Elijin said:
DarkhoIlow said:
Alienware is very expensive. You just pay extra for the brand and the "look" of it.
And the service. I think people who dismiss Alienware as overpriced with no redeeming features are ignorant to the fact they're decent machines with minimal effort and great customer service and warranties, for those who are prepared to give up their money rather than their time.
Also in this topic: Lots of reasons why 'console scrubs' dont make the leap. To elaborate, the escapist usually: 'Sell your console and buy a PC!'
The escapist when a company offers a promotion doing this: 'Oh no, not from them. You're doing it wrong. Keep your console.'
This promotion is a great entry step for people who want to make the leap from consoles to PCs. They're already used to paying for overpriced hardware, and this lets them get in so they can learn the ins and outs of PC gaming, without being put off by the prospect of either building a PC, or talking to a PC building fanatic. Seriously. Its easy if you know how, its just sort of off putting if you're clueless. People forget when you're in the dark, lots of these basic bits and pieces are daunting.
While what you say is true, you don't have to talk to a "PC building fanatic" to get someone to help you get and set up a rig, I know children who've built computers, hell I've been building PCs since I was 13, know how the process went? See motherboard, look at the basic description(DDR3, socket(insert socket here) hmm I want a video card, well that one's like $100-$150, has a fan on it, probably a decent card, Case check, power requirements on parts say it needs at least 500w, get a 600w just incase, bam $500 computer. Assembly? Shit even back when I started 14 years ago, there are manuals with very clear illustrated instructions, now, EVERYTHING is labeled and colour coded and shit, it's easier to put together than lego, drivers come with parts, and updating them nowadays is so simple it's crazy.
Most of the people I know know how to build computers, a good deal of them are older people, and a bunch of partiers, people who you wouldn't expect, I only have like 4 people in my circle of friends who would be considered tech geeks, or even gamers, so yeah, not hard, not hard at all, and even then most people know at least one person who's got some tech skills, and if they don't personally, most of the time one of your friends has a family member who can do it.
I know most of this isn't widely understood, or accepted, due to the arguments I've seen, maybe outside of Canada people don't know shit about computers? I highly doubt that, I mean look at ALL of the tech firms everywhere, hightech industry is massive.
Just saying, most of the arguments I see are blatant cop outs by people who are too lazy to learn to even ask someone about it, they like consoles because it's all they've ever known, and for whatever reason see PCs as some alien thing that's hard to comprehend, when in reality, windows OS' have been simple to use and generally extremely user friendly since like XP service pack 1, moreso 2, cuz they fixed a lot of issues that caused errors with hardware incompatibility and shit.
With windows 7 or 8, you can just start using it, hell if you can use an android phone, or know how to use a computer for ANYTHING, you can become a pc gamer, just gotta spend like 15 minutes on the internet looking at parts in an online catalogue, takes like 20 minutes for me to build a computer and install the OS and maybe another 10 to configure it, so for someone unused to it, maybe 1.5 hours tops for assembly and installation. not a huge time investment considering the benefits, I mean when you look at a games library like mine and assess it at console prices, it should've cost me like even with sale prices, like $12,000, when in reality, due to the wonders of pc game prices the frequency of sales, it's closer to like $1500, to clarify I have a library of over 600 titles, roughly 400-450 of them are recent titles that I've bought shortly after release over the course of the last console generation.
I've only had to upgrade my PC once in that time, and that upgrade cost me $150, so for the purposes of general comparison, for the price I payed, due to the old pricing of pc parts being higher than it is now, a PC I built last year when I ditched my old rig along with the rest of my stuff and moved across Canada taking almost nothing with me, cost me $400 including taxes, shipping, shipping insurance, all that shit, I already had an OS, so say you add Windows 7 64bit OEM for like $120, so $520 Canadian, and it'll play ANYTHING on the market, previous PC cost me like $600, with $150 for a new video card, so $750 in total, and I'd still be using it if I hadn't had to leave it behind. If I had purchased an Xbox 360, and like 30 games, I'd have spent the SAME MONEY, instead I had a bitchin gaming rig and like 400 games. that was when it was more prohibitively priced. Now, if you spend $750 on a pc, it'll be a pretty damn beastly machine if you homebuild, take almost no time to research the build and figure out what you need to buy, and take almost no time to assemble, plus if that leaves you drained for cash and unable to buy games, the sheer number of free games that you can download and play completely legally, is staggering, a bunch of them suck, but now there's so many of them that are pretty damn decent, that it's actually a completely viable option.
Times have changed a lot, thing is though, people haven't realized it yet, that's all.
