should have released 10 years ago. But everyone in the industry just cares about disgusting amounts of $$$ and pointless bloat features that take up graphics budget and ruin the gameplay.

And thats just games, I could rant about phones, cars, refridgerators, air conditioners, etc. you name it, it got cheaper and then worse when becoming too popular. I want luxuries to feel like ACTUAL luxuries again.

[Asker]

Even modern furniture and houses are ugly, boring, fragile piles of crap.

[Asker]

I want the versions of high end devices before they were compromised for mass production. The ones only the rich could afford, and I want em cheap.