“Too broke to play PC” is a vanishing argument IMO. People have been saying that forever, to be fair, but given how bad Xbox and Playstation have gotten I don’t anyone who’s actually into gaming purchasing a new one today. Maybe used, that might make sense if it was really cheap.
A budget gaming PC can check out at slightly over 600 now. PcPartPicker has two recommended builds priced right at 600, though honestly there might be even cheaper ways to arrive at that level of perfromance. Compared to 300-400 for the less garbage Xbox, and there’s not much argument to lock someone into the xbox’s ecosystem vs something you can upgrade for much less.
Now I think it’s a different matter if it’s a hand-me-down or given for free. There’s no reason not to do that.
I gave my last console away and got a friend of mine into gaming, then helped them build a decent PC when they actually wanted something new.
600 is already paying too much if you’re a patient gamer. Sure, if you really wanna play Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones, then get a 600 dollar rig.
OR, you could get a shitbox for super cheap and play:
Factorio, Hades, Myst, Skyrim, New Vegas, Starcraft 1, Metal Gear, Halo Combat Evolved, Dead Cells, Hardspace Shipbreaker, Superhot, Among Us, VTM Bloodlines, KOTOR, Assassin’s Creed, Antichamber, Carrion, Cult of the Lamb, Frostpunk, Deep Rock Galactic, Subnautica, Powerwash Simulator, Outer Wilds, Borderlands, Darkest Dungeon, Doom, DOOM, Rimworld, XCOM, Terraria, Minecraft, SOMA, Half Life, Bioshock, Oregon Trail, Tomb Raider, Planescape Torment, Deus Ex, Civ V, Mass Effect, Spelunky, and Portal.
There are literally thousands of good old games, and literally thousands of good modern indie games. And the thing about a PC is, you can actually play old games. How many Xbox original games can you play on the Series S other than Halo? On a shitty PC, you can play 90% of all the games ever made, and that’s including 90% of the best games ever made.
Absolutely agreed. I have nothing but love for good old games, and you can’t even buy hardware that was as bad as the stuff that those games premiered on. Well, maybe you can but you’d have to be trying very specifically to get them. There aren’t a lot of fresh athlon x64’s and 7600 gt’s rocking around out there 😉
Also, Minecraft is about 40% of my playtime and can run on basically anything as long as shaders are disabled. I remember hosting smp servers on hardware that was already old at the time, it was still the most fun I’ve had in a game in nearly two decades. Good fucking times honestly, I miss em.
I think if someone’s new to gaming the best thing they can do is get a crappy desktop, play all the classics, and then when they find they’re really hyped for a game their system can’t handle, just buy a 5 year old graphics card and install it. Easy peasy, dirt cheapy.
What people think of as the necessary hardware to play games these days isn’t. It’s only necessary to play the 0.01% of games that are new AAA releases with poor optimisation. And guess what? Those games all suck shit anyway!
I am of the firm opinion that computers have been good enough to play nearly anything you could want to play for 10 years. Except for Factorio megabases and intensive simulations. But first person shooters? Platformers? RPGs? We’ve reached the limit of what computing power can do to make a game more fun. And we reached it a long time ago.
“Too broke to play PC” is a vanishing argument IMO. People have been saying that forever, to be fair, but given how bad Xbox and Playstation have gotten I don’t anyone who’s actually into gaming purchasing a new one today. Maybe used, that might make sense if it was really cheap.
A budget gaming PC can check out at slightly over 600 now. PcPartPicker has two recommended builds priced right at 600, though honestly there might be even cheaper ways to arrive at that level of perfromance. Compared to 300-400 for the less garbage Xbox, and there’s not much argument to lock someone into the xbox’s ecosystem vs something you can upgrade for much less.
Now I think it’s a different matter if it’s a hand-me-down or given for free. There’s no reason not to do that.
I gave my last console away and got a friend of mine into gaming, then helped them build a decent PC when they actually wanted something new.
600 is already paying too much if you’re a patient gamer. Sure, if you really wanna play Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones, then get a 600 dollar rig.
OR, you could get a shitbox for super cheap and play:
Factorio, Hades, Myst, Skyrim, New Vegas, Starcraft 1, Metal Gear, Halo Combat Evolved, Dead Cells, Hardspace Shipbreaker, Superhot, Among Us, VTM Bloodlines, KOTOR, Assassin’s Creed, Antichamber, Carrion, Cult of the Lamb, Frostpunk, Deep Rock Galactic, Subnautica, Powerwash Simulator, Outer Wilds, Borderlands, Darkest Dungeon, Doom, DOOM, Rimworld, XCOM, Terraria, Minecraft, SOMA, Half Life, Bioshock, Oregon Trail, Tomb Raider, Planescape Torment, Deus Ex, Civ V, Mass Effect, Spelunky, and Portal.
There are literally thousands of good old games, and literally thousands of good modern indie games. And the thing about a PC is, you can actually play old games. How many Xbox original games can you play on the Series S other than Halo? On a shitty PC, you can play 90% of all the games ever made, and that’s including 90% of the best games ever made.
Absolutely agreed. I have nothing but love for good old games, and you can’t even buy hardware that was as bad as the stuff that those games premiered on. Well, maybe you can but you’d have to be trying very specifically to get them. There aren’t a lot of fresh athlon x64’s and 7600 gt’s rocking around out there 😉
Also, Minecraft is about 40% of my playtime and can run on basically anything as long as shaders are disabled. I remember hosting smp servers on hardware that was already old at the time, it was still the most fun I’ve had in a game in nearly two decades. Good fucking times honestly, I miss em.
I think if someone’s new to gaming the best thing they can do is get a crappy desktop, play all the classics, and then when they find they’re really hyped for a game their system can’t handle, just buy a 5 year old graphics card and install it. Easy peasy, dirt cheapy.
What people think of as the necessary hardware to play games these days isn’t. It’s only necessary to play the 0.01% of games that are new AAA releases with poor optimisation. And guess what? Those games all suck shit anyway!
I am of the firm opinion that computers have been good enough to play nearly anything you could want to play for 10 years. Except for Factorio megabases and intensive simulations. But first person shooters? Platformers? RPGs? We’ve reached the limit of what computing power can do to make a game more fun. And we reached it a long time ago.