How Your Gaming Equipment Affects Your Gameplay

Gaming is one among the most popular entertainment forms that currently exist in society. While other sectors like tv and film experience decline, the gaming industry sees growth in both game developers and players. Tech development companies have even piggy-backed the industry’s success by producing gaming equipment and other gaming-focused hardware.

The gaming industry has exponentially risen through recent decades. With over two billion active gamers worldwide, video game companies regularly earn high record sales and experience growing reach among various demographics. What was once only experienced in arcades, playing Pac-man and Galaga, is now globally available and at the comfort of your home. They’re the biggest earning entertainment sector, with an estimated 165 billion-dollar generated revenue for 2020. That’s just for one year. The gaming market itself is expected to hit a 256.79 billion value by 2025.

Typically, you can categorise gamers into two types: PC gamers and console users. Mobile gaming is also a relatively new avenue that gaming companies are starting to explore, with the release of mobile versions for already popular games like Plants vs. Zombies and League of Legends.

The Competitive Gaming Scene

Competitive gaming has existed since the arcade days, with players trying to beat each other’s high scores. But the competitive scene turned up a notch when E-sports focused itself into video games.   

There’s a great demand for competitive players in popular games like Dota 2, League of Legends, Call of Duty and StarCraft. Even retro games like Mortal Kombat and Tekken were revamped and given a spot in prestigious competitions.

Esports has become so popular, and their prize pools can reach millions of dollars. The 2019 Dota 2: The International competition had a prize pool of 34 million dollars.

It’s an extremely lucrative field not just for gamers, but also shout casters, coaches, event managers and more. In this highly competitive field, your gaming equipment could be the difference to success.

Good Equipment, Great Gameplay

Of course, skills and expertise are a huge element in gaming. But your hardware can have a big effect on your overall play. Headsets, for instance, help you in pinpointing the spatial position of sounds. This is especially important in shooter games where footsteps and gunshots give clues to enemy positions.

A good monitor gives you crystal-clear visuals in your game. PC gamers often go for screens with low input lag (the time it takes to display what’s happening in the game). Most games need a lag of about 20-30 milliseconds, anything above that and you start noticing some visual problems, including out of sync character movement.

Response time in a mouse can also be crucial to gameplay. MOBA games like Dota 2 and FPS shooters like Call of Duty put an emphasis on fast clicks and mouse drags. A good mouse not only feels comfortable in your hand, but should have easily-clickable buttons, and decent dpi (dots per inch). All of this combined helps in faster response time in games.

Gamers have many differing opinions on hardware and equipment as it is largely based on personal preference and game style. What works for others may not work for you. Test a few models out when shopping around for your equipment. Compare them with what you have and see what you like best.