My sons and I will not buy *ANY* video games or PC hardware in 2015. NONE.   Watching the whole 8chan thing today after a weekend with the grand-childs has made me really think about what a "consumer revolt" is. This is not a game to me.  This is a very serious event that gave me hope that my hobby was worth fighting for.  I had hopes that we were going to band together like when we all locked arms and fought the Jack Thompsons and Pat Robertsons who called us every name of evil just for being a gamer. Last year my sons and I spent over 8500$ on video games and peripherals.  Yes, really... 300$ of that was my flight stick for Elite Dangerous and my eldest son got his 144Hz monitor for example.  We were planning on upgrading our PCs as well this year, roughly 2K$ each machine, and new monitors to replace my 8 year old screens; there is no reason to do that if we are not buying new games.  That is over 12.000$ US that is not going into PCs and PC gaming this year.

I really want to play The Witcher 3; it can wait until 2016.  I really want to play Cities Skylines, but I can wait. I have enough of a back catalog that we can take the time and finish games that we may not have played in a while.  We also have online games that we can play together without buying anything new. Exploring 10.000 star systems in Elite will take months alone and we can now form wings and play together. No more Humble Bundles, no more GoG sales, no more Steam sales, no more hardware purchases.  I have spare PCs and parts if stuff dies so I can get by with no new hardware either.  And if the PCs all die? I'm almost at the point of not caring anymore.

I guess you could call us the "whales" of the video game world.  We spend a lot on the hobby we love.  And we do love this hobby.  Honest we do.  Two sons work in tech because they got into video games and wanted to learn everything about how the back end servers and network interacted.  One of my daughters is a STEM graduate and I credit video games with her love of the maths.  

Maybe what the hobby needs now is a crash that burns it all down so we fans can build it back up.  I am not going to retire until I am 70, so I have more than a half decade to go and I can sell rental property if there is a bigger crash than just video games.  I will survive a crash, will you guys?  I ask the creators that watch these boards: can you survive if your customers get fed up and go elsewhere? Can you survive a crash like in 1981-83 when video games became an industry of bad shovelware products?  Or do you need people like us buying your product?  Are you going to allow the "gaming press" to keep insulting the people who buy your goods, who pay your bills, who let you live your dreams? 

Or maybe I will find a new hobby that does not treat me as the enemy.  Once you get some money, and I am not at all rich honest, the number of people who show up with their hands out is near infinite.  Looking back at the last few years is almost painful. The industry is acting like I am a bad person for wanting to buy and play games that they create!  There are other industries and hobbies that will appreciate my money if video games can't get its act together.

I've been here since the 70's when a pong machine showed up on base and I am dangerously close to walking away from the whole hobby.