The Real Monster: Steam Sales

OH. MY. GOD. The absolute TRAGEDY of watching your FPS counter drop to 58! The HORROR! Meanwhile, console players are over there like "is something wrong?" with their peasant-level 30 FPS expectations. SWEETIE, you just wouldn't understand the EXISTENTIAL CRISIS that occurs when you've spent $3000 on a gaming rig only to experience a 2-frame drop. It's like watching your firstborn child stumble slightly while walking - UTTERLY DEVASTATING. PC gamers silently suffering in our 144Hz prison while console players live in blissful ignorance. The AUDACITY of them to even speak to us during these trying times!

That's the Portal cake logo with "The MSRP is a lie" repeated like a dystopian mantra. Graphics card prices haven't been this fictional since cryptocurrency miners were building rigs in their mothers' basements. Manufacturers slap on MSRPs that belong in fantasy novels while retailers mark them up to "market value" – which is corporate speak for "whatever desperate gamers will pay." Nothing says "modern computing" like needing a second mortgage for a GPU that'll be obsolete before you finish paying it off.

Oh. My. GOD. The ABSOLUTE POWER TRIP when you make even the TINIEST thing work in Scratch! 💅 Suddenly you're not just a beginner coder - you're a TECH OVERLORD surrounded by your empire of monitors, ready to hack the Pentagon with your block-based programming skills! The way this character is DROWNING in hardware after making what's probably just a cat sprite move two pixels to the right is the most accurate representation of beginner programmer ego I've ever witnessed. We go from "I figured out how to use an if-statement" to "I am basically Tony Stark" in 0.2 seconds flat!

Meta spent $13 billion on their "Horizon" metaverse and all they got was avatars that look like they were rendered on a potato. "Legs are coming soon!" is the kind of feature announcement you'd expect from a game in 2003, not something that cost twice Electronic Arts' annual revenue. At this rate, Mark's going to need another $50 billion just to add eyebrows that don't look haunted. Meanwhile, The Sims 3 from 2009 is over here with fully functioning humans that can already woohoo in hot tubs.

Ah yes, the classic "budget gaming PC" paradox. Spend $9,950 on a shiny new RTX GPU, then house it in what appears to be a case salvaged from the Chernobyl exclusion zone. Because priorities! Nothing says "I understand resource allocation" like putting a Formula 1 engine in a rusted-out 1987 Toyota Corolla. The dust alone in that case is probably older than half the games in your Steam library that you'll never play. But hey, at least you can run Crysis at 240fps while slowly developing a respiratory disease from the airborne archaeological dig happening inside your tower.

The eternal hardware flex vs. reality gap! When you're watching those VR optimization videos, everything seems so achievable—just tweak a few settings and boom, silky smooth gameplay! Then reality hits when some YouTuber casually drops that they're running a rig with components that cost more than your car. For the uninitiated: an RTX 4090 is NVIDIA's flagship graphics card (~$1600) and "9800x3d" likely refers to AMD's high-end CPU with 3D V-Cache technology (~$500). That's basically the computing equivalent of saying "yeah my daily driver is just a modest little Lamborghini." Meanwhile, the rest of us are over here with our GTX 1060s trying to figure out which settings to turn down so our headsets don't transform into PowerPoint presentations with extra steps.