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Hey! Some of us stuck with Dell for years because it was the nearest thing to a halfway decent home computer at a price they could afford with an admittedly limited level of customisation, but still some.
wanders off to grumble about tanjdammit, try being an ordinary person on this place, flip's sake not all of us were born with a soldering iron in our hands
While that's almost certainly a joke I sincerely hope that nobody thinks that building a PC usually involves the use of a soldering iron.
It's not as simple as Lego as some would claim, and will claim a blood sacrifice on occasion, but I've built my fair share.
But then again I'm poor and my current PC has only finally Ship of Theseused itself free of components from the original build I was gifted in 2011. That PSU caused me a great deal of sorrow I'll tell you, at this point I would go pre-built if only for the sake of my sanity, especially now that GPU prices have stabilized (if at at stupid levels).
Are PCs or PC parts expensive in India? I would have thought it would be quite a bigger statement to get a PC in India rather than America.
Also do you get regional pricing from Steam? Probably not from GOG?
PC parts (and most electronics not manufactured here or at least packaged) are ridiculously expensive.
My RTX 3070, bought at the height of GPU prices globally, was twice my monthly income.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max my brother bought would have cost him about $1700 here as opposed to the $1200 or so it took because he a relative in the States bring it over.
This is largely due to tariffs of about 50% on global MSRP, and when the average Indian professional makes about about 5 to 10 times less than their Western counterparts. Yeah, we're screwed.
So PC gaming has been largely dead in India barring entry level games like CS, Valorant, LOL and DOTA that runs on most iGPUs. Younger Indians don't want to play shitty mobile games, but it's the best they can afford. Even consoles are price prohibitive.
Steam usually does do regional pricing, but many AAA games opt out, so you can imagine a $70 (and added tax!) game is ridiculously expensive, leaving aside the costs of a pc or console to run it.
Thankfully, these days I actually make money as opposed to being a broke teen, even if it's a paltry sum. So a GPU or CPU every 3 or 4 years? No biggie. The odd decent game at launch? I can swallow it. PC gaming is my biggest hobby and timesink after all, but it still stings.
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On the other hand, some of us grew up with shitty OEMs (eMachine…) and needed to learn to solder to keep the thing running.
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