Since gaming has gained a lot of popularity over the past two decades, it can be very tempting to join the hobby and seek out a way to play the most popular titles currently available on the market. If you are a new player or a noob as gamers say, it can be quite a daunting feat to get into gaming, especially with all the options available to you currently. Whether it be the many consoles like the Nintendo Switch, Play Station 5, Xbox Series S, or the Steam Deck, it can be difficult to know where to begin. That much gets even more true once you realize the price tag of gaming is not that low and it can be quite expensive to get started. So let’s how you can play popular games even on a smaller budget.
So you’ve grown an interest in starting to game, maybe you’ve seen your favorite streamer play hours of Fortnite, or your favorite youtube spends days building marvels in Minecraft. Since you can’t manage to get Minecraft unblocked at school or find a way to run Fortnite on a library computer you sought out the most recent console or gaming computer and made a shocking discovery. Consoles themselves are hundreds of dollars and computers go for thousands upon thousands of dollars. This is of course without even considering the price of games themselves which are ever-increasing and slowly getting closer to the one hundred dollar price tag for a single new release.
Fear not! While many new games require extremely powerful machines to be able to handle things like PhysX and Raytracing, popular games have been developed with a different thing in mind. Accessibility! While accessibility often refers to making games for people with disabilities, in this case, we are referring to people with lower-tier machines. For example games like Minecraft, Fortnite, and Roblox all can run on less demanding specs by lowering the graphics and omitting certain aesthetic elements that could be very demanding on outdated personal computers. This means even your old laptop can run some very popular games.
What’s great with gaming culture too is that just because a game is old it doesn’t mean its irrelevant, some of the most popular games according to steam charts are all games that have been out for many years, which means they are games that require much less powerful machines to run. For example on steam charts we can see over seven hundred thousand concurrent players still active daily on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and six hundred and forty thousand players for Dota 2. Counter-Strike came out in 2012 and Dota 2 in 2013! The best thing about this as well is that these games are completely free! Sometimes it seems some of the best things in life can be free after all!
You might be looking to play some single-player experiences and enjoy some of the best games the industry has to offer. Thankfully if your budget is low you can always for one of the many seasonal sales which have become a staple of pc gaming. These sales often range from 5 to 90 percent off the price of some top award-winning games. So you have the opportunity to snatch up games like Cyberpunk 2077 at a stunning -50% sale! While it won’t allow you to play certain games on release day you will still get the opportunity to enjoy some of the best and most popular titles of the last decade at a much lower price than their initial release pricing.
As you can see gaming is a pretty democratized hobby and if you want to play a certain game there are always option to fulfill your gaming needs even if you don’t have that much money to invest in the hobby. Of course, a low-budget experience is much different than a high-budget one but the important is that everyone who wants to play gets to play something somehow. Gamers and developers alike are trying their best to make video games as available to all as possible even with the ever-increasing power of the new technologies that power the future of gaming and especially triple-A game development. In the end, the important is to find a way to play games your way and make fun of this hobby. You can always interact with the community if you need help adjusting!