Our best advice around Black Friday is to remember you don’t HAVE to buy anything
Black Friday is a great time to bag a bargain, but don’t get sucked into the dealz hype.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
It’s Black Friday week now and the sales event has become a genuine global phenomenon. It’s a time of year when just as the tinsel is starting to filter out into the high-street so now are the big black signs declaring sales so big they have their own gravitational pull. And it can be a fantastic time to get a saving on that one thing you’ve had your heart set on all year or round out all your Christmas shopping in one glut of gifted spending.
But it can also be a time where some retailers pull out their shiftiest tactics and their most effusive language in order to encourage people to part with their cash on products they would not normally look twice at. That’s why we’re here each and every year, to act as your fecal matter filters, straining out the worst excesses of the November dealiogeddon, and ensuring you only see the sort of kit we would recommend to our friends.
Because we’re all friends here, right?
We’ve also put together a Black Friday survival guide, just to give you a little extra in your armoury when the discounts keep on coming. We’ve created a set of handy features to ensure youdon’t overpay for a Black Friday gaming laptop, you canspot a Black Friday gaming PC deal, and help you figure outhow to bag a Black Friday gaming monitor deal, too.
Black Friday gaming PCBlack Friday gaming laptopBlack Friday gaming monitorBlack Friday gaming chairBlack Friday graphics cardBlack Friday SSDBlack Friday gaming headsetBlack Friday keyboard/mouse
OurBlack Friday graphics card dealsguide also highlights the relative performance and original MSRP of every GPU likely to be on sale over the sales period to give you the best idea of how the different cards stack up against each other.
But the general advice is all about being prepared. Have an idea of what you want to buy, whether that’s a new TV, graphics card, headset, or gaming laptop, and set yourself a strict budget. And stick to it. And don’t drink.
It’s way too easy to get caught up in all the hype, with discount tags flying around like some ultra-capitalist virtual ticker-tape parade. It’s no surprise that so many of us just feel like we need to scratch some nagging retail itchand just buy something. Resist that urge, ignore the calls of ‘what did you buy on Black Friday?’ That way lies eternal buyer’s remorse.
So, remember, you don’thaveto buy anything on Black Friday, if you end up with a black hole in your bank account and a needless box of tat arriving at your door at the start of December you’ll regret it. It doesn’t matter how cheap something is if you still don’t want it when it arrives.
But if there is something you want or need this Black Friday, just know that we’re dedicated to keeping buyer’s remorse at bay for everyone this year.
Where are the best Black Friday PC gaming deals?
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Dave has been gaming since the days of Zaxxon and Lady Bug on the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 16, and finally finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-based system around a year later. When he dropped it out of the window. He first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many decades ago, then moved onto PC Format full-time, then PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Now he’s back, writing about the nightmarish graphics card market, CPUs with more cores than sense, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more capacious than a Cybertruck.
Simulated CPU-building speedrun attempt ends with a functioning processor in a mere six hours
Intel’s Battlemage GPUs rumoured to arrive in December, well ahead of AMD and Nvidia’s next-gen chips
AMD’s new Ryzen 7 9800X3D gaming CPU sold out almost instantly and scalpers are already selling the chips for up to $999
