PC gamers waiting for “Black Myth” end up getting squeezed by rising PC prices instead?

For players who want to play major titles like Black Myth: Wukong and Baldur’s Gate 3 properly on PC, the hardware landscape over the next year or two is likely to become even harsher. According to the latest report from Omdia, the entire PC industry is shifting its focus away from budget users and targeting a new core audience: instead of students who just need something that “can run the game,” they’re now aiming at high-end players willing to spend significantly more. Widespread supply chain shortages have driven up both full-system prices and component costs. With profit margins being squeezed, manufacturers have made a choice that’s not very friendly to gamers: they’re proactively abandoning mass shipments of low-priced machines and concentrating their efforts on the mid-to-high price segments.

The structural shift is quite clear in the data. Omdia expects PC sales in the 1,300–1,499 USD price range to increase significantly, while the market size for models under 500 USD may plunge by 35%. This basically spells the decline of many “budget legends” and “student savior” series, which will become increasingly rare in the coming years. The pressure points behind this are obvious: continued memory price hikes combined with long-term CPU and GPU shortages mean that to keep the same retail price for a given machine, the profit manufacturers must sacrifice has exceeded what they can bear. The only option is to concentrate limited resources on segments with thicker margins.

In the short term, the impact on the gaming ecosystem will hit indie games and casual players first. Many users who only want to play indie or Roguelike titles like Vampire Survivors and Hades at 1080p on medium settings used to get by just fine with a 400–500 USD thin-and-light laptop. Now, those new models may simply vanish, leaving only clearly marked-up “gaming laptops” and high-priced productivity-focused machines. Brands like ASUS and Acer, which used to be very active in the entry-level market, are being forced to pull back their low-end lines under current cost and supply pressures. If they push further into the high-end segment, they will directly squeeze out that group of budget players who once provided the demographic dividend for indie games.

For players who want to seriously play AAA titles, however, this is actually a situation that calls for more strategic thinking: if you were already planning to spend around 1,300 USD on a rig for Black Myth: Wukong or the next The Witcher, that price band will in fact be the key battleground manufacturers focus on over the next two years. The product lines there will be richer, and refresh cycles more aggressive. My suggestion is: if your budget is tight but you want to cover both indie games and mainstream AAA titles, in the short term you can consider grabbing older models in the 500–800 USD range while they’re still being cleared out, or switch to a console plus a light office laptop combo. If you were already aiming for high-end, then mentally prepare yourself to “buy early even if it’s expensive,” because once this structural adjustment plays out, the window for snagging good, cheap configurations will only get narrower.