The cheapest way to play video games at home is on a tablet, but gameplay is often poor and the experience is less immersive than on a big screen.
The most conventional way to play big screen games is on a games console. The current top-dogs are the Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo Switch; all are powerful consoles and have a range of games. Costs are around £450 for the pro versions or £300 for the budget options. Games consoles cannot easily be upgraded so when they become old then it’s a case of throwing them away and replacing with new; typical lifecycles are around 6 years.
PC gaming is a lot more costly, with basic systems starting around £500 and rising to several thousand or more, but it’s much easier to upgrade a games computer, individual components can be upgraded to meet the requirements of new games. For this reason, it’s possible that a games computer could be running modern games well for 12 years or longer, much longer than a console.
The most important part of a games PC is the graphics card. If you start with a good midrange card then it really doesn’t matter what the rest of the system runs, you can upgrade hard drive, memory, processor, even your mainboard later as you can afford it. A PC with a 12 year old Core2Duo processor will happily run Fortnite as long as it’s got a decent graphics card.
I prefer an Intel processor and NVidia Graphics card but some people prefer AMD as their gear is much cheaper, but has a shorter service life. The current top notch graphics card is the NVidia RTX2080ti but we’re about to find out the prices for the next generation RTX3000 series cards, so we can expect a bunch of cheap second-hand RTX2080 cards to hit the market in a few weeks as the enthusiasts upgrade.
It’s quite common for gamers to over-egg their core components. There is little point in putting an i7 chip into a games rig because no game ever released requires more than an i5; so i7 and i9 chips are a total waste of money, take that £500 and put it into the graphics card or PSU. Likewise, no games require more than 8 GB ram so fitting 32 GB ram is another waste of time, 16 GB is a good compromise, but if money is tight then stick with 8 GB and push more budget to the graphics card.
Most games are released on all platforms, their designers want to sell as many copies as possible, and so the big names like Minecraft, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Battleground, etc., are all available on PC, consoles and tablets. But there are some games that are exclusive to certain platforms: Xbox has exclusive games such as Halo and Gears of War; Nintendo has their exclusive Mario Kart and Super Mario adventure; and PlayStation have games like Uncharted and the Last of Us. The current Marvel and Avengers games are cross platform but Sony have exclusive use of the Spiderman content, much to the Xbox and PC gamers’ disgust.