The Price of PC Gaming= $2500+…?

These days gaming is an expensive hobby. From Alienware computers beginning at $999 to the PS3 being released at around $700 in its day, gamers have had to grow accustomed to paying much for the brand new stuff. Now we have Razer, a company that specializes in building excellent gaming peripherals for the hardcore PC gaming market, who seems to want to break Alienware’s record for the most expensive gaming systems on the market. Their contestant for that title? The Razer Blade.

The Razer Blade & Razer Blade Pro are designed for the gamer who likes to be on the go, but not without their games.  Razer’s newest gaming machine is praised as the thinnest in the market. Its SSD allows for fast boot-up of Windows 8 in order to power a machine driven by GeForce GTX® 765M graphics card and an i7 CPU. Furthermore, their customizeable keyboard is built into the laptop with the Switchblade UI ready for a gamer to master any game that they install on this beast.  Reviews on it from Laptop Magazine claim, “Razer has bottled lightning,” and has awarded them one of the Best of Computex 2013 Awards. All over their Facebook and Company pages, it is being promoted as their best to date in terms of mobility, power, and flexibility.

As a PC gamer in the market for a new laptop, it is certainly a tempting offer. Who wouldn’t want to have the best of the best in terms of a laptop, that is almost guaranteed to last a reasonable amount of years? Well, wanting the PC is redundant if an individual cannot produce the $1,999 for the Razer Blade nor the $2,799 for the Razer Blade Pro (~$2000 is the minimum for the Razer Blade, and ~2800 is the maximum price for the Pro) it will cost them. This was a common comment to the news announcement about the Razer Blade on Facebook by their fans. Again and again their followers said they would love to have that PC, but the price for it stopped them from reaching for their credit cards.

For a company that is By Gamers for Gamers,  it seems they may have forgotten in their striving to be top that not all gamers are living in million-dollar mansions, with paychecks that make $2500 the equivalent of buying a Big Mac at MacDonald’s. Furthermore, its lack of flexibility in both its pricing schematics and lack of customization for their systems, the Razer Blade being the fourth they’ve developed, shows a real lack for drawing in the gamer with a more average salary beyond their gaming mice and keyboards. This lack of various customizations puts them below Alienware, who does offer numerous ways to customize their laptops as well as offer a much bigger price range.

Unfortunately, the joke is still on both Alienware and Razer, and any company who thinks PC gaming requires $1000+ laptops and desktops. The parts on their laptops can be purchased at much cheaper prices. For example, if one were to go to Future Shop, , and a compare “gaming” laptop to say some of their other laptops, they’d find that the gaming laptop has the exact same stuff: 2.5GHz i5 processor, 8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, and perhaps a DVD-RW drive. The only difference between “gaming” and the other guys are the other guys “fail” to have a high-end graphics cards. Should the consumer ultimately bite the bullet and pay for these “gaming” guys?

If it is within the means of their budget, yes. Why not have the high-end that will perform their intended purpose perfectly? However, those on a more modest budget do not have to do without. In fact, they should go see the specs for games they want to play on their PC, as well as consult other gamers such as PushStartPlay, or forums in order to get a better understanding of what specs their computer needs in order to run the games well. The majority will find that they do not need these expensive laptops, or rather the expensive graphics cards, in order to play their favourite PC games. In fact, they may find that the mid to lower-end laptops will do just fine.

Sorry, Razer, your high-end thinnest gaming laptop on the market is not needed here. Perhaps next time you design a new system, you should remember the gamers you are making this stuff for, instead of just the ones who have $2500 lying around?