Gatekeeping is something that's brought up a lot, isn't it? It's frowned upon, obviously enough, as obnoxious, off-putting, and generally unnecessary – whether we're talking about gaming, music, movies, books, you name it. New fans aren't going to ruin Metallica for you just because they're, well, new, and they like St Anger. I'm not here to talk about that trashcan snare drum, though – no. I'm here to talk about PC gaming and how absolutely diabolically expensive it's become to even get yourself into the ecosystem.
It's dumb. Real dumb. I bought my first gaming PC back in 2011. It was a pretty solid build back in the day: Intel Core-i5 2500K, 8GB of DDR3, a nice BitFenix Shinobi chassis, the works. The crowning glory in that thing, though, was the graphics card, an MSI Twin Frozr GTX 460, complete with 1GB of VRAM, on Nvidia's Fermi architecture at 40nm. Perfect for a bit of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm raiding with my guild Fracture at the time. It's a card that retailed for $250, but I paid around half that for the GPU (£130 in the UK to be precise). In January 2013, I upgraded to a GTX 660, Asus DirectCU II, with 2GB of VRAM. That card was available for £155 (retailing at $229), offering much more performance and twice as much memory (for less money in the US).
