No Stupid Questions

Japan? I heard the Xbox didn't do well the because it's physically larger. Space can be at a premium in certain places.

I'm in the US and I have a professional career. I've had many jobs where I'd travel around the US for short trips, or just have to work in the mountains for weeks on end, followed by trips back home via. plane or by car.

Carting a desktop and monitor around is impractical, and asking for trouble, and certainly wouldn't fit in the carry-on luggage shelf or under an airplane seat. Additionally, gaming laptops generally have way nicer screens for watching Netflix or YouTube or whatever. I have a 17 inch Omen with a 1070 from like six+ years ago and it's spent most of its life just being a way to use Excel, watch my favorite shows, and more recently, finally do some gaming.

Now that I'm more settled at home, I'm probably just going to buy a new gaming laptop because they're so much more flexible than a desktop, and who cares about the most modern, graphically intense games nowadays. There are a few exceptions, but I could stay occupied forever playing games from five years ago, or whatever interesting indie release is coming out tomorrow.

Lots of people don't have the luxury of buying a laptop and a desktop, so they buy the best laptop they can afford to and hope it works real well.

I guess in many third world countries, the growing generation prefers prebuilt machines for gaming like laptops (mid-range) due to its ease of acquisition and portability. These are people who don’t have the dedicated income or the space to invest in a desktop.

What do you mean still game on desktop??

In Argentina it's pretty common for a variety of reasons. To sum them up, laptops are the best way for someone here that doesn't have knowledge to get a functional gaming computer.

Hardware is scarce and pretty expensive so building your PC is complicated without experience and pre-built PCs are absolute trash.

I don't have space for a desktop computer - and I have a standalone house, it's not like I'm in some tiny apartment, so I'm guessing this isn't too unusual? I pull out the laptop when I want to play games.

It helps that I don't play AAA games and a decent spec laptop plays what I want just fine

Having all that heat in a laptop sucks bad. Maybe if a person is super into gaming and in a dorm or something they might use one for gaming. The really capable laptop GPUs like a 16GB all but negate the benefits of a laptop. The battery life is terrible, the noise is annoying, and the heat is everywhere, like blowing around the keys onto your hand. Plus you have an even more obscure hardware chain with modern laptops having all kinds of closed source and poorly supported nonsense that sucks.

Your thermals are tied between the CPU and GPU in a laptop. If either is over loaded thermally both will throttle. There are also a lot more thermal interrupt states in a laptop GPU. If anyone tries to hack around with these to push them past their inbuilt safety margins while following guides that are intended for the desktop GPU version of the hardware it can easily lead to failure.

The only real reason to get a gaming laptop is if you travel a lot, if you're extremely space restricted like sharing a bedroom with someone, or if you're disabled and need the ergonomics for a specific reason.

I don't see how any aspect mentioned is regional in nature.

I can't speak for everyone obviously, but my own observations lead me to believe that laptop gaming is the most "accessible" of the options for someone who wants to game on PC based on the use cases below:

Consoles are the cheapest route to play games, with a PS5 costing US$500. You get the console exclusives, but you lose the flexibility/mods/enhancements PC gaming provides, which is why some people prefer PC gaming. However, realistically, a decent gaming PC in the current market is going to cost 3 or 4 times the cost of a PS5.

That being said, one justification for the higher cost of a gaming PC is that most people need a computer anyways. The PS5 might only be $500, but if you need a computer on top of that, the difference in cost slims a bit. But in terms of what kind of computer the average person needs, you're going to see a hard trend towards portability. A computer you can carry around is far more convenient than one you can't.

If you opt for a desktop PC, you address the "I need a computer anyways" use case, but not the "I need a computer for school/work" one. Unless you can satisfy your mobile computing needs with just a smartphone, chances are you need a laptop anyways (or maybe a tablet) and it creates a similar added cost issue we see with the PS5+laptop situation.

So if you don't have the budget for two computers, you go for the option that attempts to do it all—the gaming laptop. They run games, they're portable, and in many cases more affordable than desktops with equivalent components.

But the tradeoff is that they don't really do any of these things well. They run games, but form factor/heat output prevent most gaming laptops from being "Ultra Settings" capable. They are portable, but typically weigh a lot more than standard laptops and have a battery life of just a couple hours. They are more affordable, but then when you want to upgrade or if one component gives out, you have to replace the entire thing because everything is on one board.

Check if Steam’s hardware surveys are queryable somewhere.

Desktops are simply better in terms of performance and affordability due to cooling and size constraints.

So signed, PC Master Race.