Should I give up gaming because it's too expensive?

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I have a couple modern games, within the last 2 years, and I'm afraid of having to give up gaming specs if I wanted to buy a new computer, I still live with my parents, and the economic conditions so far have been tough for all of us to deal with. What can I do to substitute gaming?

Gaming (at least on the PC) isn't necessarily expensive; in fact when considering use cost averaging, it can be cheaper than many other forms of entertainment.

Take advantage of sales, check out older or open source games, ones with large modding communities, or genres which are less demanding on hardware and have higher replayability. A prime example of this would be Nethack, or any of the many open source roguelike games out there. New triple-A, big studio FPS/action titles which require hardware from the future are all too often overpriced and undervalued for their cost, I've found, and generally when the myopic focus on graphical candy is removed, they're all largely the same anyways, and have terrible value-to-cost ratios when DLC is considered.

I probably average $5 per game spent on Steam. Wait for sales and Humble Bundles.

The thing is, computer games might be cheap, but the hardware investment for computer gaming is massively expensive...

My gaming computer is probably finally coming to the end of it's useful life...

I have a gateway fx6800-01e [click].

It was one of the best values in gaming computers in January of 2009!

I paid $1100.00 for it. Over the years I upgraded the OS for $100.00, memory for $200.00 and the video card for another $200.00. That's a grand total of $1600.00.

So, I've gotten about 6 years out of my investment for a hardware cost of about $267.00/year.

If you wanna play current games, I'd say switch to a console. It's definitely cheaper in the long run if you consider the costs of hardware.

Gaming on PC is only expensive if you need the latest video hardware. Most games are coded to run on pretty old hardware because they'd limit their market share otherwise.

Remember, even an Xbox One and PS4 are way behind what modern PC specs are in hardware.

^^^ As I proved in the above post, that simply is not true.

Even a midrange computer will cost more than an Xbone or PS4 (at $350/$400) yet either of those consoles is guaranteed to give you 5 or 6 years of being able to play current games...

Even games like Wasteland 2 and Rome Total War II make are unplayable on my 3 year old Toshiba laptop ($600) (which runs games like Fallout 3 and Arkham Asylum just fine).

If you REALLY consider hardware costs, consoles are a much better value.

Don't expect laptops to have any gaming longevity; few can even run modern games at high settings the day you buy them, their form factor doesn't allow them to have very powerful (and hence heat-generating) components.

I refuse to pay $60 for games so I can't speak about (or even understand) getting games immediately on release when I can get them for 50-75% off in 6 months. If you want games on release then forget about 'gaming on a budget' because paying full retail is not gaming on a budget. Computer hardware is not massively expensive; if you're buying a retail computer then, again, you're already outside of being budget-minded. Doing things 'on a budget' requires you to be clever, do things yourself instead of paying others, and often being patient and waiting for the right moment to spend.

Visit http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/wiki/builds if you want to see what it actually costs to do this.

Okay, build me a gaming computer for $400.00 or less that's guaranteed to be able to play current games for the next 5 years with NO UPGRADES.


Some of those plans on reddit look too good to be true... and the fact is you cannot directly compare console specs to PC specs because the games are very different. PC games are always more demanding on hardware.

Those builds might be adequate for now, but I doubt they'd have a very long lifespan. If so. then I should be able to squeeze another 6 years out of my rig.

Welcome to building your own computer and why you never buy retail again once you do. All of those parts are clickable links, and their prices as well as the outlet the price was grabbed from are listed, leaving you zero reason to believe they aren't legitimate.

There is no console magic that makes raw compute performance in a console worth more than in a PC. A bad port may run poorly on a PC for the express reason that it was a bad port. Xbox One and PS4 both use 2x AMD Jaguar CPUs running around 1.7GHz per core, both have 8GB of RAM, both use AMD GCN-based GPUs. These are not magic devices that do something miraculously different like Sony and Microsoft love you believing, they're the result of contracts with AMD to tweak some of their architectures to their liking and sell them a bunch of chips for cheap. None of these chips of which come close to the fastest AMD has to offer. They're priced around the same as a mid range (self-built) PC because that's what they are: mid range PCs in special cases.

They're guaranteed to run the games made for them for 5-6 years because those games will not be taking advantage of new tech that PCs get access to (this is why PC versions of games often come with higher resolution textures and upgraded effects). If you have a PC with the performance of an Xbox One then you'll have to pull those detail sliders back and use the same texture resolution that the Xbox One uses. And it will run its games as long as the Xbox One does, as long as you keep pulling the detail sliders back - because PC games are going to keep offering better visuals to keep up with their better hardware, you'll just be stuck using the Xbox One-equivalent detail levels. Which is what you'll be stuck with if you play on an actual Xbox One, too.

There isn't much left to say here but good luck.

I'm in the same situation. Staying with my parents and I've sold my XBox 360.

I have some old computer parts laying around and I feel my only option is to embrace Retro gaming. Seriously, talk to any local PC Shops to see if you can get a bargain system or even bargain parts to put one together.

I have an old full size tower with 3 hard drives plus an ATI graphics card I got from a friend who runs a PC shop. I may be able to play some decent web based games, retro games, or free Linux games.

You could try to look at some older games. They are cheap and you don't need a high-end pc to play them.
The website www.gog.com offers lots of older games.

on steam, most games can be had for under $10, if you are willing to look around and wait a bit.
also, specs aren't all that important. i have a 3 year old laptop (3G free ram, shared vid memory, 2.3GHz duocore), and i can still play 70% of games released last year (on low settings, and having occasional freezes when scene-loading, but still).

PC gaming doesn't have to be expencive.

actually, if you step away from big AAA games, there are many indies and side-games from big studios, which have spec requirements of "meh, you're good" and a price of "well, free is cutting edges"

in my gametime, 80% of the time i spend is on non-AAA titles, which are cheaper to buy and cheaper to run then the big games, and more fun as well.
some of them ("this war of mine", "the binding of isaac") could even run on my phone, statwise, and i got them for about $4 each.

This thread reminds me of this:


http://xkcd.com/606/

There are a lot of good games out there that don't require breaking the bank.

I've been gaming since the Genesis (Sonic!) on various platforms. It gets expensive, even just on consoles. As I've gotten older I've had less and less money to spend on video games it seems. But that doesn't mean I stopped gaming. There are some great indi games, as mentioned. Flash games can be surprisingly addictive. Also exciting are the free ol' skool dos games now being emulated online. (ex: http://www.classicdosgames.com/online.html).

These days I play Ingress (free) so my gaming device is my phone.

Three things. One, X-bone and PS4 aren't going to last five years before the next one comes out. Quite litterally, with all that hype, I would have been smarter keeping my xbox.

Two, I don't think you should have spent so much on that computer. 1600 dollars is a ton. As for what I have now? Pavilion, works great. Currently priced at $500. When this one dies, guess what I'm getting. Either that, or I'm finally sucking it up and building my own. I'm betting against that.

Three, nobody ever talks about the Wii U, which has pretty much made itself a monopoly on platformers and other unique light games. It got very high ratings. Now, with smash, we have a game that probably will last quite a while. Maybe. I'll tell you in a year.

I'm not sure what you'd be playing. I can play Mass Effect 3 on my netbook if I so choose. It's not optimal, but I'd never have to give it up if for some reason I needed a new PC and it had to be a $2,000 one that I can't afford.

Your mileage may differ, but I think you might be overestimating how hard it is to play video games both on a budget and with a weak-ish PC. There's a lot of grey area between flash games and an expensive gaming rig. Try to differentiate between what's actually necessary and what's people having a hard-on for nice hardware and big price tags.

Why not play game system emulators?