On Steam, anyone can purchase PC Building Simulator, a delightfully meta inversion on the hobby, in which you will get to solder together an endless supply of new machines—because who needs to game when we can instead be mesmerized by a VSync sizzle reel?PCWorld wondered aloud
"My family bought our first PC in 1995 and over the years it became a Frankenstein’s monster of parts scavenged from computers we brought home from our local dump," says Stephen Kick, CEO of Nightdive Entertainment, a publisher that resuscitates old, out-of-print PC classics, and just completed."It was through this experience I learned how to build a computer and I think for many people it became a right of passage to put your own machine together.
It is mainstream consensus today that buying a smattering of your own parts and assembling them in a PC case is cheaper than the glossy premiums you can expect at Alienware, Lenovo, or Acer. So yes, while custom-PC adherents might be elitist, much of that pretension is rooted in a desire to ensure their fledgling newcomers—Aurora owners like me—aren't getting a raw deal.
There's a funny paradox to that trend. Elitists in every other field in geekdom—from Warhammer marshals to flight-sim aficionados—all tend to look down on those whodumping a ton of their hard-earned capital in the hobby. But in the PC gaming contingency, there is nothing more casual than splurging on an all-in-one case.