Is Gaming A Cheap Hobby?

Playing video games is one of the best experiences you can have in life and just like reading a book it allows you to enter and explore fantastic open worlds but many good things in life aren't free unfortunately and while not entirely free video games are cheaper then ever and this leads us to ask is gaming a cheap hobby to have? Can someone who has never played a video game start playing video games at a low entry cost in comparison to other hobbies he might be interested in starting for example scuba diving, mountain climbing  or traveling? 

The birth of the Steam market was the birth of a new era and it would became associated with gaming as much as Nintendo or PlayStation. With it's huge sales no longer would gaming be considered expensive. Gamers, kids, and adults alike in countries were pirating games was the norm would suddenly have an affordable option at their fingertips to experience what the western world had known for a while. The experience of being able to download digital games without fear of a virus or of the internet provider shutting down their internet service for digital pirating. Is the growth of parent company Valve and Steam the point at which gaming became an affordable hobby? Not necessarily thou it did become accessible to a far wider audience in terms of price and accessibility because of Steam and it's marketing/sales tactics.

To figure out if gaming is a cheap hobby we can look at the money involved and add up the cost to go from having no gaming equipment at all to being able to play a few games. The gaming market in 2020 has matured and therefore we have options at hand to choose from to get ourselves the cheapest way into gaming. We will for the moment discard mobile gaming and not because we don't consider them games but because most people already have a smart phone and mobile games are too gaming as watching sports is to playing them. We are after the most common notion of what it means to be a gamer.

The console market is the cheapest entry point for anyone interested in the cheapest and fastest way to gaming however the PC market is cheaper in the long term in most cases. We can look at the price for both. It will cost $370 for an Xbox One and $355 for a PlayStation 4 on Amazon. These are the latest consoles and they come with controllers however we still need a Television which is at the minimum around $200 however most TV's in the US sell for $400-$500. Added up this comes out to $555-$870 for a TV, console and controller setup. However there are also games involved and we have to add that to the total as you cannot just buy a console and buy no games. Let's start out with 5 games for someone who is new to gaming. We can get current player counts and see what people are playing the most by searching for it so let's for our study buy the top 5 games by player count and add up the cost. Some of these games are free to play and these will be included. As of September 14, 2020 the current highest played games on Xbox are the following: Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2019, Fortnite, League of Legends, NBA2K21, and Minecraft. The total cost of these comes to $120. The top 5 currently played PlayStation games cost also oddly comes out to $120. If we add the cost of the games to the cost of a console and TV we get a cost of at minimum $675-$990 for a full gaming setup and these are before tax numbers. We can do the same for PC however with a PC there are multiple parts to purchase and depending on the quality you want the cost can vary greatly. 

$675-$990 is the average amount a new gamer will pay to enter the gaming market. One could in theory do the same and add up the cost of entry for any hobby and take a look at and figure out how cheap is it to start. A lot of gamers will measure how many hours they spent playing a game and divide it by how much the game cost to see how much they spent on entertainment. For many games this comes out to mere pennies on the hour as the game has hundreds of hours of story and gameplay. There are not many if any hobbies that cost pennies on the hour for an hour of entertainment. Going out for a movie for example costs around $15 minimum and that is without food and drinks. 

Gaming can be very expensive if you make it but that is the same with many hobbies. You can purchase every single new release game at $60 or you can wait until there is a sale. There are PC enthusiasts who spend $10,000 on a new PC to be able to get the highest frame rates. Gaming is one of the most affordable hobbies and we know this from the cost of entry for other hobbies for example the cost of entry for skydiving is $300 per dive on average and that doesn't account for the equipment you need to purchase. Per hour of entertainment this is one of the most expensive hobbies. Traveling is not cheap as well. There are hotel costs, food costs, gas if driving or the cost of a plane ticket, and these costs add up quickly. Per hour of entertainment gaming comes out on top every time.  

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