*Sorry for the lateness of this post I wanted to post this last week but life has a way to happen. hope you like this*
As the holiday season comes into vision, one naturally draws
their attention to the custom of giving and receiving gifts in the spirit of
Christmas. This experience can be met
with a number of different emotions; from having the best idea for a trove of wonderful
gifts accustomed to each person to having no idea and finding yourself mass
buying a selection of DVD’s and other media.
I kind of sit in a mix of these mind-sets where I have an idea of some
nice gifts I’d like to get for people, but limited funds to truly make it
happen. This has been the case for a
couple years, but the gifts in question have been able to add a little
something special to the occasion; like a nostalgic piece from childhood or
framed photo to immortalise a moment in history. I've gotten a certain joy out of these
experiences and I've noticed a similar action when it comes to my spending in
the PC gaming space.
I have wanted to build a new PC for a number of years now
but due to financial commitments this has been pushed to the side. My current build is a mix of year one
university parts and year two upgrades, putting the general age of the machine
at around 6-7 years. As you may imagine,
it has a long start-up time of ~3 minutes and there are many, many games that
cannot be played well let alone even run.
The most ‘intensive’ games that I've played on this machine have been
Witcher 2 (minimal spec ~15-20 fps) or Far Cry 3 (minimal spec 25-30fps), but
I’m still getting a lot of enjoyment out of my time spent gaming. Utilising a number of power options from
software like Game booster (which is called something else now in its new
update I can’t remember), tweaking the config files (with thanks to
pcgamingwiki for some of that) alongside the collection of new titles not being
graphically intensive, I've been able to continue to broaden my gaming scope
while not breaking the bank with a new build.
On the subject of costs, these tiles in question have
generally been in the £15 or under bracket (with some of the cheapest being
like 89p!) which has allowed me to avoid the £40 new releases from the AAA
developers which in the past I would be buying up on release. Of course, I have the massive sales given by
online storefronts like Steam, GoG and Humble store; but it’s surprising how
far you can get on little or no money. On
top of this, there is the wide range of free to play titles that offer gameplay
with no upfront cost, allowing the consumer to try and consider whether they’d
like to play more and possibly invest money into the experience. Over the past two years, my most played games
have been dominated by the free to play space, with Dota 2 and Warframe taking
the second and first spot respectively. Both
these titles have clocked around 1000 hours from myself (well, according to
steam stats but in game losses about 10%) which in the past games which have
hit this ‘milestone’ come under the mmo genre like World of Warcraft or Guild
Wars 2.
This section of my gaming time has been an interesting
review into the price vs. amount of content on offer which is of course highly
subjective. £15 for a 4-6 hour game like
Transistor can be good for some and inadequate for others; alongside a full
price yearly release like Call of Duty can be justified via its multiplayer
content to some and for others holds little interest from an innovation
stance. For me currently I have a rather
tight budget on gaming expenses so expensive titles aren't really viable, but
from this it’s allowed me to be more ‘investigative’ in finding interesting
gaming experiences for little or no cost.
One could consider this an ‘invention brought out of necessity’ kind of
mentality, but of course in a more relevant manner.
One last thing I want to discuss on the subject of gaming
habits via spending is that of a very small, but useful self-generated income
for games particularly via Steam. I have
taken time to sell trading cards for the games I own as well as items from free
to play games I don’t have an interest in keeping. Although most items sell for an extremely
minute sum of 10p or less, they can add up overtime and give you a nice little
wallet on the side to pick-up a couple games when they go on sale. Being able to sell Dota 2 cosmetics for £1 to
£10 has been a nice maker and as such paid for this passing year’s summer sale
purchases, which in turn got new cards to recoup some losses (and so on and so
forth…)
I hope you find this an interesting perspective into the
thoughts of gaming on a budget and that maybe someone finds this useful to get
a couple more games from this season’s sale.
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