Edit: Re-read your question, you are talking about games in general. A Switch might be a good buy, straightforward and you can usually find people willing to play in person or online for the more popular games. The games are rarely on sale though. Highly recommend a pro controller if you go this route.

For PC, there’s basically never kernel level anti-cheat, only a few frankly not great games go that route.

As far as expensive goes, there’s a ton of great PC games you can get for less than $5 during steam sale. The initial buy-in is more for a maybe $1500 PC, but you will make that up after a few dozen games. If you know a PC gaming enthusiast, imply you would play with them if you had a PC and they might sell you an old rig for dirt cheap. I’ve sold a few that way for like $100.

Set-up is easy as steam is the only program you need and controllers are plug-and-play. If you are willing to risk a little work, I found Linux Mint as an OS really easy to install and use, and then it will be future-proof (unlike windows) as well as free. You may have to troubleshoot something weird, but their forums are super helpful.

There’s WAY too many good games to be worried about playing the latest most expensive cutting edge slop. A cheap gaming PC from the marketplace of your choosing and a new SSD is all you need.

Piracy is also generally very safe, if you find a certain reputable russian steam forum, they have a very strict vetting policy. If you’re that cautious about that sort of thing, you can always download the clean Steam files and apply the crack (drag and drop) yourself.

It’s the closest you can get to the source without being in the scene.

New consoles are expected after the RAM crisis, whenever that ends, but I believe you’re right about the futureproofing aspect. The consoles of today are capable of a LOT, the only thing that will get devs to stop releasing games for them is if Sony/Nintendo take a page from graphics card companies and stop selling them.

Portal is very nice, runs on my school laptop. (I haven’t really played a video game ever before)

I am wondering if Factorio is a good or absolutely terrible suggestion… I mean the basic controls are pretty simple, but there is also the risk you may never see sunlight again. But there is a free demo and it should run on fairly low spec PCs so wouldn’t need any special extra hardware.

Why would you need a separate device?

Install Steam, install game, click play, play.

This is an oversimplification, but the gist of how it works. This also assumes you know how to use a PC generally.

Ehh… I’ve yet to get a virus from pirating games. Only virus I’ve ever gotten was on my childhood PC when my uncle was watching some sketchy adult content. I was just playing neopets at the time, so I doubt it was me

Kernel level anticheat is mostly in MMORPGs, which is my preferred genre, though there are some games without it. Notably Final Fantasy XIV, and Guild Wars 2 have no anticheat in the client at all. It also depends on the anticheat how much I’m willing to put up with it. XIGNCode is a hard no from me, but nprotect, and easyanticheat are both whatever IMO. Pick your threat model though.

The most complicated game is Wurm Online, and that’s because there’s something going on with my desktop where it just. Crashes. Constantly. I can usually get it to stay on indefinitely after 8 restarts, but it’s annoying.

Consoles are only future proof if you consider that eventually games will stop being released for them, and parts will stop being made. Sure you’ll be able to play the games you already own on them forever, but… Also your PC will be able to run any game on them forever, at least until the hardware degrades, but that also goes for consoles.

If you want to go fully no DRM, GOG is your best bet for most games. Itch.io is also there, but it’s mostly indie games, which isn’t everyone’s scene.

Overall I don’t think of it as complicated, but I’ve been PC gaming consistently for… 25 ish years? I’m largely used to it.

1. I haven’t had a virus in recent years, and I’m pretty sure that the ones I had many moons ago were just the virus scanners being scared of a keygen exe. Just go with your gut and you will pretty much be fine. Use a sandbox if you want to be extra safe, but a separate computer is completely and utterly overkill.
2. Yeah true. But that’s only a select few games. Most indie titles forgo DRM altogether, and most titles that use for example denuvo remove it after a while (mostly after enough sales) for the free performance boost.

No one says you gotta play games coming out today.

If you only want to play single player, want it to be cheap, and have a great library of games to play… .Pick up a used PS2 or Gamecube. PS2 lets you play both PS2 and PS1 games, gamecube…if you can find a gameboy adapter for it for cheap, also opens up gameboy/gameboycolor/gameboy advance games. real versatile.

Should be able to find one used online/garage sale/classified for cheap. games are abundant, cheap, and amazing.

anything older is starting to get expensive, and anything newer will typically be always online/online drm checks/etc.

Especially true with how AI is absolutely ruining hardware prices atm, with ram costing as much as goddamn video cards.

Course, thats assuming you want to play on the actual hardware, setting up a retropi for SNES/NES/Genesis/ETC is also viable, bit more fraut trying to find the roms nowadays, though. is the best, most affordable option if you want to play PS1 or older, though.

It really depends on what kinds of games you want to play. The AAA industry is largely a mess these days, but it’s not like those are the only games that exist.

I built my PC on a modest budget several years ago, and it’s still overkill for my favorite 2D indie games. Setting up Steam shouldn’t be difficult, nor should downloading from itch.io.

I bought a Switch 2 at launch, and that’s pretty much just plug and play.

Emulation is a bit more tinker-y to set up, but it’s really not too hard to get a nice library of classics at your fingertips.

