Be Excellent To Each Other

So how much do you think your going to spend on gaming in 2016

Are you going to enter the next generation with a PS4 / Xbox One or whatever Nintendo's new console is ?

Are there big games you are going to grab on day 1 - or will you wait for the magic £20 mark ?

Post your estimate here and try and keep track of just how much money you are throwing away when instead you could be outside !

2011 thread : viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6653
2012 thread : viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8199
2013 thread : viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9209
2014 thread : viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9879
2015 thread : viewtopic.php?f=3&t=10294

Post your prices inside <> symbols and Grim...'s magic tracker will total everything up for you : http://www.beexcellenttoeachother.com/c ... sh2016.php

You can also put negative values in if you've sold items back

I'm going for £1200-£1500 this year purely because with my PC getting on a bit and the Oculus out soon I suspect this'll be the year I bite the bullet and upgrade. Given that I'll want something nicely future proofed and I'll buy an Oculus headset and I'll probably spring for a new monitor while I'm at it £1500 might end up being conservative.

I thought for a glorious moment that I was wise enough to do 2016's counter when I did the 2015 one.

Alas, I was not.

Done it now, though.


Zaphod. Really.

Cut n paste from last thread - I will change it now so next years will be correct :-)

WoW account will be £120. (There are three accounts for the family which is £360, but only one of the accounts is my personal expense, and Mrs Hearthly and Hearthly Jnr would still have theirs even if I didn't have mine, so I'll just count £120 there).

(Did the pre-orders for the next expansion last month otherwise that would have been another £35, or £105 overall.)

Other than that I'm not expecting to spend much at all. I've already got my console for this generation (Wii-U) and the only game I can really see on the horizon for that is Zelda, so that'll be £50 I guess. XBone and PS4 are pretty much a zero-interest proposition for me, can't see any spend there.

I keep thinking I'll buy a new PC but the Saturday night sessions with the guys where my current PC cheerfully kicks BF4 around all maxed out (2560x1440@60FPS@ULTRA) constantly pulls me back from dropping the best part of £1500 on a new PC that'll basically, erm, just do the same thing. I did get the GTX970 last year for GTAV and that appears to have given the PC the boost it needs to keep it going until it drops. I'm not right fussed about 4K, so I can see this old PC lasting another year. (CPU, mobo and RAM now over seven years old, and I bought them second hand for £180. Case is now ten years old.)

Beyond that maybe a few quid on mobile games for my Shield.

Hearthstone I'm largely freeloading now apart from the adventure expansions so let's allow £40 for that.

Usually chuck a few quid at stuff that comes up in Steam/GOG sales, maybe another £50 there.

Might grab the last bit of the Starcraft 2 campaign (Protoss) when it turns up cheap, which it will do.

There'll probably be another couple of seasons for Pinball Arcade and they'll be insta-purchases, so I guess around £60 in total there based on previous pricing.

Overall I'm going to say £300-£400. Where I'm really saving cash on gaming these days is:

1) No need to buy consoles or constantly upgrade PC to play the snazziest games.

2) The major 'franchises' pretty much leave me totally cold or have turned to shit, I certainly wouldn't pre-order the deluxe edition of a SimCity game ever again, for example. Also BF4 was effectively broken for a year, so the smart money there would have been on waiting for that period of time and snagging it in a sale. (Me and the guys have had fuck all to do with BF Hardline and the Star Wars FPS game.)

3) The endurance of really good games like Hearthstone, WoW, Pinball Arcade. And also fruit machine emulation and MAME and suchlike. i.e. Low cost or free.

Price: approx £260 or the same as a console.


Ah, the old 'I own a gaming PC to save money' argument. Just like how people who read Playboy for the articles.

If you buy every console day-one (which is a rather profligate thing to do) you're spending about £350-400 three times every six to eight years. That's not much. Or to put it another way, if you amortise console cost over its lifetime, you'd spend less on a PS4 per year than you've budgeted for Steam and GOG sales this year.

I think i will get No Man's Sky and 3 more PSN subs.

popcorn.gif

What else would you want Playboy for?

I've not been very consistent with my spending. In the three years I've participated I've spent £400, £1300 and £1000.

I'll go for £1000 this year as I'm sure I'll get a new PC and some form of VR headset.

There's no way I can spend as much as last year so I'm going for £800-£1000.

Is the PS4 headset due this year? If so, that will bump me up by quite a bit, though I tried an Oculus Rift recently and didn't get on brilliantly with it.

