Video games are really a rather inexpensive hobby. Let's not count the PC cost for a minute here.

Fallout 4 at the stated $100 - 400 hours of play (assuming you do not use mods) - $0.25/hour. That's not bad.

Going to a movie First Run movie - $9.00 - 2 hours - $4.50/hour. (Not counting popcorn, soda, etc).

Median cost for a round of golf - $36.00 - 3.5 hours - $10.29/hr.

Going for a nice drive in the country - 30 miles round trip - 1 gallon of gas $3.14/gallon - 2 hours (with stops to relax) - $1.57/hr

So really, it is one of the most inexpensive hobbies around. And if you add in the startup costs - a computer is expensive, sure. Going to a movie isn't that much, so that's a decent choice (but all the time?). Golf clubs - that's expensive. A car sure isn't cheap, unless you buy an old one, but then, that comes with its own problems.

Are there cheaper hobbies than computer gaming? Sure! Is gaming expensive? I guess it depends on what you are using to measure it against and just what you get out of it. If you only play a game for a few hours and then chuck it, ya, it's expensive. If you play the heck out of the games - I'm still playing Fallout 3 and New Vegas, no clue how many hundreds of hours I've put into them - then...not so much.

Only if you want to stay on the bleeding-edge of PC development, yeah you're buying expensive parts every year.

In my experience, that's generally uneccessary, unless you're a very serious gamer. One new part every few years is genetally enough to keep up at midrange. Or whenever it becomes obsolete, though you may be missing out on a few new releases for the last 2-3 years of your PC's life.

Still not sure why people keep saying Fallout 4 is 100$. You do not have to buy the dlc, it's not even out yet and won't be for quite some time.

If you only have 60$ to spend on videogames you're just not going to buy Fallout 4 because you cannot get the season pass right away as well?

Green Man Gaming is totally legit, and they usually have 20-25% discount codes that you can apply to almost any purchase. Also, make sure you check the VIP section (you have to sign in to see it) for occasional extra good deals. If you're on a budget, it's often cheaper to buy Steam keys from them than from Steam. No big mystery--to secure the sale for themselves, they're willing to take a smaller cut than Valve likes to take. They're not paying the retail price for the keys.

There are some shady key resellers out there, so I wouldn't buy Steam keys any old place.

Man, sometimes I swear people forget how much gaming used to cost in the 80's and early 90's. Gaming was a luxury...kinda still is...Nothing really has changed.

I am replacing a $1200 GTX 780 with a cheaper Graphics Card I spend a lot of My free time involved in Games, playing and lurking in a few Forums. I do not like the idea of spending a large portion of My disposable income, but I have something that I will get thousands of Hours of enjoyment with.

Yeah, well, the requirements are crazy. Especially after I could run MGSV on 60 fps with a video card that is half of the minium requirement for Fallout 4.

Thanks. I kept reading wondering if I was going to get a proper reply, so I appreciate the effort. I'll check out that site, and does anyone have thoughts on the site cdkeys? Another user mentioned it but was also unsure of its legitimacy, so a little "testimonial" wouldn't hurt haha.

CD Keys is fine as well, though regarded as less "legit" than the GMG shop by anyone who only holds the big stores in regard, though those people won't be buying from them in the first place anyway. They deliver on their promises though, so you're okay to buy from them.

If you consider the power of the hardware, PC Gaming is way less expensive than in the past. While software has gone up somewhat in price, the complexity of the code and the experience the player has is (usually) vastly improved.

If you are really concerned about the cost of PC gaming, that's the first sign you should start considering consoles to play video games.

I spend more for cable,phone,internet each year then I do gaming.

I just bought a new rig but it's still less then my cable bill each year.

I also have a lot of games.

So in the end, even buying a new rig every 3 to 4 years and lots of games, it's still a reasonably priced hobby.

Of course I'm stuck in bed 75% of the day due to spinal injury and need all the entertainment I can get. RPGs ( like Fallout ) especially help me forget my problems for awhile.

So to me it's worth every penny.

But truth be told, if I hadn't had my accident I doubt I would be a gamer. I bought my kids consoles but never got interested enough to play.

Now I can't live with out my baby.

Guess what the first game I ever played was....? Yep Fallout.

My brother in law saw me dying of boredom ( 96 ) and brought over a crappy old PC with a few games on it. Hooked it up and loaded Fallout 1...the rest is history.

CooI. I checked out Green Man Gaming, unfortunately Fallout 4 was just the standard $59.99 so I went ahead and got it off cdkeys for $39.99 after your info. I was hoping for an immediate key to add the game to my library on Steam, but nope, not yet. But it does say that I should get it on or before the release date, here's to hoping it's before - especially if the game will be available for pre-download like some games have been. If you or anyone else knows anything about that, do tell. This method is obviously foreign to me. Thanks so far, guys.

