Same

Why play expensive games when you can get addicted to Balatro
- The cure is one of the jokers. Just keep playing Balatro, you're close to finding a way to quit.
- With how much Factorio I've played, I'm down to less than $0.10/hr with the Space Age expansion. I'm nowhere close to done.
  
  I've played like 50 hours of Factorio in 2 weeks, then it started feeling like a job. Not in a sense that it was a chore, but in a sense that I literally do this kind of automation and optimization at my job, and I enjoy the process.
- I don't get the Balatro addiction stuff. It's a good game, but after you've played it a few times it gets boring. Sure, "number go up" but it's like people have never played a video game before. There's so many Skinner boxes that, at least for me personally, it becomes numbing. I also don't easily get sucked into other manipulative addicting things in other games though, so maybe it's just something wrong with me.
  What makes you continue playing Balatro after you've "figured it out?"
  
  For me it's 2 things :
  Making a deck that works so well that it crushes everything. -Getting shit cards and making it works.
  The first one gets me hooked, the second one keeps me going. It takes a long time to figure it out, as you put it.
  
  I find it fun
  
  Once I "figured it out", I realized I was beating the decks using flushes. So I decided trying different styles like building a deck for playing straights, full houses, two pairs. I found out you can play a full house flush. It isn't on the list of poker hands so that was fun to stumble upon.
  
  Playing different Antes, Decks and Challenges has kept it fresh and interesting for me: forcing me out of my comfort zone to find new combinations and strategies that works. It might help to change the game speed to 4x so it's not so showy with the jokers and you can iterate different strategies faster. Or it's not your thing. Nothing wrong with that.
- Sadly, the young'uns can no longer play the 18+ restricted card game that's explicitly got zero gambling in it. They'll have to get addicted to real gambling in EA sports games

What’s funny is that a new GPU alone will set ya back that amount already. I’m hopefully picking up the 5080 at launch for 1k
- I’m hopefully picking up the 5080 at launch
  why tho
  
  Bethesda games aren't gonna run themselves
  
  For the pixel art.
  
  Not OP but my GPU is a decade old, would be nice to have the latest for once.
- Why?? Just get something a few years old, it'll do the same thing anyway
  
  Used graphics card prices aren't that much better than new.
  The 4090 still has a VRAM advantage over the 5080 so it's probably going to continue to hold it's value pretty well. Especially since there's a massive voice in pricing between the $1k 5080 and the $2k 5090.
  Unless the 24gb ARC GPU comes out (or AI crashes) I see the 4090 just not depreciating a substantial amount. And that's the only option that would compare to the 5080 since AMD isn't even trying to make high end.
- I was just going to say my new PC was $5000 and $1,200 of that was the GPU.
  
  Just to game though?
- I feel like kinda the main reasons to pick up a latest gen gpu nowadays are energy efficiency and a warranty (although 5000 series doesn't look all that energy efficient, we'll see i guess)
  otherwise you can definitely get something better on ebay for cheaper
  but if you live somewhere where energy is expensive, the difference might be significant. 500w is kinda a lot lol, any difference in performance/watt will add up
  prices are going to drop when the new gpus come out and people need to get rid of their old ones, but currently with a little bit of looking i could find a 'buy it now' 7900 xt for $640, a 3090 for $775, and a 3090 ti for $850
  honestly these aren't great deals you could probably find better ones

Me going back to hollow knight, celeste, modded minecraft, and dead cells instead of buying new games
- I see that you bought expensive hardware just for modded minecraft. That shit's no joke.

Me with a:
Ryzen 5 5800x, RTX 4060 TI, and 32GB RAM.
Plays: Factorio and Minecraft 😂
- That's like minimal speks for properly modded Minecraft
  
  Now download optimization mods to offset the overhead of the other mods.
- Lol that's almost exactly my specs except I have 46gb ram
  I play a lot of dungeon crawl stone soup

Balatro got me like...

this failing isn't on you though. AAA games is not what it used to be, I feel like between 2008 to 2014 game companies have all progressed and transitioned into something they didn't use to be.
my $4k gaming PC at this point is a glorified FFXIV machine although, I do plan to play other things soon.
- I mostly play indie games, but I sometimes play AAA games (Ghost of Tsushima right now) and I am glad that I have my rig that can get 90 fps @ 4k (with fsr).
  It's not because you don't use it every single time that you play a game that it is a waste of money.
  
  This exactly. I bought a custom build specifically for Elden Ring. After blowing that out of the water, my next most played game that year was Stardew iirc. It's about having power for when you need it rather than always using it to feel like it has value
- I feel like the last few years at least have had like one worthy game per year, which for someone with a lot of work to do and now a family, is plenty. I've yet to finish Elden Ring and Baldur's Gate III, and while I completed Cyberpunk, I never got around to the DLC.
  I'm also cautiously optimistic for 2025, it honestly seems to be a great year if not too many games get delayed or turn out to be shit
  I do certainly feel like between 2016 and 2021 or so, we barely got any good games. The biggest release of 2020 took a year or 2 to be decent and even then never lived up to its' hype because what was promised was simply too much. 2021 the biggest release was Forza Horizon 5 which I loved, but a lot of gamers don't really care for.
  
