The struggle of the everyday gamer

We are all gamers ’till the end right? Well I hope so. With that comes some ups and down, and some struggles that we face every day in our gaming life.

Some of these struggles you might not be able to relate to, while others will sympathize with me on them as they know exactly what I am talking about. Money problems, new hardware, large installation times, we have it hard guys.

New Game announcements

We all love new game announcements, and when E3 comes around or a company reveals something we have been waiting all our lives for, we cannot help but get excited for it.

Then reality sets in, we sit back after the trailer has been replayed 17 times, and realize that we will need money to buy this game which has just blessed our lives.

As we work out our finances and cancel our Netflix for a few months, the darn publisher then trolls us even more and reveals a shiny Collector’s Edition with a pretty bust and a Season Pass to go along with it. We now realize that a second job might be in order to pay for the game.

It has now been two weeks since we spent a car payment on a game and we are somewhat happy with the purchase, until DLC is revealed for the game which is not included in our Season Pass – and we have to have it.

The Internet from Hell

If anything, the past few years have proven that without internet, your gaming experience is not as good as it should be. This is where the biggest struggle comes about, as it affects every single part of our daily gaming life.

We battle to host a decent online lobby, we only play pre-ordered games two days after release due to slow pre-load downloads, and once a game has been deleted due to lack of storage space, it will never be downloaded again.

If you are lucky enough to have fast internet, then good for you, but your cap probably ruins your life just as much as our slow downloads.

Batteries just do not last

Console gamers will understand what I am going on about here. When you are raiding and have to have an extra controller on charge at all times so you can swap when the one you are using goes flat.

The worst thing though, is when you are so into the game that you forget the “low battery” sign appeared 40 minutes ago, and forgot to change controllers.

Poor battery life in controllers has been a real threat to gaming in recent years, and as much as we say “hey, I charged it yesterday” – you did, the battery life just sucks.

We then have the issue of the wires, and this gets to me because we dealt with wires for our entire childhood, and to sit on the floor in front of our consoles just won’t do.

Someone always has one better than yours

Just when you think you have the best PC build in the world. A GTX 980 with all the SSD space you will ever need. You PC boots up in 2 seconds and instantly loads into Star Wars: Battlefront. Your entire PC is liquid cooled with more LED lights than a Lady Gaga concert.

As you are enjoying your gaming session on your PC hardware, your phone starts to light up with texts from your friend who has just upgraded his PC.

He now packs a GTX 1080 Founders Edition, with an Acer Predator curved LED 4K screen, double the SSD space you have, and some HyperX 2,666MHz DDR4 RAM. No amount of LED lights can brighten up your day.

Not enough time in the world.

You could win the lotto and stay at home for the rest of your life and play games, there will still not be enough time to play them all. As we all rush through our daily lives in order to keep the starvation away and the games coming in on a regular basis, we all want more time to play.

Those two hours we sit and play World of Warcraft feel like 20 minutes, and it feels like we got nothing done at all. We then start to ration ourselves on different games every hour or so, so we can spread our time equally.

It all fails terribly in the end, as we end up playing games which we really should not be playing anyway, and the games we sat down to play, are left in the dark.

The Constant feeling of being taken advantage of

If anything, being a gamer today feels like you are a piece of cake and everyone out there wants a piece of you. From the moment we learn of a new game, all the way up to the moment the game hits the sales bin, we are forever being abused by the system.

Expensive games which lack content, overpriced DLC and in-game purchases, and constant bugs and issues with a full-priced game. We have it rough, as we are not taken seriously enough most of the time, and we are more like cash cows than anything else.

Games come and go and we are forced to spend more and more money on lackluster experiences, which most of the time are locked behind even more pay walls.

Remasters are released, forcing us to spend the same amount of money on games we already owned before. It is just not pretty. The biggest struggle of being a gamer today, is being a gamer today.