I think the “patient gamer” model could be the way through don’t buy new shit and encourage your friends to play older games too. Hardware can be not great and the games are cheap.

How long is that going to work though? Today’s slop is not going to unslop in 5 years, and it seems like every big name game publisher is exclusively doing slop now. Especially the optimization issue won’t go away, and it looks like the times where you could just wait for a generation or two of more powerful hardware are over, too - hardware might be getting more powerful, but the performance per dollar isn’t improving because the performance is only improving incrementally and the prices are getting higher and higher.

There are options that don’t involve buying. Open source games exist.

I’m talking about the hardware. “not buying” that and getting away with it is quite a bit harder than for software.

Cheaper hardware also exists, raspberry pi can run loads of games. Could even run old flash games on it.

Pis (Pi’s? Pi-s?) are cool, but it seems like overkill in this case. A second-hand thinkpad should be accessible enough, both cost-wise and difficulty-wise.