Unless you’ve been deliberately avoiding tech industry news, you’re likely aware that component costs have skyrocketed since 2025. GPUs and SSDs that would have ordinarily been manufactured for consumer-grade products, like gaming rigs and personal computers, are being gobbled up in massive quantities by the generative AI industry. Demand, supply, et cetera. Gamers on a budget (like yours truly) are finding themselves increasingly priced out of one of their favourite hobbies – all so that out-of-touch CEOs can brag about their “token spend,” and kids in university can scroll on Instagram instead of writing their term papers.
The newly released Steam Machine (with performance benchmarks no better than current-gen consoles, I might add) retails for an eye-watering CAD $1500. Meanwhile, Microsoft plans to increase the price of its flagship console yet again, and Sony executives (who also raised the price of the PS5 earlier this year) recently warned that they “do not intend to sell hardware at significant losses.” It seems quite likely that – barring the AI bubble bursting within the next year or two – the PS6 and XBOX Helix will both retail for well over CAD $1000, which feels almost unfathomable.
It would be very easy for me to sit here and rage against generative AI for doing its damnedest to ruin yet another thing I love, but that’s not what this blog is for; I’m here to write about the things that make me happy, or find a positive spin to throw on stuff that would otherwise bring me down. And so, while other gamers are out there panic-buying PS5 Pros and working out how many vital organs they can sell on the black market to afford the next generation of consoles or GPUs, I’m here reminding myself that I have a massive backlog of games that run beautifully on the hardware I already have.
Gaming industry executives are undoubtedly hoping that the current component shortage will lead to plenty of knee-jerk FOMO purchases. They want us all to drop CAD $1,100 on a PS5 Pro right now, just in case prices rise soon (and you better believe they will – those data centres don’t pay for themselves). They probably read articles like this one and salivate at the mouth a little. I, for one, am not going to give them what they want; I’m going to use the gaming hardware I have until it stops working and cannot be repaired.
My gaming hardware is not impressive, by any means. I have an XBOX Series X, a base M4 Mac Mini, an old entry-level gaming laptop, and an even older iPhone Pro Max. Even so, I am still able to get consistent 60-100+ FPS on a plethora of amazing games set to high or ultra – more games than I could ever hope to play in my lifetime, at that. Can I crank up reflections and ray tracing on the latest resource-heavy games released this year? Will I be able to enjoy 150+ FPS on some major triple A game coming out in 2028? Of course not, but that doesn’t really matter to me quite as much when I think about all of the amazing older games that I haven’t had a chance to play yet.
As a great case in point, I recently picked up the following new-to-me games during the Steam Summer Sale:
- No Man’s Sky
- Hades
- Returnal
- Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart
… and all of them run extremely well on my Mac Mini and my RTX 3060-equipped gaming laptop.1 They’ll probably keep me entertained for the rest of the year or longer, at one-tenth the price of a PS5 Pro. And if I happen to lose interest in them before the year is out? Well, I still have plenty more awesome games at my disposal.
I’m not telling anyone what to do, but if you’re on a tight budget and the recent price hikes have freaked you out, I encourage you to at least consider taking a good look at your backlog before making a fear-driven hardware purchase. If current-gen games (or whatever games you like to play) still run well on your existing hardware, consider raising a certain finger to the greedy CEOs looking to profit off of this situation by squeezing the absolute most out of what you have before you upgrade. There have been so many great games released over the past decade, and I doubt you’ve played every single one of them. I certainly haven’t!
The situation royally sucks, for sure … but we can weather this storm without making big hardware purchases we can’t really afford (or can’t stomach, if we can afford them) during these dark, AI hysteria-fuelled times. Chins up, everyone, and happy gaming.
Footnotes
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With the following caveat, of course: no ray tracing enabled, and a mix of medium to high texture / shadow settings. ↩