[_coldfire]

>I'm legitimately worried about the long term future of my hobby (PC gaming)

The equipment required for gaming loses value very quickly. Old 7970's released in 2012 command amazing resale prices in 2018. Everything else in a rig back then is now worthless apart from scrap metal.

GPU's are one of the biggest expenses for gaming, as a hobby it got far cheaper. The fear is unfounded and this is typical alarm-journalism.

Now if only CPU's held value 6 years from now.

[bo1024]

My i7 2600k from 2011 is still doing great now, even not overclocked. Maybe not much resale, but I would guess it would play almost all games today fine (not much of a gamer myself). Actually, the upgrade from DDR3 to DDR4 is probably as much of a factor.

[freeflight]

As an avid gamer, with an i7 2600k@5GHZ I can confirm that it's still up to the task with anything I've thrown at it so far, the bottleneck is pretty much always the GPU, and it's not looking like that will be changing anytime soon.

And I'm still sticking with DDR3, which runs with way sharper timings compared to DDR4.

[distances]

> Old 7970's released in 2012 command amazing resale prices in 2018. Everything else in a rig back then is now worthless apart from scrap metal.

RAM is much more expensive and keeps resale value well. I could sell my 16GB from 2012 now almost for twice the price (!!), which is also keeping me from upgrading to 32GB.

[gspetr]

Monetary value, perhaps.

Gaming value? Actually the reverse is true - everything in my i5-3570K's rig is from 2012, except for the GTX 1080 and it ran everything 2017 @1440p very well.

Admittedly no BF1 or PUBG as I grew tired of the FPS genre a long time ago.