5 Downsides Of Buying A Gaming PC In 2026

PC gaming has long been a platform of ultimate freedom. Unlike consoles, where hardware choices are few, operating systems and ecosystems are closed, and graphics are hamstrung, a PC lets you play games on any operating system, from any storefront — including emulated ones — with a powerhouse of a machine at the highest graphic settings possible, or a cheap laptop more in line with your budget. You decide. But PC gaming is not what it was in its golden years. If you’ve been tempted to ditch your console for that ultimate freedom, then there are some factors that might give you pause.

In the interest of fairness, PC gaming has gotten better in certain ways as of late. The Steam Machine (even if pricey) and SteamOS generally brought PC gaming to the living room, and Android is getting better and better by the day at running PC games. If you don’t own and/or can’t afford the necessary hardware, you can stream your games for the cost of a Netflix subscription. Just be aware that buying a gaming PC in 2026 is going to come with the deck stacked against you for these reasons.

This will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with desktop computing, but just in case: Prices are absolutely bonkers insane right now thanks to the global RAM shortage. PC Part Picker’s Price Trends graphs say it all. A 256GB SATA SSD that would have cost you around $25 in early 2025 will now cost you an average of $75; an NVMe of the same capacity also once cost $25 and has since exploded to just shy of $100. RAM is no different. Two 8GB sticks of DDR4 used to run you $50 on average, and now it’s north of $150; two sticks of 16GB DDR5 rose from less than $100 on average to now over $400, a more than fourfold increase. Video cards are also rising in some cases. Bear in mind, these are averages. The ceiling of how expensive things can get is much higher in every instance.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, expert opinions suggest we’ll be stuck in this rut until at least 2027 — likely longer — and pricing can easily get more egregious than it already is. It is hands down the worst time to buy a gaming PC. To be fair, it’s industry-wide, with the PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2 having suffered price increases, but consoles are still (generally) cheaper than comparable PCs.

Since storage and memory are integral parts of any gaming PC — and since game install sizes easily surpass 100GB for recent AAA titles and those same titles have made 16GB a common baseline — you’re going to be hurting when the bill comes due if you want enough storage to store your games and enough RAM to support them.

No more PS exclusives

PS exclusives for years were one of the primary draws to the platform, with high-quality games you couldn’t play anywhere else. Then things changed in the 2020s. Sony probably internally acknowledged that there were a whole bunch of PC gamers that wouldn’t play on PlayStation even if you gave them a PS5 for free, and so it began gradually releasing its latest exclusives as native PC ports, including blockbusters like “God of War,” “Last of Us: Part Two,” and “Spider-Man 2.” For PC gamers, this was awesome. Now you could effectively play everything (assuming you emulate Nintendo titles) with a single device. Sadly, that’s over.

Out of seemingly nowhere in March 2026, the highly anticipated “Ghost of Yotei” PC port was suddenly cancelled. It went from a concerning portent to a grim reality when Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier broke the news: Major PS exclusives on PC were over. Big upcoming titles that we had been anticipating, like “Saros,” will likely never step foot onto a PC. Only a small handful of games like “Kena: Scars of Kosmora” will still release. Needless to say, it was good while it lasted, and a potential reason not to get a gaming PC if you’re eyeing a PlayStation instead.

Having said that, there’s an absolutely gargantuan catalogue of games on PC. Over 24,000 on Steam alone. Some indie titles are “exclusive,” and won’t come to PlayStation or Nintendo. We imagine most people could live without having ever played a few dozen PS exclusives. However, this was a huge blow to anyone who enjoyed PS exclusives on PC and might impact your decision if you thought you could get two for the price of one, as it were.

Increasingly poor game optimization

While consoles are not immune to poorly optimized games, they do more or less guarantee a playable experience. Almost any game you play will run at at least 30 FPS on your 4K TV without you needing to touch the graphics settings, in my experience. The same cannot be said for PC. PC game optimization has been an issue for a long time now, but it does seem to have worsened to an embarrassing level in recent years.

