If You Want to Be a Serious Gamer, Prepare to Spend Over P100K on a Full Gaming PC

There’s never been a better time to be a competitive gamer. Globally, the esports market was valued at $1.38 billion (over P77 billion) in 2022 and this is only projected to grow further to $1.87 billion by 2025. 

That translates to more and more people, particularly young people, becoming attracted to pursue not just a career in competitive gaming, but to become hobby gamers in general. According to the latest study, there were roughly 43 million active gamers in the Philippines 2021, increasing by an average of 12.9 percent annually since 2017.

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Of course, before you abandon your college degree and strap yourselves into your gaming chair, you should be aware that getting into gaming isn’t exactly as simple as, well, playing a video game. First and foremost, you’ll need the right hardware, and while mobile gaming has seen a huge surge in the past few years, driven largely by the popularity of games like Mobile Legends, desktop gaming is still pretty huge. 

This has led deals and discounts platform Picodi to conduct a study on just how expensive it is to purchase a full-spec gaming PC on various countries across the globe.

In the Philippines, the breakdown is as follows:

Motherboard – ?8,180

6-core CPU – ?13,640

RTX 3060 graphics card – ?25,890

16 GB of RAM – ?5,780

Power supply – ?6,750

1 TB HDD/SSD – ?5,440

PC case with good ventilation – ?5,530

Also, you’re going to need to purchase a legit operating system license, and if you choose Microsoft, that’s around P5,500.

And then, you’re going to need a bunch of peripherals to make gaming as smooth and as easy as possible. That includes:

Ergonomic gaming mouse – ?2,880

RGB keyboard with wrist rest – ?4,310

Headset with a microphone – ?3,530

24-inch monitor with high refresh rate – ?14,240

In total, Filipino gamers in the Philippines would need to shell out about P101,670 on a gaming PC and a full set of peripherals.

Photo by Picodi.

Finally, you need to purchase the actual games themselves, and those don’t come cheap. According to Picodi, assuming that an average gamer buys one game a month, they will spend an estimated ?29,520 for them annually.

Elsewhere in the world, gamers in Argentina need to pay the highest price for a gaming PC in the world at $4,238 roughly P237,000), while Polish gamers can enjoy the lowest component prices at $1,547 (P86,300).

Expanding the study to reflect how expensive a full gaming rig costs relative to a country’s average wages, Picodi found out that a gamer in the Philippines with an average annual wage of P72,051 would need to spend 1.4 times that amount to get the full gaming PC. 

Photo by Picodi.

In this price comparison, the most favorable ratio can be found in Switzerland (0.3 of an average wage), the USA (0.4) and Australia (0.4). Citizens of Indonesia, Pakistan and Argentina have to face the least favorable ratio as gamers from those countries will have to spend 8.7, 10.4 and 12.4 of their wages, respectively. 

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