50.1%—that’s the portion of my working hours I have to spend in Switzerland. At least, calculated over the year. Still, on average, I have to work at least 21.1 hours per week in Switzerland, otherwise I’ll have issues with social security. Luckily, my parents live on the Swiss border, so I don’t have to commute the entire way to the office every single workday.
I’ve now planned my workdays in Switzerland for the next few weeks, and due to company events, on-site appointments, training, and personal plans, there are quite a few days when I won’t be at home. Which is where my gaming PC is. One of my biggest hobbies, as you know. And when I am home, I want to spend that time with my girlfriend. After all, I don’t see her for several days either. It’s a real catch-22 for me.
Sure, I have a Nintendo Switch I could play on. But I’m more of a PC gamer; my main games—currently Destiny 2—aren’t available on the Switch. Even though there are many great games for Nintendo’s console, I’d rather pick up where I left off on my PC at home. Plus, I have a few PC games I still want to play, like Anno 1800, for example. That’s a tough one on the Nintendo Switch.
Besides the fact that I shouldn’t be installing games on my work laptop, it wouldn’t have enough power anyway. For an office job where I mainly work with Office products, Jira, and Confluence, that’s not necessary. But what are the alternatives? Cloud gaming comes to mind. But here, the price and fragmentation throw a wrench in the works. Xbox Cloud Gaming requires a controller and only offers a specific library; GeForce Now is expensive and also limited. On mobile devices, games without official controller support don’t work, and on a PC, the connection has to be stable. More stable than local online gameplay needs to be.
I have little desire to be kicked out of an Anno 1800 match mid-game. And if I get disconnected during a Strike or while running around the map in Destiny 2, it’s less of a big deal—the connection is back in a few seconds and I can log back in. We’re not yet at a point with cloud gaming where I see it as a permanent option for serious gaming. Not to mention, I’d have to calculate how long my 82 GB of roaming data in Switzerland would last for game streaming. According to a quick online search, somewhere between five and eight hours. And that’s without doing anything else on my smartphone. Not very satisfying.
The last option? A device for gaming on the go. There are two possibilities here: gaming handhelds, though the Steam Deck from Valve is unfortunately not an option for me because of Linux—too many of my games don’t run on it. That leaves the Asus ROG Ally and the Lenovo Legion Go as sensible options. The former not only looks bad, it’s also poorly designed and burns SD cards. The Legion Go is comparatively bulky and heavy, but you can detach the controllers and it even has a mouse.
Still, these are extra devices I have to carry around and charge. So, the most attractive option for me right now is a gaming laptop. Since our workplace allows BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), I could skip bringing my work laptop, meaning I’d still only have one device with me (plus my Kindle and smartphone). Gaming would be no problem with it either. On the other hand, gaming laptops are expensive, and I’m a bit worried about the noise. The laptop would also replace my Acer Swift 1, which—at the cost of performance—has no fans at all and therefore makes no noise. I’d rather not have what sounds like an airplane in front of me on the train or on the sofa.
The gaming laptops from Mifcom seem to have a good price-to-performance ratio. Annoyingly, you can’t try these out locally, as Mifcom only has a store near Munich. Maybe I’ll order a device and test it for a week. I’m still not sure about that.