People often find it odd when I say I don’t play PC games, but it seems rather complicated (and also expensive) to me.
I mean, I enjoyed it back when I had friends with PS, but I never had to set up anything myself. Searching around it seems rather… overwhelming, and I don’t know if it’s actually the case.
- PC seems most versatile, and with the prices, I considered piracy, but I would need a separate computer for security. Hell, I wouldn’t even trust the device firmware on it afterwards.
- So I considered maybe paying the amounts, but I went to check some games and lo and behold, kernel-level anti-cheat. Great, so pirated games might even have less malware in the end.
- Since I’d need a separate device anyway, how about getting a PlayStation. With a disc drive, I want to be able to go future proof and fully offline. Well, about that… apparently it needs to verify the disc drive online. For what? It’s a BluRay drive, either it works or it doesn’t. And then I heard another shitty thing, “most games are released almost unplayable and need updates right away”. So they just release Alpha quality software on the most permanent medium???
So that just sounds like shitty experience no matter what. How is it actually? I’d expect consoles to be least buggy and fully future proof.
The only thing I ever had was a $4 NES bootleg console from AliExpress, Contra was glitched out and Battletank unplayable because they forgot the select button, but ok, $4.
Edit: Re-read your question, you are talking about games in general. A Switch might be a good buy, straightforward and you can usually find people willing to play in person or online for the more popular games. The games are rarely on sale though. Highly recommend a pro controller if you go this route.
For PC, there’s basically never kernel level anti-cheat, only a few frankly not great games go that route.
As far as expensive goes, there’s a ton of great PC games you can get for less than $5 during steam sale. The initial buy-in is more for a maybe $1500 PC, but you will make that up after a few dozen games. If you know a PC gaming enthusiast, imply you would play with them if you had a PC and they might sell you an old rig for dirt cheap. I’ve sold a few that way for like $100.
Set-up is easy as steam is the only program you need and controllers are plug-and-play. If you are willing to risk a little work, I found Linux Mint as an OS really easy to install and use, and then it will be future-proof (unlike windows) as well as free. You may have to troubleshoot something weird, but their forums are super helpful.
I use Arch, OS is taken care of. Awesome documentation, and I don’t have to care about version upgrades because there’s no such thing. I still don’t know how to properly update Debian. Though Mint has GUI for that, so it’s fine there.
The bootstrap image is also pretty cool. I wanted Arch on a VPS, but I couldn’t boot any installer. I could however use provided Debian rescue environment to download the bootstrap image, chroot into it and use that as an installer. Really cool thing.
Considering that Steam comes pre-installed on Manjaro, that should be fine. Or at least it did when I tried it.