Playing new video games is expensive. Especially if you tend to play a lot of video games – like I do – and if you live in an inflation-ridden dystopia – like I do. Too often I’ve had the unpleasurable experience of getting interested in upcoming games, balking at the system requirements, getting sticker shock for the over $100 CDN price tags, finding out that they have intrusive DRM that borders on malware, and learning that the games aren’t even finished or good.
And this happens more and more with every new major release – to the point where AAA developers are coming out in advance of their games’ releases to say “Hey, this won’t run well” or “Hey, we’re gonna finish this one up sometime later.”
System requirements are also becoming something of a sick joke, with 30 series cards becoming the fucking minimum for many new major releases while those same games don’t run properly at the best settings on even the best graphics cards out there. Something is messed up here.
I think I’ve told this story before, but I’ll repeat it. My current “gaming” PC is a middling prebuilt thing from 2015 with a decent contemporary i7 processor and only a GTX 970 inside it. I bought it with the sole intention of playing Grand Theft Auto V, which proceeded to not even fucking load. That was my first purchase ever on Steam, and my first refund from Steam.
Luckily, I could use that PC for running emulators like PCSX2 and Dolphin, which wouldn’t run on any other computer I had. I also got tipped off to a game called Fallout 4, which for five years to me was kind of like Clown College was to Homer Simpson.
A photo of dubious origin which may or may not be an actual photo of my “new” gaming PC… or not.
Anyway, my point with all this is that my current 2015 PC cost me about $1600 back then, and took me over a year to save up for. There’s no way in hell I can even hope to set aside money for a new computer now, with my newfound hobby of spending money on frivolous luxuries like food and utility bills.
So it’s all I have for the foreseeable future. That, and my PS4. My PS4 is actually my only real hope for playing some new games that will be coming out, such as the next couple of releases in the “Like a Dragon” series. But when new games stop coming to PS4, I’m out.
So, it’s been an interesting, sometimes fun, but often frustrating ride. I came from a retro-gaming space, and it looks like I’m headed back there whether I like it or not. But that’s not so bad, because it looks like all the newest big budget games coming out from now on are going to be shitty soul-less cash grabs, franchise rehashes and reboots, or some combination of those.
rage quit lol