Gaming is still a multi billion dollar industry, and touches into all the other aspects you mentioned as well. Losing out to AMD for Xbox/Playstation was definitely a costly loss.
>Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years.
Yes, marking up your consumer hardware by 4-5x to appeal to crypto miners surely does have an effect on your market. Arguably, AI saved them from a crash due to their over investment on Crypto/NFTs. It's not like gaming demand diminished this decade.
Gaming isn't THE way out. But it's one avenue to consider. It does seem like companies c. 2025 prefer to fall into the AI bubble, though.
I wonder what risks the bubble has for them. If they can sell every $30K AI accelerator they make right now, that might cause them to overextend, committing to up-front capacity or long term projects that are financed by the current spend patterns, or just neglecting other parts of their product line.
If the hype dies and they're back to selling 5090s to gamers, can they afford to pay those bills?
That's probably the saddest part. They can still pay thrd even pay off the debts from the bubble bursting just doing what they used to rely on.
But we know that won't be enough for shareholders and their stock would tank regardless. Because 2020's speciation isn't about having a reasonable long term portfolio. It's just extremely abundant pumping until you need to dump and pump the next trend. It's not enough these days to be a good, sensible business.
Historically the answer has been "no". When a company pivots to doing something that becomes 90% of their revenue, there is no way to go back to doing whatever the 10% was. Imagine NOKIA going back to manufacturing gumboots, which is how that company started out!