WAIT WHAT?

TBH Doc I wasn't making any money saving arguments for the PC as a gaming platform versus the consoles or anything else, just that my overall gaming spend is lower because the PC upgrade cycle is slower now (and I'll cite my 7+ years old CPU+mobo+RAM again!), and in my situation the consoles have become largely redundant, especially if your chums are on the PC platform as well.

Last gen I got a 360 as it did stuff PCs of the time couldn't do, whereas now I don't see anything that makes me want an XBone or PS4, so I'm spending less cash on gaming overall in that regard for example.

The Wii-U I got specifically for a small number of games that are exclusive to the platform, Mario Kart 8 and DKC Tropical Freeze were damn near worth the price of entry alone. (And Rayman Legends, although that's on other platforms now.)

Mobile gaming spend is less now too, whereas in the past I'd have something like a Nintendo DS with expensive games, now I just use my phone or a £150 tablet where the games cost buttons. (The £150 on the Shield missed this year's spend as it was a December purchase.)

The motion tracking was very good, but it did strange things to my sense of balance and I could only use it for a few minutes.

Boo, you aren't supposed to provide a reasonable response! Get a 360!

I am now considering that enhanced paternity leave stuff. If it works with no mans sky

mmm more than 2015 i'm afraid...

<949.98> PC Specialist Vanquish Elite II Gaming PC

Go big or go home.

Does it play CD's?

Yes!

Traitor. What kind of hipster takes that to a coffee shop?

Yeah because I often took my MacBook to my local independently-run coffee emporium for a London Fog and a few laps of Indianapolis.

<mutters>

<1.44> on The Room 3 for Android.

<39.99> Steam controller

I started off the year quite well. I bought Just Cause 3 on the 4th for £21 (g2a) and then two days later BLOPS 3 for £21 also (g2a)

I've put £100-£200 because tbh looking around there's about 4 PC games I want this coming year.

Funny story about the Steam Controller. In my mind, i've been using it like a mouse even for first person shooters so up is up and down is down but when I go back to the PS4 controller suddenly I can't play a FPS with invert, which is my norm.

Crazy.

Related story: I used to be an invert Y person - then I played World War 2 Online which didn't have the option. So I trained myself to use it the normal way. And then I couldn't go back.

Same here, different game.

Aye. I now use non inverted mouse after using inverted controller having originally learnt on inverted mouse

Is controller any good?

If you like fiddling with stuff you'll enjoy fiddling around with this stuff. If you don't, you might find messing around with it a bit of a chore as it ain't exactly plug-n-play (although you can, for all intents, plug it in and it works) (after downloading some firmware and, hnnngh, using Big Picture).

And I didn't even realise how to engage the gyroscope until I read about it on Reddit. Stupid thing has this stupid symbol on big picture. Stupid. Anyway, that's quite good.

So, yeah. I kinda like it.

Big Picture is mainly fine, and it defaults to that using the Steam Link anyway.

From what I've heard the default best-voted community config for each game is applied automatically. Have you found that?

I've not noticed that happening. When I played Black Mesa all the moves were already mapped to the controller so it might have happened then but when I played The Forest (which is really cool by the way, but I haven't really played enough of it beyond an hour) it didn't recognise the Steam Controller at all.

I might have to load up a few more games to see what happens.

I'm off the mark!
Mario party 6 <30>
Another world: 20th anniversary edition <3.20>

£30 for Mario Party?! Cor.

Nintendo games never get cheap, sadly. One of the reasons I'm happy to buy on day one usually.

I'd have totally sold you my copy for a tenner.

But does it come with the microphone and cardboard box?

If it does... I'll be annoyed.

<1.08> on Reveal the Deep for Android.

<9.99> on Everybody's Gone to the Rapture.

spoiler: Everybody has gone to the rapture.

(It's obviously a gripping story, given I can no longer remember why everyone vanished)

A boy and his blob <6.79>
Asteroids deluxe <1.99>

Yeah. I loved the setting, but the story was like a sub-standard Radio 4 play.

<0.60> Ghosts of Memories for Android.

XCom 2 - Steam <34.99>
Ace Patrol Bundle - Steam <1.19>

<2.16> on Plug & Play for Android.

<76.38> XCOM 2 w/ DLC pass and Steam Controller

Edit -- Jesus, I'm ahead of TheVision on the score board. Ruh roh.