Gaming Consoles Keep Getting More Expensive. I Finally Stopped Caring.
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Every few years the internet has the same meltdown. The new PlayStation costs too much. The new Xbox costs too much. Games are $80 now(soon to be $100!), RAM and memory prices keep climbing, and everyone's mad about it.
I get it. But I gave up on consoles after the Switch and the Xbox One, and honestly, it's not for the reason you'd expect. It's not really about the price at all — that's just the excuse that made it easy.
I'm Not the Gamer I Used to Be
I'm a PC gamer at heart, but the truth is I don't PC game all that much anymore either. What I really don't want to do is sit in front of the TV with a controller for two hours. That's movie time in my house, not gaming time.
Somewhere along the way I moved on to handheld retro gaming — right now that's an AYN Odin Portal 2 — and it just fits how I actually live. Gaming stopped being an event I plan my evening around and became something that fills the dead space in my day instead. A waiting room. A few minutes before an appointment. Fifteen minutes on the couch when I don't have the energy for anything else.
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We all have busy lives now. Nobody has three free hours to dedicate to a single-player campaign the way we did at seventeen. So my gaming shrank down to fit the gaps I actually have — and I like it more this way, not less.
So Let Them Raise the Prices
Once gaming stopped being the main event, the console math stopped mattering to me. Go ahead and charge $400, $500, $600, heck make it $1000 for the next box. It doesn't matter, because even $400 is too much for something that would mostly sit under my TV collecting dust.
I've bought exactly one game at the full $80 price point in my life. Never again. Steam has more good games under $20 than I could finish in a decade, and every year AAA publishers feel more like they're running a money grab than making a game — day-one DLC, battle passes, deluxe editions, ads, the works.
So here's my policy now: if a big release eventually makes it to Steam at a real discount, great, I'll play it. If it doesn't, that's fine too. I don't need it. There's always something else.
It's Not That Gaming Got Worse — It Got More Expensive
Those are two different problems, and only one of them is actually mine to solve.
The industry can keep chasing bigger budgets, bigger price tags, and bigger subscriptions. Meanwhile there are retro handhelds, Steam sales, indie darlings, and entire back catalogs of genuinely great games sitting there at a fraction of the cost — and none of it requires me to camp out for a console launch.
I didn't fix this by finding a cheaper console. I fixed it by admitting gaming isn't the centerpiece of my life anymore. It's something I do in the cracks between everything else — and once I stopped needing it to be more than that, the whole "consoles are too expensive" conversation just stopped being my problem.