The actual cost of gaming is a highly subjective matter. It really depends on how much time and money you are willing to invest, which is no different from any other hobby. My personal circumstances at the moment mean that I have a lot of time on my hands, and I also had a surplus of funds to invest in something that I enjoy. And so I recently decided to get back into PC gaming, something I thought I would never be able to do. So far, including the Steam summer sale and a brand new gaming laptop, this has cost me the equivalent of around $7,000. But the way I see it, this is something that I am passionate about, and it also fits my present situation perfectly. Others might see this as wasteful, and yet would readily spend the same sum on other hobbies and interests. At the end of the day, it's all a matter of perspective.

That's about the same as my first except I didn't buy a hard drive for a year or more, never had a RAM card, and I couldn't afford a color monitor and graphics adapter so all my gaming was in sixteen glorious shades of amber. Oh, and my processor was an 8086-2 which for whatever reason was considerably cheaper. That was late 1985, built it myself for around $700 - the same parts pre-assembled were over $1,000! My first hard drive was a 20 MB Seagate that with an RLL controller could be formatted to 30 MB; it cost maybe $400 and had to be reformatted every couple of months. My first math coprocessor was maybe a year later and cost another $300, so I was at maybe $1,400 and didn't even have a color monitor, just a 12" amber CRT. Not only are good computers massively cheaper today in 1985/1986 equivalent dollars, they are cheaper in absolute terms! (Although sadly we can no longer save 30% by building our own.)

As for the game, I have near 2,000 hours of play in Fallout 3 & New Vegas combined. Todd Howard said there's over 400 hours of content in Fallout 4, so even not counting DLC and mods, even if he's off by 50% and you spend a thousand on a new computer, that's less than 20 cents an hours. Even six isn't that cheap!

I'm guessing they'll give us access to the keys when the game is officially released to distributors, so we'll probably get the same amount of pre-loading everyone else gets. We'll be ultimately relying on Steam to let us download anyway, at whatever time they choose, and we'll have our keys in time for that.

That's what I'm saying. I remember. It was actually MORE expensive then. And the PC technology was in an arms race. If you weren't upgrading your PC every year, forget about playing the latest and greatest game.

It could be that some of the people complaining are too young to remember it being any different. We've been in a "steady" requirements period for the last 7-8 years where the PC requirements haven't drastically jumped, since we were experiencing a long console generation. The console generation moved ahead technologically, and suddenly PC developers are free to jump far ahead again themselves.

We are in an interim period right now where developers are still seeing how far they can push games on the new consoles, and still satisfy PC gamers with the ports. In a year or two, when developers have touched the ceiling of the consoles performance, PC requirements for games will settle down again for a long while.

They actually (almost) always have a generic voucher code shown on the front page that you can apply to any purchase during check-out. Right now it's http://www.greenmangaming.com/vouchers/, but it varies. Anyway, no matter, since you got 33% off at Cd-Keys, but just so you know for the future.

Off topic for a second here, but am I the only one who was expecting a something something something, priceless, for everything else there's mastercard?

As to what the OP is asking, i have to ask, where are you seeing the $100 for Fallout 4....

i would even argue that pc s even got vheaper

if you compare the prive with my first pc i bought in 1988 and what i have nwo it isn't much different , what you can actually do with i have now compared to my first machine ....... wooow

This is true. I've been able to play Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Skyrim on a computer I built in 2007, thanks to the XBox and PS3. It is only now that Bethesda is beginning to develop games for the XBox1 and PS4 that I find myself needing to upgrade.

With 3 copies of FO4 now ordered (1 Pipboy PC, Steam PC, & Xbox One) for all the fam, I can't say I agree with the "expensive" premise unless we are talking about from a video game addicts view. I'm more of a BGSaholic rather than a Gameaholic. I have only a handful of games I currently play at random but save myself for total immersion in the Fallout/Skyrim universe. Of course just my opinion.

Gaming has always been expensive if you think about it. Even back then, I remember seeing games like Chrono Trigger retailing for like $89.99 in stores like Funcoland and Toys R Us.

Same here. Not that I had a real reason to get one until now. Still, I'd like to see more new IP's. So far next gen gaming has been nothing but sequels and remakes of last gen games. Glad I still have my PS3 to play.

3 copies of Fallout 4? You're definitely a gameaholic with money to burn.

This is my favorite measure of entertainment cost ratios.

Some video games shine way above others but they really do provide an excellent ratio of entertainment to cost.

Haha, you and I are in the same boat.
I built my pc in late 2007 for gaming and have since only upgraded the RAM from 2 to 4 gigs and upgraded the video card significantly, plus replaced the case and fried psu, so same mobo and cpu and ram speed which is a huge bottleneck. It's been somewhat of an issue having such an old pc but I've still been able to play most games like Skyrim on high... but now I HAVE to upgrade everything if I want to play Fallout 4. What's your new build you're upgrading to, if you're upgrading any time soon? Mine's going to cost half as much as my 2007 build - around $550 compared to $1100. PC gaming is definitely cheaper now, in my opinion...or there's more options to go cheaper, like with AMD.