It is so normal these days for a game to release broken and unplayable that the games that run well on day one stand out like sore thumbs. We’ve seen big AAA titles like “The Callisto Protocol,” “Star Wars Jedi: Survivor,” “Metal Gear Solid Delta,” and “Mafia: The Old Country” needing supercomputers to run them and even then playing like hot garbage. 2025’s “Borderlands 4” is a case study of this phenomenon. It has a “Mixed” review average on Steam in large part because of its poor optimization in a cell-shaded game with cartoonish characters, not one aiming for hyperrealism.

If you’re hoping for a happy ending, don’t. The trend hasn’t changed in 2026, with game companies rushing their launches and leaning heavily on the gum-and-duct tape of AI upscaling to make them work. Big releases like “007: First Light” and the upcoming “Gears of War E-Day” demand some heavy hardware in exchange for unsatisfactory performance. It was already an issue before the RAMpocalypse that someone with a seemingly capable gaming PC could struggle to run a modern title well, but now with the prices in the stratosphere, the problem is compounded. And there’s only so much you can do to improve gaming performance on your end.

Increasingly invasive anti-cheat and DRM systems

If you play competitive online games, it’s likely that the game has installed kernel-level anti-cheat software on your system. The kernel is a core part of your computer’s OS that communicates with the hardware. Such anti-cheat intercepts a cheater’s software tricks there, meaning you’re giving anti-cheat makers a truly skin-tingling level of control over a device where you probably have your most important accounts and most sensitive personal data. Given the tech industry’s record of infringing on user privacy, it’s not unreasonable to be alarmed by kernel-level anti-cheat.

But even if you never play any online games, there’s another way the tech industry could intrude on your system against your desires: DRM. DRM has long been reviled among the PC crowd since it can ruin game performance and force you to play online-only. However, DRM may soon become even more invasive. Game pirates recently discovered how to bypass game DRM by undermining it — literally. We won’t bore you with the technical details, but basically, pirates exploit hypervisor-based virtualization to bypass conventional DRM and make it possible to illegally play games that formerly were impossible to crack. To counter this, DRM companies may soon dig themselves even deeper into your PC, taking a page out of anti-cheat’s kernel-level method to curtail piracy.

Console owners, meanwhile, generally don’t have to worry about any of the above as consoles don’t expose users to the same third-party kernel-level software concerns as PCs, after all. Unless you are going to use your gaming PC exclusively for PC gaming and nothing else, then this will always be a sword of Damocles hanging over your head.

Windows 11

Among Windows users, Windows 11 is quite … disliked, to put it mildly, making some switch to other platforms entirely since the darling Windows 10 is now unsupported. We could inundate you with reasons why. It puts ads right in your UI; it pushes forward with wildly unpopular features like Recall; it’s had a raft of broken updates and bugs, some of which literally killed people’s hardware. Since Windows is the heart of PC gaming, you’re effectively forced to use it.

Even putting those issues aside, there are gaming-centric ones that may rear their ugly heads. There’s the fact that Windows’ native controller-first “full-screen experience” is still half-baked, in my opinion; Windows has notoriously poor sound lag; there are long-running shader compilation performance issues; various buggy updates over the years have introduced problems such as the one that borked HDR in 2024; and generally speaking, Windows as an operating system is heavy and bloated, robbing resources from your games.

Granted, Linux PC gaming — where you translate Windows games and run them seamlessly on a Linux system — has come a long way. I’ve been using Linux to play PC games for years now, and I can count on one hand the number of games that haven’t worked. Performance might even be better in some cases. But Linux gaming comes with one huge caveat that’s unacceptable for most: Competitive online games that use anti-cheat are usually unplayable. Are We Anti-Cheat Yet? documents many games that require anti-cheat, including big ones like “Fortnite,” that are either broken on or actively block Linux systems. Case in point, you either have to tolerate a deeply problematic operating system, or switch to Linux and lose access to some of your online games — we may never see a day when Linux can play all anti-cheat titles.