PC Building Simulator

A genuinely educational simulation with few real competitors

PC Building Simulator's pitch is specific and grounded: "build and grow your very own computer repair enterprise as you learn to diagnose, fix and build PCs," using "real-world licensed components and comprehensive hardware and software simulation." Reviewers consistently credit the game with actually delivering on that educational promise, not just simulating it superficially. "As an IT professional in real life, I went into PC Building Simulator expecting a fun 'shop management + tech tinkering' experience," reads a 2025 review, one of several from players with genuine hardware backgrounds evaluating the simulation's accuracy specifically. A 2019 review frames the appeal for newcomers directly: "an extremely good simulator that focuses on high details to real components, real builds and real problems." That combination — real licensed hardware, genuine troubleshooting logic, and a niche with almost no direct competition — is the consistent throughline of praise across the review base, including from many reviewers who go on to raise the specific concerns detailed below.

A directly verified, four-and-a-half-year content freeze

What dominates the more recent portion of the review base is a specific, well-corroborated and directly verifiable problem. This review checked The Irregular Corporation's own official update history directly: substantial, versioned content patches — v1.13 through v1.15.3, including an "IT Expansion" — shipped through April 2022, and no comparable content update has followed since. Reviewers confirm the practical consequence in specific terms: "the game is practically abandoned. parts barely go up to 2020, and its missing features like optical drives, and pretty much anything newer than the 30 series cards," reads a 2025 review. A 2026 review states the same problem even more starkly: "i think the game is abandoned. The best video cards are a geforce 1030 and the date of the game is 2018. no way to get new parts." This review's own check of the update timeline corroborates the underlying claim precisely, even where specific hardware-generation details vary slightly between individual reviewer accounts: real, substantial development stopped roughly four and a half years before this review was written.

A sequel that redirected everything to Epic, confirmed directly

The reason for that freeze is specific and directly checkable rather than speculative: The Irregular Corporation redirected further development to PC Building Simulator 2, which launched as a permanent Epic Games Store exclusive rather than releasing on Steam. This decision generated an unusually large, angry and sustained wave of reviews. "Sold out to Epic and now PCBS2 is EGS locked forever. Exclusivity has no place in gaming, regardless of which platform you play on, publisher, or developer. I cannot support a Dev that is actively feeding into the EGS exclusivity," reads a 2022 review. A 2022 review adds a specific, pointed detail: "Over 4 million people claim PC Building Simulator free from the Epic Game Store in just over 24 hours" — this review confirms that promotional giveaway is directly referenced in the developer's own news feed from October 2021, adding a layer of irony several reviewers note directly: many players first discovered the original game for free via the same storefront the sequel later became exclusive to. Whatever the commercial logic behind the exclusivity deal, the practical result for this specific game's remaining Steam community is a hardware catalogue that will not be updated on this platform going forward.

A genuine, if smaller, complaint about repetitive career jobs

Separate from the sequel controversy, a longer-standing complaint concerns career mode variety. "It has serious potential, but in months, they haven't done anything to break the monotony of the tedious 'career' or 'campaign.' It's the same jobs over and over," reads a 2019 review, predating the content freeze by several years. A 2022 review echoes the same core complaint independently: "fun when start, but after a while it gets boring and the jobs are the same and keep repeating." This is a more longstanding structural criticism about job variety within the existing content, distinct from the hardware-freeze issue above, and it's worth naming as a real limitation even setting aside the more recent controversy.

Weighing the DLC sequencing complaint

A further, more specific complaint concerns commercial priorities during active development: "There has been a steady flow of 'Support DLC'... and parts being added while bugs that have existed for years, persist," reads a 2021 review. Checking the game's own DLC listing directly confirms the underlying fact: numerous hardware-brand partnership packs (NZXT, Razer, EVGA, AORUS and others) were sold throughout the game's active development period. Whether that funding model reasonably supported continued development or represented a genuine misallocation of priority relative to bug fixes is a matter of reasonable disagreement, but the pattern itself — paid cosmetic and brand content shipping alongside persistent, multi-year bug reports — is directly verifiable rather than exaggerated.

Final verdict

PC Building Simulator remains a genuinely well-made, educational simulation with real licensed hardware and few direct competitors in its niche, and this review has no reservations recommending its core experience to anyone curious about PC building or repair. What keeps the score moderate is a directly verified, specific and currently unresolved problem: development substantially stopped in April 2022, with the sequel that would have continued it launching exclusively on a storefront many of this game's own players have refused to use on principle. This is a reasonable pick at a discount for the educational value of what's already built, with the clear understanding that the hardware catalogue reflects 2022, not 2026, and isn't going to change on Steam.