  ?
  2016 we got Blood and Wine for Witcher 3 and Fallout 4 (which is a good game, just not a good Fallout game). Oh and we got Doom.
  2017 wasn't that great for AAA, except for Nintendo. But we still got great games like Breath of the wild, Prey, Nier Automata, Hellblade, Hollow Knight, Undertale to name a few.
  2018 we got Red Dead Redemption 2, Monster Hunter World, God of War.
  2019 we got Death Stranding, Divinity Original Sin 2, Sekiro, Resident Evil 2
  2020 we got Final Fantasy 7 Remake, The last of us 2, Hades
  2021 is kind of a dud because of covid.
  So I'm terms of AAA only 2017 and 2021 can really be considered duds. But indies released some absolute bangers between 2016-2021. For example Disco Elysium, among us, outer wilds, Stardew valley, inscryption etc.

Pixelated grass is always greener

Me with me $3000 AI laptop. Copilot shit on Windows Console programs on Linux

Consider this, a 3D indie pixel-art game (Ultrakill)
- Atlyss, Pseudoregalia
- Minecraft-alikes?
  
  Not every pixel-art game or voxel game is a Minecraft-alike. For example Hytale is fundamentally different.

Me upgrading my computer to kick ass just so I can play Old School Runescape
- Hey, the GPU plugin in runelite that adds lighting effects can absolutely EAT GPU power.
  
  Yeah it can, if I use that plugin fullscreen on my 1440p monitor, I can't even watch YouTube on another monitor because my GPU is maxed out lmao

Me but just playing free to play games. lol
I can't give up the AAA quality. Hell I want a more powerful GPU just to push it
- Holocure
  
  lol. I don't think I'd ever
  It'd need to be a really pretty girl to get me in to that. lol
  Seriously tho... The Finals

everyone reading that probably had one in mind. i bet ill hit 75% of them with the balatro/stardew/terraria combo, though if yours is far more obscure, by all means enlighten me so i can buy it and let it sit in my backlog for years because of my own game addictions.
- Noita, Streets of Rogue, and Dwarf Fortress are some of favorite games.
  I haven't played it, but Animal Well looks great.
  It's not a pixel game, but because it has Sims 1 graphics, I think Project Zomboid should get a special mention.
  
  Also, zomboid used to be a pixel game
- Undertale
- I've been having a lot of fun with Vagante recently
- Have your heard of our Lord and Savior... balatro?
  
  oh you mean the "The wheel of fortune is fucking rigged" simulator? Why yes. Yes I have.
- I'm always a huge fan of Deep Rock Galactic, Moonring, Rimworld
- Dead cells, factorio
- Gelatine and I wanna maker are cool obscure games
  Celeste is also fun, but less obscure

1000$ PC? No shit you need to play 2D indie games!

Normally me too, but then there's always one game I want 60fps that I'm like wait I thought I maxed out my build pretty decently for my budget and it's like, you can play on ultra sure but there will be so many 5 fps hiccups

Terraria

Me modding the 2D pixel art game with ultra HD textures, shaders, reflections, realistic physics engine, ray tracing.

Yep. Hexcells Infinite hasn't overtaxed my RTX 3080 yet. That may have been a slight waste of money.

I'm OK with 2D but draw the line at pixel-art. Pun not intended.

I love my 3080 running LA noire.

Your uh... $1000 gaming PC? Isn't that pretty much all it can play? (assuming the game is released today)
- you can build decent enough pc in a 1000$ on ryzen 7700 and 64gb ram and intel a770 16gb in that budget

Compensate by running an electron app alongside it.

I’ll always upvote a Chaeyoung meme

I'm happy with my legion go, it can handle most aaa games pretty well. And if I want to upgrade later on, I'll get an eGpu. Modular gaming system ftw
- Maybe I'm missing some important details, but isn't an eGPU still limited to throughput of the thunderbolt connection?
  
  It is.

DCSS in the browser requires top of the line graphics cards.

every AAA game in recent years sucks and most of them are scrapped before they're finished
- Remarkable how none of that is true.
  Elden ring, Baldurs Gate 3, Helldivers 2, Wukong, Marvel Rivals... List goes on, and that's just 2024. You .ight not like some genders, and that's fine, but there are good AAAs.
  Also, with the number of AAAs reaching the shelves, what do you mean "most are scrapped"? Sure some games get cancelled from time to time, but saying that's most of them is just fantasy...
  
  2 of those games are from 2022 and 2023
  
  Helldivers 2 has Sony fuckery involved. I was considering getting it when I upgraded my machine, but not after the login nonsense.

Diarrhea 4

I don't think I even remember what "AAA" games I bought last year. Uh... Baldur's Gate III and Train Sim World 5. That's about that.
Thing is, I didn't play much of those either! I have an absolutely gigantic backlog! And in December I got somehow addicted to Skyrim again. It never ends
Best and awesomest and most profound game experience I had last year was Chants of Sennaar, and even that technically came out in 2023.
- I don't think those games AAA. Baldur's Gate 3 is in the border between being AA and AAA, but Train Sim World can't have that much of a development cost, no?
  
  Well, I suppose they're less "AAA" and more "Games With Actual Noticeable Budget". Simulators aren't exactly mainstream these days, yes.