My current gaming rig, back in the summer of '23, paid around 6000$ all in all (including monitor and every accessory). It was easily worth it, I already have thousands of hours spent on it, both for gaming and other uses. I'm also glad I managed to get a beefy rig before prices went even wilder of late.

Most expensive is this gaming laptop which was $2400 but add the $300 32 inch curved 145mhz 1440P monitor then $100 keyboard. So almost 3 grand. 

Most expensive console I bought was the PS5 at $500 in 2022.

Most expensive single game purchase was Mad Stalker on PlayStation 1. $330. Edging out MUSHA Aleste on Mega Drive at $280.

Back in 1998, I paid about $1000 for a PC just to play Ultima Online.  It actually was worth it even though I only played the game for a few months.  I ended up playing several other MMOs (like Everquest) as well as other PC games from the late 90s like HoMM3.

PC rig, roughly $3500 all in with a 4090. Worth every penny for a few reasons:

a) high gaming performance, I run all games at 120 fps which is lovely

b) prices have only increased so my rig should have some crazy good legs

c) via emulation and steam sales, no idea how much money is saved that offsets the initial costs, but it is a lot

Asus Rog Strix G16 in 2023 with Core i9 13980 HX and RTX 4090 mobile for $4500. Not the best decision since I got 2 RMAs in 2 years. But the machine is very capable and I can make some money of it due to productivity. Gaming laptops are usually not worth it, but thanks to Epic Store I got some free games. Switch OLED definitely is a great purchase for gaming, as it was my first Nintendo console in a while.

About 9,000 guilders for a maxed out Pentium 2 266 back in 1997, which would have been about $4,600, About $8,500 in today's money. Of course it was worth it, right in time for the best year in gaming ever. Half-Life was amazing on it, paired up with my brand new surround system.

For me, it's when I recently upgraded my gaming TV to an LG OLED which was around $1000 AUD, or $718 USD, cos the old one died.
It's actually a $2000 TV but I got it half price cos it's a 2025 model that they were clearing out to make room for the 2026 models.
Definitely worth it, games look phenomenal on it.

Phenomenal indeed. I finally upgraded from the monitor I got back in 2017 to a great OLED one earlier this year and my god the difference is insane. My old monitor was really good when it came out and used to look really nice to me but now looks terrible. The jump from 1440p to 4k and 144hz to 240hz is significant but seeing a display actually being able to properly display black feels as game changing as going from a CRT to an HD TV back in the day. Display tech has truly come a long way in the past decade.

Ps5 in 2021, when no store had it and the only ones who were selling it were scalpers.

I built a PC for around 2000 Euros back in 2021. It wasn't worth it at all. I barely played on that thing and even when I found the time, there was always some tinkering to do, games would crash and whatnot. I mean I had fun with stuff like that back in the day. But I simply don't have the time anymore. So I switched back to console and gifted the PC to my son, lol. He enjoys the machine a lot.

Luckily, I got gifted a PS5 Pro and could sell my PS5, so console gaming was relatively cheap for me lately. =D