Embrace the great Tech Pause

Let's take a look at the scoreboard: A 1TB Steam Deck costs $1,000. A top-of-the-line gaming PC costs $7,000. A PS5 starts at $650, an over 50% increase from its launch six years ago. A modest hard drive goes for rent money. The RAMpocalypse continues unabated. The Steam Machine is a hard sell out of the gate. The reasons for the slow, suffocating death of the hardware market are well-documented on this website, but basically: it's greed again.

For the average person, the latest tech is so out of reach it might as well not exist anymore. It's hard enough to justify the cost of a decent computer with years-old components when every other part of life is more expensive than ever.

What do we do with that information? One idea is to keep talking about how much it sucks and hope it changes. A much better one, I think, is to refocus: Challenge the stranglehold that the "latest and greatest" has on our attention, and instead appreciate what's already in front of us. Embrace your mid PC! Become overly interested in controllers! Buy an emulation handheld! Get into the wonderful world of Linux!

Welcome to the great Tech Pause. It could be worse.

Your PC is already amazing

It's hard to mourn the accessibility of powerful hardware when the cutting edge keeps showing us how inessential it is. Generational GPU improvement has stagnated hard in the past five years—maybe since the pivot to ray tracing, even. Manufacturers now pitch us a future where every game looks so real it's boring—look no further than Halo: Campaign Evolved—and AI shovels slop into our eyes in real time under the guise of "better graphics."

For that privilege we're expected to accept shortage prices in quadruple digits. Kindly eat my shorts.

The mediocrity of the new is so profound that being stuck with "just OK" hardware is increasingly a savvy move. If you have an aging PC, or a four-year-old Steam Deck, or a solid laptop, then congrats: you already own a device that can play 40+ years of videogames, including most of the new ones. Everyone I know has a backlog the size of a phonebook, and if you're building one for the first time, sales are deep and constant.

Developers, both indie and otherwise, are beginning to recognize the diminishing returns of extreme graphics and respond with reasonably-specced games. One of the best multiplayer games of 2026, Meccha Chamelon, is advanced hide-and-seek with basic art. Our 2025 game of the year, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, is an all-timer RPG that scales surprisingly well on older hardware. Nine of the top 10 games in PC Gamer's Top 100 list (2025 edition) will run on anything these days.

I know I'm arriving late to the party suggesting we play some old games, but I've never been more enthusiastic about looking backward than right now, specifically. I've spent the last year enjoying old games that run flawlessly on anything remotely modern, and it's been so enriching that new releases are losing the fight for my time.

It sank in recently that there are enough great games I haven't played to fill the rest of my days. That thought is definitely rewiring my brain a bit—I'm still playing new stuff, but it doesn't seem as urgent as it once did.

It helps that what counts as "old" now includes the games I once knew as cutting edge. Recently I bought Deus Ex: Human Revolution—an immersive sim I played in 2011 but couldn't remember for the life of me—for $2. It's incredible. Eidos Montreal's rendition of cyberpunk Detroit is still striking and original, and it employs these painted skyboxes that blend 2D and 3D to incredible effect. There's so much texture in the parts of the world you can't actually touch—I couldn't stop looking at this imposing view of the Hengsha's upper city:

Today, I think a modern game would just model that imposing upper city in high-detail 3D. It'd probably look nice, too, but I'm not sure it'd elicit the same overwhelming reaction. And just look at these artsy 4K screenshots of the sequel, Mankind Divided, that we featured on PC Gamer in 2016. 2016!

As I rolled credits on Human Revolution last week, I wondered why I didn't appreciate it when it came out. Then I went to YouTube and reminded myself what it looked and ran like on a PlayStation 3: blurry, choppy, and jank.

Replaying it with every setting cranked to max on a handheld PC at 90+ fps was like playing a different, better game that I can now count among my favorites. I mapped quick save and quick load to back buttons, and used Steam Input's inherent gyro support to add precise motion aiming I could activate only when I needed it.

The new retro gaming

A similarly magical experience was playing a native PC port of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess through Dusklight, a community recompilation project that dropped a few months ago. It's an amazing package—both a remaster and a community update bundle—that outclasses Nintendo's own preservation work with modern resolution support, high framerates, and quality-of-life toggles. Within minutes I had Dusklight recognizing the gyro of my Steam controller, enabling bow motion aiming that's better than a Wiimote.

The wildest part, to me, is that it also supports Mac, iOS, and Android. One of the best Zeldas (don't @ me) now runs natively on your phone.

The decomp/recomp scene is one of the most exciting things happening in videogames right now, and you don't need a mighty PC to reap the benefits. Not only are these hand-crafted ports a huge win for preservation, but they inject new life into out-of-print classics while also making them more accessible. The effort to develop them has become its own AI-tinged battleground, but a lot of amazing work is being done (as dutifully cataloged by PCG editor Wes Fenlon on his emulation blog).

Playing the best versions of aged games in whatever form I want feels more like living in the future than stressing my graphics card. It's never been easier to become even the most novice of tinkerers. I'm less than a novice—just a guy still learning what a "repo" is—but I can see the highway to sicko laid before me.

Tinkerer's spirit

In that spirit, a category of gaming tech that I still consider worth it, especially if you can find a secondhand deal, is PC handhelds. The Steam Deck has become a big part of my rotation (and a Linux gateway drug) because of its versatility. It crushes every game from the 2010s and earlier, serves as an emulation powerhouse, and benefits from the best input configuration in the biz. When I want to play something it can't handle, I stream them from my office PC with Moonlight, a community-made tool that outperforms Valve's equivalent. With the addition of a dock and a great budget controller, it has become the living room PC that I default to instead of my PS5.

But when it comes to actually affordable tech, emulation handhelds are where it's at. There's this interesting thing going on where Chinese manufacturers repurpose middle-of-the-line mobile chips and phone screens to make quality, modernized portable systems at accessible prices. Many of them run Linux, but more popular is Android, a scene that's come so far that a lot of your Steam library can now run natively through translation layers (similar to how Linux can run Windows games through Proton).

You might've heard the buzz this year about this strange 3DS-looking object flying off shelves, the AYN Thor. That's an Android handheld, and a surprisingly beefy one. It can competently emulate games all the way up to Switch and even run lighter weight Steam games through the early 2010s. It also starts at $260. That's considered a lot for one for one of these. Emulation handhelds are beginning to feel the squeeze of hardware shortages—the Thor has gone up in price recently—but it gets less dire when you scale down to machines aimed at Game Boy through PSP emulation.

Plus, these things are just fun. They're genuinely pocketable, intentional devices with creative shapes that expose the boring state of glass slab phones and the Switch's standardized "screen sandwich" gaming layout. I keep eyeing this RG Rotate, a mutant Game Boy with a T-Mobile Sidekick-like swivel action that I would've killed for in 2003.

These things may not be PCs, but they reward the same tinkerer's spirit. It's an amazing time of support for PC gaming as long as your eyes aren't locked on the release calendar—a moment when more of us than ever are embracing the freedom of form factor, of open source software, and of preservation, rather than pure hardware might. I'm having a blast.

If tech had to pause sometime (it didn't, but you know, the greed), I'm at least glad it's now, because this hobby was always so much cooler than graphics.