Why Is Pre-Ordering Games Like This Now...

Remember when NVIDIA politely asked you to upgrade your graphics card? Those were the days. Now they sit on their silicon throne, looking down at us mere mortals with contempt. "Buy our $2000 GPU or continue living in your pathetic low-polygon world, peasant." The transformation from humble tech company to aristocratic overlord is complete. And we just keep throwing money at them like the desperate frame-rate addicts we are.

Ah, the glamorous life of game development! Pour your soul into creating digital worlds for three years, surviving on coffee and dreams, only to be rewarded with angry pre-teens threatening your existence because the latest patch nerfed their favorite weapon. That exhausted character is every indie dev who's ever checked Steam reviews after launch day and discovered their masterpiece has been review-bombed because "loading screens take too long" or "the main character's hair clips through their hat sometimes." The dark circles under those eyes aren't from the character model—they're a feature of the job description!

Behold the evolution of PC justification logic: Normal brain: "I need this RTX 4090 for school spreadsheets." Glowing brain: "This 64GB RAM setup is essential for my remote work meetings." Enlightened brain: "My liquid-cooled rig is purely for watching YouTube at 1080p." Transcendent cosmic brain: "I spent $3000 on this battlestation to play Stardew Valley and occasionally open Notepad++."

Game engines: either drowning in endless menus or making you frantically jump through hoops to accomplish basic tasks. The comic nails it by sorting them into just two categories - "menus" (looking at you, Unity) or "parkour" (hello, Unreal). Anyone who's tried to find that one specific setting buried in Unity's seventeen nested dropdown menus knows the pain. Meanwhile, Unreal devs are performing mental gymnastics just to implement a simple "Hello World" blueprint. And poor Unity, getting called out for "jumping around a lot" yet still being classified as "menus" - the ultimate burn for an engine trying so hard to be developer-friendly. It's like being told you dance like a spreadsheet.

Remember when 8GB VRAM was god-tier? Now it's the bare minimum for running those bloated AI models and rendering engines. $400 for entry-level specs that would've been flagship material a decade ago is the new normal. The hardware inflation is so bad that we're genuinely excited about mediocrity. Next we'll be celebrating when our IDE opens in under a minute.

Remember when buying a GPU was just an expense and not a second mortgage? In 2009, dropping $500 on a graphics card felt like a splurge. Fast forward to 2025, and you're staring at a $4,799 price tag with the same horrified expression as someone who just found out their entire codebase has no comments. Thanks crypto miners, AI enthusiasts, and whatever unholy alliance of market forces conspired to make rendering pixels cost more than my first car. At this rate, we'll soon be trading organs for ray tracing capabilities.