RISING STEAM

How much would an average Steam user's PC cost, if you bought the parts in 2023?

- Phil Iwaniuk

Back in June, the Bank of England raised its interest rates to a nice round five percent. It's a single number that tells a much wider story about the impact of Covid and Brexit on our economy. Often what we read in the news feels worrying in some abstract form - it's simply a loop that we can't close, some unwelcome chaos that's sufficiently distant from our observable world that it's gone again by the time we put our phone away. But this isn't that.

Our country's economic health affects just about everything in our observable world: the price of boiling the kettle while we check the news on our phone. The monthly tariff of the phone contract. The price of the tea bags. And thank you for bearing with me for this long while I get this thing touched down on the runway - the price of PC gaming. Which is the real kicker, obviously. We're all aware of and sensitive to those who are most vulnerable to economic fluctuations, but it's human nature that we notice national-scale phenomena like this most acutely when it starts to affect our leisure time. And from £79.99 standard editions on Steam to graphics cards that offer 35-year mortgage plans, the economic impact of our recent history has most certainly affected our shared interest.

With thoughts like this in my mind, I visited Steam's latest user hardware survey to see what it might reveal about the present situation. Valve's storefront and game library platform pulls system data from all consenting users periodically and releases a handy little report that shows what hardware specs everyone's actually using at the moment. Obviously it isn't limited to the UK, so we can't extrapolate the impact of the BoE's interest raise hike on Steam's survey, but neither is the economic situation of 2023 localised to British shores. We're all in it, everyone with a Steam account.

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