Gamers Panic as Tariffs Poised to Spike Prices for Gaudy RGB PC Components

President Donald Trump's baffling escalation of his trade war has bodychecked international markets, and is expected to leave countless industries — and consumers — with major bruises.

Americans will bear the brunt of Trump's soaring tariffs. After all, they're basically a tax on goods from other countries, additional costs that are typically passed straight down to consumers.

The electronics sector is already taking a beating, with gamers facing skyrocketing prices as supply lines fall into chaos. As Tom's Hardware reports, boutique PC builders heavily rely on parts imported almost exclusively from Asia, which means that buying that shiny gaming PC setup of your dreams could soon become an unaffordable luxury.

"Tariffs have a direct impact on our cost structure... which we have to pass down to our customers," PC builder Maingear CEO Wallace Santos told Tom's. "Some of our suppliers are stopping their production lines to move out of China, causing scarcity, which ultimately causes FOMO, which causes even more scarcity."

Santos expects prices for Maingear PCs to rise by anywhere from 20 to 25 percent in the US in the wake of the illogical trade war.

Countries where most PC components are manufactured have been hit hard, with China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Vietnam facing steep tariff rates of anywhere from 26 (South Korea) to 54 percent (China).

"Some of our GPU suppliers had to stop their Chinese lines to move to Taiwan or Vietnam, causing additional shortages," Santos told Tom's Hardware.

Gamers — a contested electoral demographic — are unsurprisingly fuming.

"Dude these tariffs are going to fuck gaming raw, I'm sorry," one user tweeted.

"If you think that retailers aren’t gonna jack up the prices of the units already in the US too, I got a bridge to sell ya," one Reddit user seethed in the PlayStation 5 subreddit.

"I'm scared of how much the PS6 will cost," another user fretted.

Other users expressed fears that the already expensive Nintendo Switch 2 console, which was announced earlier this week, could soon become even pricier. Some argued the Japanese gaming company had pushed the price up in anticipation of tariffs.

As The Verge reports, even the board game industry is trembling, with Steve Jackson Games CEO Meredith Placko calling the tariffs a "seismic shift" for the industry, indicating that "prices are going up."

"This one-two punch is likely to put many of our members out of business or force them to downsize and lay off employees to survive," the Game Manufacturers Association, which represents the tabletop and card gaming industry, said in a statement quoted by Polygon.

The gaming industry as a whole is about to face major price hikes. Aubrey Quinn, senior vice president of Entertainment Software Association, the US trade group that reps all major gaming companies, told Game File that "Any one product that a consumer would buy is likely to be subject to many of the tariffs announced, all compounded on top of one another."

And the situation is bound to get even worse as China has called Trump's bluff, announcing an (actually) reciprocal tariff of 34 percent on US imports on Friday. It's yet another major escalation that could worsen trade tensions and lead to even more price hikes — to the detriment of gamers everywhere.

More on tariffs: Trump Tariffs Show Signs of Being Written by AI

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