I upgraded from my 15 year old PC to one of the new Mac Minis at Xmas last year, thinking that I would be fine for gaming with my Xbox / Game Pass, and I would “skip a generation” on PC hardware. I have a small Steam / Epic library, but everything that didn’t work on MacOS, I had a Game Pass version of.

Fast forward a year. Xbox shit itself, RAM and GPU prices / 2026 outlook are dismal, etc etc

What’s my best option going forward for gaming? The only option I see right now is cloud gaming like GeForceNOW, but it seems like such a ripoff.

Any advice?

Edit- a lot of people are fixating on GamePass. I canceled my GamePass sub when the price went up. I no longer have it.

  • pyrinix@kbin.melroy.org
    13·
    2 days ago

    I don’t know what I can tell you.

    I’m one of those patient gamers, where I’m just happy I finally have a machine that can play about 89% of the games I have to throw at it. Moreso happier that it can confidently run PS2 emulation, something I’ve been chasing for years to have a machine that can do, to own anyways.

    I think you just need to sit down and contemplate to yourself what you want out of a machine. It’s not a good healthy mindset to be fretting about upgrading all of the time. I mean, you made a huge leap already going from 15 years to what you have now.

    Also consider that, there will still be games released that look graphically demanding and everything, but will require maybe a 1060 GPU, just as an example. Probably 8GB of RAM. It’s only the AAA stuff that wants everything to be tip-top shape. Don’t chase those.

    • mohab@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      I played +400 hours last year and most demanding game in my library has a GTX 1050 minimum requirement. There’s much more to gaming than yearly AAA releases.

    • AnchoriteMagus@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      51·
      2 days ago

      This is honestly the healthiest take, there are just a lot of games currently out that I want to play but have no way to.

      Space Marine 2, KCD2, Stalker 2, etc etc etc

      It’s just been a good year to be a single player gamer, and I wanna get in on it. 🤷‍♂️

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        3·
        1 day ago

        The good news is that single-player games tend to age well. Down the line, the bugs are as fixed as they’re gonna be. Any expansions are done. Prices may be lower. Mods may have been created. Wikis may have been created. You have a pretty good picture of what the game looks like in its entirety. While there are rare cases that games are no longer available some reason or break on newer OSes with no way to make them run, that’s rare.

        With (non-local) multiplayer games, one has a lot less flexibility, since once the crowd has moved on, it’s moved on.