A budget midrange PC with good performance would still cost about $1,500. That might be expensive compared to a $700 console but put it this way - I built a flagship in Feb 2017 for about $3,000. When the Xbox Series and PS5 consoles came out in Nov 2020 they were raving about this measurement of power called Teraflops. My flagship had more power than these consoles and in most cases ran games better. As you may know those consoles haven’t been replaced by a new generation yet, so that build is still med-high quality.

In terms of raw performance a good PC is always the best choice. Choose a motherboard with built in wireless and you can use Xbox One >, PlayStation 3 > or any third party controller via Bluetooth. Buy a USB adapter and you can use Xbox 360 > controllers via RF.

Steam has a ‘big picture mode’ that can be set to turn on at startup - if you wanted you can simplify everything to booting the machine and powering up a synced controller - sofa friendly UI.

Multiplayer gaming is free. Heavily discounted games are more common. Pirated copies, as long as you choose the right sources (start with FitGirl), are top tier. Community-made mods that improve or fix games. GOG for DRM free copies. More control over data collection and updates. Offline/sandboxed games that think collecting your IP, age, device hardware and playtime is necessary for a solo campaign. Heroic Launcher for GOG and adapting DRM games bought on Epic/Amazon/Steam, Freesm Launcher for Minecraft.

Recently, AAA publishers have been so toxic that their employees suffer greatly and their released games have alpha-level bugs. They’ve become lazy, forcing always-online components and relying on post-release updates to actually finish the product or add more monetisation. These issues have started to appear on console releases too.

I’d highly recommend Linux (Mint with Cinnamon or Gnome) for a host of reasons, but it’s up to you - just know that Linux is often just as plug-&-play as Windows 10.

Regarding games with anticheat, most are designed for Windows so if you do go Linux, the games will be sandboxed pretty much and even if anticheat is unavoidable it can’t install to the primary OS. Regarding pirated games in the event you get malware from a bad source, I don’t know how bad it’d get so I’d recommend just buying the games again (GOG or Steam really is inexpensive, just wait for seasonal sales and wishlist everything you want).

Finally, the last good time to buy components was September last year. RAM is absolutely required to run a PC and its market price is thoroughly raped by generative AI server farms. You could build with whatever motherboard last supported DDR4 and save some money there, but GPUs are still 50% higher (relative to performance) than they were before crypto farms, SSDs are 100% higher than they should be, CPUs have spiked by 10% and rumour has it the corporations are going to suck up HDDs next, destroying possibly the cheapest component in computing. If you value value, keep this in mind.

Hey!

If you like retro games, there’s Batocera.linux for example. It comes with a lot of games out of the box, but you can add more ROMs of course. It’s just a bit of a process to get all the artwork for them to make things look nice and all.

Batocera.linux is an open-source and completely free retro-gaming distribution that can be copied to a USB stick or an SD card with the aim of turning any computer/nano computer into a gaming console during a game or permanently. Batocera.linux does not require any modification on your computer. Note that you must own the games you play in order to comply with the law.

I also find Wrath Of The Gods quite fun.

I’ve been playing on linux for almost five years now with steam through proton. It’s a compatibility thingy majigger that makes it so I can basically play any game I want through steam as long as it doesn’t have anti-cheat, which to me is a plus because I think that shit is downright disgusting.

PC is the most versatile, and IMO, the most future proof. Sure you can get a console that will be good for maybe five or six years, but my current system is almost 13 years old now (an old dell work station with a hole cut in the door so 1070Ti can fit inside) and it still works fine enough with most games. I couldn’t play Baldur’s Gate III or some of the newer games though. It’s basically a potato in that regard; however, it’s more than good enough for my favourite games like Deep Rock Galactic, Deadlock, Satisfactory, Slime Rancher 1 & 2, Factorio and whole bunch more.

An issue right now with PC is that the “AI” fad is increasing the cost of components like RAM and hard drives. So if you want to to get a PC I’d suggest waiting a couple of years or until the AI bubble pops, which should be a good show to watch at least. Valve is also releasing their own PC (the Steam Machine) soon, maybe. I think you’d be interested in that if the AI price hikes didn’t fuck their plans up too much.

Many of the larger studios that you’ve probably heard of were bought out by venture capitalists that then proceed to fuck shit up because, idk, efficiency I guess. This leads to the incomplete releases you often hear about. Anyway, there are a lot of smaller studios that are amazing; like Ghost Ship Games (Deep Rock Galactic) and Coffee Stain Studios (Satisfactory, Goat Simulator). Not to mention the probably thousands of solo devs that make games just because they want too (From Glory to Goo, Townscaper, Tiny Glade, Stardew Valley …).

It’s not just the flashy games you read about, there’s so many other games you can play that are often better in almost every aspect then the games from the larger studios, other than graphics for the most part. I really don’t like consoles because they are limited in what they can play, and often only last five to six years before games stop releasing on them and you have to buy an entire new system. Just my take tho. Again, look into Valves Steam Machine, it should be the best of both worlds. AFAICT prices look to be ~$950 - $1000.

If you want to pirate games check out Linux Crack Tips. I always forget how to link to communities… :s

Building a PC isn’t that difficult, but it costs a lot right now. Maybe just wait for the Steam Machine to be released and consider that.

Lol, boomer