"Gaming is prohibitively expensive these days, you can't play video games for an affordable cost anymore!"

Ladies and gentlemen, the humble $200 Alienware Alpha.

Are you going to be able to play the latest AAA games on it? Can it run the latest graphics techniques like DLSS and ray tracing? No.

Will you have fun with the myriad of indie games and massive PC gaming back catalog, as well as emulation of a dozen retro consoles? Hell yeah!

This little guy was my first ever gaming PC. Jumped straight into modded Skyrim with it, lol. I still own one from over a decade ago and, although it has about the power of a PS4, that certainly doesn't prevent you from having fun with it.

There is a whole world of gaming just waiting for you to uncover it. Outside of the latest and "greatest" games getting shoved in your throat. And no, it's honestly not that expensive to get into at all. In some ways, gaming has never been cheaper. You just have to temper your expectations a little bit and you'll find so much joy.

@beardalaxy Those old Steam Machines, including that Alienware model, from over a decade ago deserve to be revived and replayed. The goal to play games on Linux (and also those small form factor designs) was ahead of the times, although the CPUs and GPUs were as spotty as the game support until about a decade later. Today, they mostly seem to run just fine for playing those indie games with some maintenance, and some of the parts can be upgraded since there's a few that are just rebranded ITX/ATX towers.

@berkberkman the alpha can even be upgraded to a certain extent, the gpu is soldered on but you can upgrade the CPU and RAM and both of those aren't very expensive at all. if you've got the r2 it even has that graphics booster thing so you can just hook up a full size graphics card to it if you get that. wouldn't recommend it lol but you can do it.