Where in the world is laptop gaming the most popular?
I feel like I see a fair amount of gaming laptops in the US but a majority of people seem to still game on desktop. I guess what I am looking for is a ratio of one versus the other otherwise a country like China might dominate on numbers alone.
When looking for searching online for this I was mostly coming across pros and cons lists. This isn’t what I am after.
In Argentina it’s pretty common for a variety of reasons. To sum them up, laptops are the best way for someone here that doesn’t have knowledge to get a functional gaming computer.
Hardware is scarce and pretty expensive so building your PC is complicated without experience and pre-built PCs are absolute trash.
I’m in the US and I have a professional career. I’ve had many jobs where I’d travel around the US for short trips, or just have to work in the mountains for weeks on end, followed by trips back home via. plane or by car.
Carting a desktop and monitor around is impractical, and asking for trouble, and certainly wouldn’t fit in the carry-on luggage shelf or under an airplane seat. Additionally, gaming laptops generally have way nicer screens for watching Netflix or YouTube or whatever. I have a 17 inch Omen with a 1070 from like six+ years ago and it’s spent most of its life just being a way to use Excel, watch my favorite shows, and more recently, finally do some gaming.
Now that I’m more settled at home, I’m probably just going to buy a new gaming laptop because they’re so much more flexible than a desktop, and who cares about the most modern, graphically intense games nowadays. There are a few exceptions, but I could stay occupied forever playing games from five years ago, or whatever interesting indie release is coming out tomorrow.
I don’t have space for a desktop computer - and I have a standalone house, it’s not like I’m in some tiny apartment, so I’m guessing this isn’t too unusual? I pull out the laptop when I want to play games.
It helps that I don’t play AAA games and a decent spec laptop plays what I want just fine
I meant that in the way of mobile gaming become more feasible and widespread.
Oh, I see.
I’d say gaming on desktop is the traditional experience wouldn’t you?
Yes, I agree. I am getting the impression you are sensing/expecting a shift away from desktops due to the widespread mobile gaming you mentioned. Maybe I am too old fashioned and conservative in that sense but for me gaming should ideally be done on a desktop. Furthermore, I believe that gaming is best experienced and most desirable on a desktop.
I guess in many third world countries, the growing generation prefers prebuilt machines for gaming like laptops (mid-range) due to its ease of acquisition and portability. These are people who don’t have the dedicated income or the space to invest in a desktop.
if you have to pay 20x the minimum wage for a computer,
Hourly? Daily?
In America that would be: 150 or 1,200
But that’s gross, I don’t know how different taxes are.
But I thought prices were high due to tarrifs? Surely some basic parts could be bought without tarrifs. Especially just the savings of being able to hook up to any TV as a monitor.
It makes it easier to upgrade slowly overtime to, which helps with the tariffs.
I’m not sure I follow this, desktops are generally cheaper. And if a part is bad you can replace just that part, you have better cooling so things should last longer, and you can buy and sell parts. So both short and long term it should be cheaper.
I think op’s argument is that there is a chance of fucking up building a desktop and having wasted money. Just buying a laptop is a safe route, even if its not necessarily the cheapest.
Having all that heat in a laptop sucks bad. Maybe if a person is super into gaming and in a dorm or something they might use one for gaming. The really capable laptop GPUs like a 16GB all but negate the benefits of a laptop. The battery life is terrible, the noise is annoying, and the heat is everywhere, like blowing around the keys onto your hand. Plus you have an even more obscure hardware chain with modern laptops having all kinds of closed source and poorly supported nonsense that sucks.
Your thermals are tied between the CPU and GPU in a laptop. If either is over loaded thermally both will throttle. There are also a lot more thermal interrupt states in a laptop GPU. If anyone tries to hack around with these to push them past their inbuilt safety margins while following guides that are intended for the desktop GPU version of the hardware it can easily lead to failure.
The only real reason to get a gaming laptop is if you travel a lot, if you’re extremely space restricted like sharing a bedroom with someone, or if you’re disabled and need the ergonomics for a specific reason.
I don’t see how any aspect mentioned is regional in nature.
I don’t see how any aspect mentioned is regional in nature.
I feel like what’s in-style is going to be more important than thermals and overall specs. Maybe in some countries it’s more common to carry a laptop with you? Maybe desktops are viewed as “dated” because laptops have become the norm in schools? Maybe it has something to do with tech literacy? Maybe it’s easier to acquire desktop components versus laptops in some places?
I think it is likely that most people that buy a laptop like these, see the shit show and the scam market and say fuck that, just give me a single product that mostly works.
This attitude could be more prevalent in different areas of the world though. Imagine somewhere in Eastern Asia that’s flooded with dated low-grade products from China compared to the US where you don’t see a lot of laptop brands you’ve never heard of before. There’s going to be different levels of skepticism.
I can’t speak for everyone obviously, but my own observations lead me to believe that laptop gaming is the most “accessible” of the options for someone who wants to game on PC based on the use cases below:
Consoles are the cheapest route to play games, with a PS5 costing US$500. You get the console exclusives, but you lose the flexibility/mods/enhancements PC gaming provides, which is why some people prefer PC gaming. However, realistically, a decent gaming PC in the current market is going to cost 3 or 4 times the cost of a PS5.
That being said, one justification for the higher cost of a gaming PC is that most people need a computer anyways. The PS5 might only be $500, but if you need a computer on top of that, the difference in cost slims a bit. But in terms of what kind of computer the average person needs, you’re going to see a hard trend towards portability. A computer you can carry around is far more convenient than one you can’t.
If you opt for a desktop PC, you address the “I need a computer anyways” use case, but not the “I need a computer for school/work” one. Unless you can satisfy your mobile computing needs with just a smartphone, chances are you need a laptop anyways (or maybe a tablet) and it creates a similar added cost issue we see with the PS5+laptop situation.
So if you don’t have the budget for two computers, you go for the option that attempts to do it all—the gaming laptop. They run games, they’re portable, and in many cases more affordable than desktops with equivalent components.
But the tradeoff is that they don’t really do any of these things well. They run games, but form factor/heat output prevent most gaming laptops from being “Ultra Settings” capable. They are portable, but typically weigh a lot more than standard laptops and have a battery life of just a couple hours. They are more affordable, but then when you want to upgrade or if one component gives out, you have to replace the entire thing because everything is on one board.
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