Why would component vendors allow shortages to continue indefinitely for the benefit of hyperscalers and AI companies, especially given what may be years of pent-up demand in other markets?

And why would the game industry, considered as a whole, want to incur higher costs to exclusively deliver its product in a way that provides less value to the majority of its customers, many who won’t be willing to pay the higher prices required to maintain similar profits?

Recompilation at most threatens platform exclusivity as a business model. Otherwise, it’s just piracy with extra steps.

At most, I expect to see already existing trends towards more live service components and microtransactions continue, with digital delivery only and a required online component in many cases, but with most if not all of the actual game code and assets hosted and running locally.

As for non-gaming applications, content creation and a software development are two examples where "cloud native" workflows remain cost-ineffective in many market segments in spite of hardware price increases, and will remain so as long as cloud providers continue to nickel-and-dime customers for IOPS and compute.

I don't know how much of a conspiracy that is. If the current trend of hardware costs keep rising to the point of pricing people out of having any real compute locally, and chip makers actively de-prioritizing consumer-grade memory, GPUs, etc, companies will (more) heavily push thin clients and streaming for everything.

I would have laughed at the thought a few years ago, but now I am slowly starting to adopt some of the viewpoints of American second amendment hardliners.

It's just unfortunate that producing a half decent computing platform is significantly more difficult than a rifle (and that in the case of said hardliners, the capital is backing them, here it's working against us).