Mr.Self Destruct
Chosen Undead
It depends on how recent the purchase was. I've noticed a disturbing trend of increasing prices for gaming laptops from reputable online specialist retailers like powernotebooks and agearnotebooks. A few years go you could have gotten one of the lower end MSI or Asus gaming laptops for around $800-$900, but today the lower end models are priced several hundred dollars higher. Retailers like Xotic PC only offer laptops with Intel HD graphics for lower prices. I suspect this is because we've reached a point where gaming laptop hardware components are beginning to outpace the demands of high end PC games which means the old addage of shorter lifespan for gaming laptops versus gaming desktops is going to become less true.As Sean said, the price paid for your machine was a rip off. And it's sad because in the end, people are willing to pay for something that should be good and works as advertised but the devil is always in the details.
Video game software developers can only push the demands on PC resources so far and when you look at the amount of detail on games like Arkham City and Skyrim maxed out with visual improvement mods, it's hard to imagine developers being able to do much more. MMOG's can push the envelope further but the developers generally are reluctant to do this because they know it will reduce their consumer base (too much of the performance demands would be on the server side which can't be compensated by client side settings). This is why a conscious decision to dumb down the graphics for The Old Republic was largely based on keeping the demographic that could play the game larger. The graphics were vastly inferior to those of the game trailers produced by Blur Studios (contrasted to the graphics being identical in the game and the trailers for Mass Effect 3).
What all this is that means there will be fewer purchases of new gaming laptops as the practical lifespan of the gaming laptop is going to increase by several years at this rate. I suspect this is why prices for gaming laptops have been going up.
I can't believed I paid 30 dollars to play for 60 days of TOR, I mean god, that was dumb.