For what is essentially top-of-the-line gear? Yes. That is cheap. Remember, I am talking about the upper limit here. As in, there’s no more money you can reasonably spend than that, as you won’t get any further benefit. Top-of-the-line GPU, CPU, 64GB of RAM, the best OLED you can get, extra budged for cheaper elements such as additional side monitors, etc. in practice you can get by with much less

I mean, just look at the prices of any other hobby. Hobbies aren’t cheap! A “fun” car and its mantainance isn’t cheap. And what about a really good bike? Or a good instrument and music lessions? A small fishing boat, with fishing gear, and a way to transport and store it all, won’t cost little either. We could even talk about practical hobbies such as woodworking, working with metal, leather working, but those definitively can be very expensive, especially in material costs. And especially if you include the space they require as part of the price.

You need to keep in mind maintenance costs, or the money it takes to partake in hobbies over time, as well. For video games this is low compared to other hobbies. Even I, who considers video games to be my main hobby, rarely spend more than a few tens of dollars a month on new games on average, and I feel like I play new stuff constantly. A lot of the games I like to play are simply not AAA prices, I play replayable/long-playable games I already own a good amount, and I simply don’t have enough time to play through games quickly enough to spend more

Of course, you can do a lot of hobbies cheaply, but not if you go for high-end stuff. You can do video games cheaply as well. You probably need a computer for work anyway, so spend like 200$ extra, and you got something that can play a lot of interesting games.

Same.