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

That special moment when you find the perfect GPU for your build, only to discover it costs more than your car payment, rent, and firstborn child combined. The crypto miners and scalpers have turned hardware shopping into a financial horror movie. Just smile through the pain as you contemplate selling a kidney on the black market for that sweet, sweet RTX performance.

The four-panel descent into game dev reality hits harder than a production bug on release day! It starts with pure optimism: "we make the game" (cue innocent developer dreams). Then the marketing team swoops in with their brilliant strategy: "we market the game to the people who want to play the game" (revolutionary, I know). But then comes the soul-crushing realization in duplicate panels: "we realize nobody actually wants to play this game." That moment when you discover your revolutionary procedurally-generated roguelike dating sim with blockchain integration isn't actually appealing to... well, anyone. This is why market research before writing a single line of code isn't just good practice—it's emotional self-preservation!

LinkedIn optimization at its finest. Rejecting the harsh reality of "broke and unemployed" in favor of the much more impressive "full time indie game developer" – which is technically the same thing but with a Steam page that has 3 wishlists (all from family members). The resume gap becomes a "focused development period" and ramen dinners transform into "startup culture."

The digital hoarding phenomenon strikes again! That sweet dopamine hit from clicking "Purchase" during Steam sales is vastly superior to the actual commitment of downloading and playing the games. My Steam library has more unplayed titles than a bookshelf at an illiterate's house. It's basically a digital museum of good intentions at this point. The backlog grows faster than technical debt in a startup with no code reviews.

THE ULTIMATE BETRAYAL! 💔 Imagine thinking you're safe with your gaming setup when suddenly your "mom" knows EXACTLY what GPU you're rocking! The horror! The Terminator isn't just hunting John Connor—he's hunting kids with clueless parents who can't tell an RTX from a toaster! That moment when your AI overlord exposes your foster parents as tech-savvy imposters because NO REAL PARENT knows what an RX 9070 XT is without being a literal killing machine from the future. Peak silicon-based betrayal right there!

Remember when games were actually games and not elaborate schemes to empty your wallet? The Vince McMahon reaction meme perfectly captures the unicorn that is a quality game in 2023. First, it's free? Mild interest. Could run on a potato from 2017? Now we're talking. No microtransactions? Holy crap, that's rare. But great replayability too?! That's like finding a bug-free production release – theoretically possible but I'll believe it when I see it. Meanwhile, modern AAA studios are shipping 200GB games that require a NASA supercomputer and still ask you to pay $4.99 for a slightly different colored hat. The gaming industry really took "monetize everything" a bit too literally.