Steve and the other members of the Gamers Nexus team are a pretty knowledgeable bunch. They’re also unafraid to pull their punches when covering the PC industry, as demonstrated by some excellent investigations. So at Computex, Adam Patrick Murray asked Steve: Is right now the worst time ever to be a PC gamer?
The answer is… yeah, pretty much. In Steve’s estimation it’s the worst time to buy and build a PC for gaming, at least in his multi-decade run of covering the industry. Between massive price increases enabled by Nvidia’s GPU dominance, pressure from the AI and datacenter industry, and general economic chaos from the Trump administration’s tariffs, it hasn’t been so expensive to buy high-end hardware for personal machines since the 90s.
And it’s not as if this is happening in a vacuum. Games themselves are getting more expensive as publishers push prices up to $80 for new titles, and the old “you’ll own nothing and be happy” situation is in full effect, notably with software and services. You can’t escape it by fleeing to consoles, either. For the first time in a long time, they’ve gotten even more expensive years after launch.
Steve’s advice if you’re feeling the pinch is to stick with what you’ve got. Unless you’re in desperate need of an upgrade — and as someone sitting on a GPU that’s nearly five years old, I’m not — you can just play new games on lower settings or maybe try to squeeze some more performance out of overclocking. There are other options like streaming, too, though that’s running into the service-over-ownership issue.
It’s bad out there, and not likely to get better in the short term. This is fun stuff, huh? Maybe you should watch our in-depth coverage of scented thermal paste as a palate cleanser. For more coverage of Computex and the rest of the computer hardware industry, subscribe to PCWorld on YouTube, and watch our weekly podcast The Full Nerd.