That's because most of them are playing F2P video games on their mobile devices.

Even then I knew they were all still going to buy them.

Back in the early 90s I would walk into a store, buy a game that came in a box with a manual, take it home and it was mine.

I bought the 1st Civilization like this. I still have it. No Internet needed.

That's the way it should be. All the online, dlc, mini boxes, group play, create online accounts.....fuck all that shit.

At least it is still being updated and just happy to hear it hasn't gone dark like most other Early Access titles.

Yeah they're making steady progress on major updates, and releasing patches for bugs and tweaks in between.

And even today's potato PCs can run old AAA titles just fine.

I got shadow of mordor on a huge discount and it still barely felt worth it.

I'm a younger millennial and bought just under 2 years ago. At like peak interest rates... Other than cost of houses what would a crash mean to the economy anyway?

Uh, in a few words:

Great Depression 2.0, potentially worse.

The dollar has lost roughly 10% against all other currencies, because we are a debt laden nightmare that is either going to or beginning to default, going to not be the world currency / favored safe asset nation for bonds.

And we produce basically nothing tangible, we import a lot, so... everything gets more expensive.

Also we functionally just fired all our construction workers and farmers via ICE raids, so food goes up in price a lot, probably shortages, ie, famine... and we can't actually build any new houses or warehouses or office buildings or anything without much higher cost, from both imported materials and higher labor costs...

Oh right and the dollar tanking generally means oil, gas goes up in price, so anything involving logistics is now considerably more expensive.

Oh and basically everyone in the bottom 2/3rds by income distribution is in massivr amounts of debt, so, garnished wages, reduced consumer demand...

Yeah, I could go on, but I am quite serious when I say this could actually be worse than the Great Depression.

... I hope to god you didn't buy in roughly the lower 1/3rd of the country, almost all of those areas will be uninsurable within 10 years due to more frequent and more severe climate/weather events.

SoCals gonna burn down, Florida's gonna sink/melt into the ocean, get washed out by hurricanes.

Possibly the only possible bright sidd is that if you have significant stock investments of some kind, those might 'melt up' to roughly keep track with the devuation of the dollar, so you may have a chance at at least treading water there...

... but basically everything else is going to be a shitshow, business can't afford to pay the wages that would be necesssary for a worker to survive, amped up to 11... rents will probably start to trend down after a while though, as housing values nose dive.

Or maybe they'll just say you need to have ridiculous income level to qualify, but we'll give you 3 to 6 months of free rent.

They tend to do literally everything other than just lower prices for as long as they can.

I live in the UK, but our economy seems to generally follow the US except without any increase in productivity for over a decade and wages are trending towards minimum wage.

Ah. Well, as you can see, I am most familiar with the US economy...

but uh... broadly speaking, ya'll did the whole Brexit thing, and as best I am aware off the top of my head, ya'll are a bit more economically intertwined with the US than most of the rest of the EU...

So, as the US collapses, that'll disproportionately affect the UK as compared to other Eurozone economies, the financial / currency / bond market situation in the US will 'contagion' over to the UK faster, as will demand collapse for material goods and services.

But, I'd have to look over UK econ data in detail to be more specific than that.

Out of curiosity, can I ask what you approximatelty paid for the house in the UK?

One weird thing that could start happening (or intensifying) is that as the US dollar devalues... is that people/corporations with mostly USD will start trying to buy homes in places that they expect will have relative currency appreciation compared to the USD... basically, slow or long term currency arbitrage via homes as mainly financial assets.

£230k which is on the cheaper end, got a small bungalow.

A fair few people here already dislike Londoners buying property and driving up prices because they earn more than the local population can. Tourist destinations get it particularly bad. I think a few parts of Wales have increased council tax (similar to property tax) for second homes that are left empty. An empty house doesn't contribute to the local economy.

£230k is approximately $315k...

Yeah, in the US, that's significantly on the cheaper end as well, broadly speaking... i think what you call a bungalow is roughly what we'd call a starter home... but the problem in the US is... we don't really build those anymore, the construction companies can only turn a profit by making larger homes, that are also built to very shoddy standards.

That and the only areas with $315 or lower as a median home price are quite poor, with terrible economies and no reasonable transportation options... and the US largely murdered remote working after the corpos realized it would make their commericial office values collapse.

US median home sale price, over the whole US, is about $425k as of May, about £315k.

Maybe that will change after the whole housing market crashes, but that level of specificity is way too hard to meaningfully predict.

As to a second home tax... yeah you would think this we be an obvious thing to do, to combat gentrification, or at least make it have more fair broad social impacts... but here in the States, nearly nowhere actually does it, and there are a ton of legal loopholes and bs you can do to get around it.

Instead, a lot of places actually encourage second homes with tax incentives and write offs for getting one... because... entrepreneurship, or something.

Oh my house was way below the median, in my region of the country the median house price was £385k when I bought. If anything bungalows are often seen as a retirement option as well because no stairs to climb. At the same price range we could have got a terrace house, but they were in worse areas of town and the gardens much smaller. This is small (60m²) but its enough, after that I would like to have some outside space too. Which is also fairly small but its still something, the entire property is about 150m².

We need more places to apply similar taxes to discourage houses being left empty. It won't fix the problem but its a step in the right direction. Rentals being left empty for long periods of time is also a problem, for both residential and commercial property.

Still working remote, not sure how long I will be able to keep that but I have had to refuse orders to start commuting more than once. Compromise agreement is offered and everyone forgets about it while we continue not going into the office more than a handful of times a year. They moved the office over 50 miles away which I am using as my (quite reasonable!) justification to not go in on a regular basis. If it remained local I could cycle in more often quite happily. Yeah in my area there are not the best job opportunities, but there is at least work to be done if you want to just take any job and its not like the pay makes much difference. In the UK we have comparably good minimum wage. I am on £26k (~£13.33/h) and minimum wage gets you £12.21/hour. So even if I just switched to literally any job I wouldn't be taking much of a pay cut and its actually cheaper than taking the train each day would be as rail is really expensive here.