// PC GAMER — GAMING
Embrace the great Tech Pause
It's a great time to enjoy the stuff we already have.
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What I've been playing recently instead of new stuff: Deus Ex (2000), Batman: Arkham Asylum, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Judgment, Armored Core 6: Fires of Rubicon, Halo: Combat Evolved.
Let's take a look at the scoreboard: A 1TB Steam Deck costs $1,000. A top-of-the-line gaming PC costs $7,000. A PS5 starts at $650, an over 50% increase from its launch six years ago. A modest hard drive goes for rent money. The RAMpocalypse continues unabated. The Steam Machine is a hard sell out of the gate. The reasons for the slow, suffocating death of the hardware market are well-documented on this website, but basically: it's greed again.
For the average person, the latest tech is so out of reach it might as well not exist anymore. It's hard enough to justify the cost of a decent computer with years-old components when every other part of life is more expensive than ever.
What do we do with that information? One idea is to keep talking about how much it sucks and hope it changes. A much better one, I think, is to refocus: Challenge the stranglehold that the "latest and greatest" has on our attention, and instead appreciate what's already in front of us. Embrace your mid PC! Become overly interested in controllers! Buy an emulation handheld! Get into the wonderful world of Linux!
Welcome to the great Tech Pause. It could be worse.
It's hard to mourn the accessibility of powerful hardware when the cutting edge keeps showing us how inessential it is. Generational GPU improvement has stagnated hard in the past five years—maybe since the pivot to ray tracing, even. Manufacturers now pitch us a future where every game looks so real it's boring—look no further than Halo: Campaign Evolved—and AI shovels slop into our eyes in real time under the guise of "better graphics."
For that privilege we're expected to accept shortage prices in quadruple digits. Kindly eat my shorts.
The mediocrity of the new is so profound that being stuck with "just OK" hardware is increasingly a savvy move. If you have an aging PC, or a four-year-old Steam Deck, or a solid laptop, then congrats: you already own a device that can play 40+ years of videogames, including most of the new ones. Everyone I know has a backlog the size of a phonebook, and if you're building one for the first time, sales are deep and constant.