Gaming is becoming more and more of a mainstream hobby and more and more something that is acceptable for adults and families. While gaming is a great and immersive form of entertainment though, it is also unfortunately a rather expensive hobby and with consoles selling for a few hundred dollars at a time and computer games often costing $50 or more, it’s a much more expensive way to enjoy yourself than watching TV is or listening to music.
If you want to enjoy playing the latest games then without spending a small fortune, you need to be a bit strategic. Here are some ways that you can enjoy gaming more cost effectively.
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Image by Flickr user : szogun000
Rent
Very few of us will ever finish every computer game we ever play and just like your book shelf your games shelf is probably made up at least 50% of games you haven’t finished. As such then it was probably really rather a waste of money to buy those games when you could have just rented them from a games rental store and played them for a couple of days.
Borrow
Likewise you can also borrow games from friends or swap. This will work particularly well if you do it in a strategic manner – for instance one of you buys one new game, and the other one of you buys the other. Then when you’ve both completed the games you swap and try the other ones – and you can agree on who keeps each one.
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Trade
You can also trade your games in with the games stores and most will give you a lot of money off your next purchase depending on what you’re trading in. Even if you don’t trade games every time, you can still probably get a lot of money off of your next purchases if you take in a few games that have been collecting dust on your shelves lately to get money off next time you buy.
Wait
As with new DVDs, one of the best ways to enjoy a game more cheaply is to just wait for a bit before you buy. If there’s a new game out that you want, just wait a few weeks and you should find that the cost gets significantly slashed and you save a lot of money as a result.
And if you can’t wait? Then a great solution is to just rent the game for a bit to see if you like it and so you can experience it right away, and to then buy the game only once you know you’re a fan and once it’s come down in price to provide a good deal.
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OnLive
OnLive is an interesting service that aims to change the way we enjoy games. The idea here is that you don’t actually download the games, but rather just stream them from a server that handles the processing. This means that an old PC can play games that are designed to run on top of the range devices, but it also means you can save a significant amount of money particularly by using the rental feature that gives you the game to play for three days or ten days for a very reasonable price.
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Download
And if you don’t want to stream the games then you can still use a service like Steam to download them at a fraction of the cost it would have been to buy them. Of course it’s cheaper here because the overheads are that much lower for the publishers.
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I play a lot of games daily and always looking for new one. You have given some good ideas there.
There are loads of online games, that you play within a browser as well, such as Tibia, World of Warcraft, but great post. Saving money is always appreciated.
What an interesting article! Great job Peter! Entertainment is expensive these days including gaming. This article have given me other options to enjoy great games. Thanks for sharing this.
There are many free games that are of excellent quality and therefore you do not need to go broke nowadays. Of course, you can also wait for the price of a new game to drop and get it used from someone else. The internet definitely helped to distribution and accessibility of computer games and the technology allowed less exprienced programmers to come up with great idea and new games.
Cheers,
Jenn – midoritech.com
This is good information but now everyone is doing this thing. No doubt when a game come in the market, every game lover wants to play it as soon as possible. But some guys confused what should they do. This is very suitable article for these boys who want guidance to play newly arrived games. I am living in Canada and also a game lover too. I prefer to rent games instead to purchase them.
Playing the game is fun. I play much game on my android. but on PC i think more comfortable. I have collection free app game for PC and android. And i was write to people some reference site where they get free app. any how, i really enjoy your post. Thank for sharing.
Thanks for your tips Peter. For me, i can just buy some used laptop with pretty good specs on it and play some average 3D games with it. In fact, my old-mediocre-used HP Compaq laptop can be used to play some decent games like Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow or PES 2009. It’s really fun that we can have a great time with our computer/laptop without spending big money.