“No one buys physical releases anymore. Did you see how poorly physical copies of GTA6 sold? Consumers clearly want always online subscription services!”

I'm making the argument that gaming is not a cheap hobby.

It can't be cheap regardless of what is stated.

The cost of your steam deck alone has already ate up over two thirds of what I have spent fishing in the past ten or so years and that's with a rod, a few ice fishing rigs and buying a yearly fishing license.

Gaming is not a cheap hobby. There are ways that you can make it cheaper, but I would never agree that it is one of the lesser expensive hobbies.

I think I would have to agree with your metric of 400 being the starting point., because this Steam Deck is probably the cheapest option you can have for a gaming system at this point but that's not going to provide you with any games. You are going to have to find some way of doing so, and for someone who just spent $400 on a gaming unit, that probably means you're going to be spending money on the Steam store. Because it's not like Epic Game Studios allows you to retroactively redeem every freebie they offer. (by the way, unrelated, but Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 has been put as a freebie again on Epic Store this week, and if you didn't grab it the first time, it is a good game.). You would be locked down to buying, waiting or finding one of the various gatchas that Steam has on the platform and then hoping that it runs without having to install a custom proton like dw or something

I spent $150 on my rod, another $100 on my ice fishing rig, and I have spent 30 a year for my fishing license. You can also include the boat, if you like, which would be $50 that I spent 15 years ago(second hand), but I generally fish off the shore.

Now, I will agree with you that if you're doing deep sea fishing, that's where the $$$ is. My parents do that. I couldn't do it. Because that's like $1,500 for the boat trip, or buying a boat that can handle the ocean. on top of the at minimum $300 deep-sea fishing poles because everything needs to be stronger and weighted

But I definitely don't agree that fishing as a whole is a more expensive hobby than gaming, that concept is absolutely ludicrous to me. an entry or minimalistic fisher vs entry minimalistic gamer; the fisher is going to spend less.

I put gaming a little bit under golfing in terms of expensive hobbies. Because with golf you have a metric buttload of different clubs that you need for it. So it's a really, really high upfront price, and then a relatively low upkeep.

That's how I see gaming, a high upfront cost, and a moderate upkeep.

You can take a photo of the same mountain with the latest and fanciest canon or whatever and your grandma's old film camera, but you can't play a lot of games with few years old gaming PC

For example my old gaming PC with 1st gen Ryzen and rx6600 while quite new (~2018-2020 I think) is already severely underspecced to play some modern games even on lowest graphics settings. Luckily I don't have any interest on playing anything except a little classic wow and oats, so don't really care of upgrading

Having $1k+ disposable money makes you kinda wealthy though