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Comment by marban | Hacker News Reader

I stopped playing video games after the Super Famicom & Neo Geo so I'm not even remotely informed about the industry but whenever I see kids showing off their gaming gear and rooms on TikTok I feel like parents these days have to spend their entire paycheque on these kinds of setups — And I'm not sure youngsters are having the same fun that we used to have with a bag of chips and Bomberman & a Super Multitap. Not even mentioning In-App purchases.

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Classic social media reality skew . Most kids have a crappy laptop or maybe a base console. Maybe a few rich kids have a gaming room. In general those are for the 30-40 year olds who now have the disposable income to splurge on their hobby

It's not that bad because most of the things that go into a gaming setup are useful outside of games.

Having a good desk, chair, monitor, keyboard, computer is generally useful, the premium to turn that into a gaming-capable setup is not that high.

The Neo Geo originally cost $650, over $1,400 in 2022 dollars…

Sounds like the cost of a GPU and some fancy LED lights.

Right but it's not though, nearly all of the big-ticket esports games are easily playable on a GTX-1060...

You could build an entire esports machine, with monitor (and RGB!) for less than 1000USD. I have done it many times.

And most of those gaming chairs, fancy mousepads, etc. are cheap Chinese crap. The entire room may cost less than what a Neo Geo costed.

A decent mid-range GPU is $400. That's TWO Neo-Geo games even before you adjust for inflation. Fancy LED lights are cheapish because they're just LED lights...

I'm sure the kids posting their setups on Tiktok are probably the most spoilt and if 90s rich kids could do the same you'd see kids showing off their entire AES and SNES collection and their brand new pentium.

Sounds to me like a _lot_ less than the most popular console for young people these days, the Nintendo Switch. You can get a used one for $200, I see kids on the subway close to the poverty line who scrounged the money together for one. Personally, I didn't know anyone whose parents could afford to buy them a Famicon AND Neo Geo, back in the day.

It really isn't that expensive.

Gaming chairs are usually cheap chinese vinyl, <$90 even if they look fancy. It's not remotely close to a typical mesh aeron, for example. A TKL mech kb is $20-30 on amazon.

A 3060 is $400, a 1TB SSD is $50-80.

Hint: parents buy it for themselves to play with.

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