Got pulled off all of my R&D projects and told by the CEO in a meeting with all of the team leaders (who enthusiastically agreed) to focus entirely on this one project as it was critically important and mandatory whether we liked it or not before we could go to market with our product. Said OK, got it ready in record time, none of the managers wanted to approve testing. Got told a generic “We need more info.”
Fleshed out everything I could. Did all sorts of bench top testing with full reports, did thorough budget analysis for the entire thing, a complete gantt chart with every contingency accounted for.
Two years later I’m in the latest of god only knows how many approval meetings with management. I’ve dialed back how much I expect out of them and I’m just trying to get an official project initiation form signed so at least I have a record of them acknowledging the project’s existence. One of them asks, for the nth time, “Why do we need to do this again?”
Boss looks at me expectantly, like “Yes, why do we need to do this?” as if I was the one who put myself on the project. I said “I can forward you the email where you told me to drop everything and work on it. If you changed your mind I’m more than OK to drop it and work on something else, but I refuse to hold even one more meeting to get agreement that I should even be working on this.”
He says “I think we just need more information.” I ask “Such as?” knowing full well there wasn’t a single more thing I could add. “We just need more information.” All of the team leaders just stared at me. So I quit on the spot and walked out.
Talked to a friend who still worked there and they still haven’t moved forward with that project years later, and the governing body still refuses to allow sale of the product until they do. It’s a 2 year timeline for testing so I have no idea what they are thinking. It’s only $100,000 too, they paid me more to try and get approval for two years than it would have cost to do it in the first place.
Edit: Re-read your question, you are talking about games in general. A Switch might be a good buy, straightforward and you can usually find people willing to play in person or online for the more popular games. The games are rarely on sale though. Highly recommend a pro controller if you go this route.
For PC, there’s basically never kernel level anti-cheat, only a few frankly not great games go that route.
As far as expensive goes, there’s a ton of great PC games you can get for less than $5 during steam sale. The initial buy-in is more for a maybe $1500 PC, but you will make that up after a few dozen games. If you know a PC gaming enthusiast, imply you would play with them if you had a PC and they might sell you an old rig for dirt cheap. I’ve sold a few that way for like $100.
Set-up is easy as steam is the only program you need and controllers are plug-and-play. If you are willing to risk a little work, I found Linux Mint as an OS really easy to install and use, and then it will be future-proof (unlike windows) as well as free. You may have to troubleshoot something weird, but their forums are super helpful.