Is it worth investing in a gaming laptop?

In the general sense, the answer would be a resounding 'NO'. A laptop may be a better option for most tasks (due to its portability, lower power consumption and compactness), but for gaming, it is totally inappropriate in a lot of ways.

The first and most important aspect is ergonomics. If you don't already know, 'ergonomics' refers to the art of designing computers to avoid/reduce discomfort or injury. Laptops don't usually have an ergonomic design, because their main focus is to provide portability. Gaming is an activity which requires quick reflexes and lots of key presses/mouse movements, continuously. Also, most games are too cumbersome to be played with the laptop's touchpad (you can attach an external mouse, but it affects portability). In fact, even for non-gaming activities, using the touchpad too much can cause nerve damage in the wrist and fingers. Hence, using a laptop as your primary gaming device could cause extreme discomfort, and even injury in the long run.

The next aspect to consider, would be the laptop's specifications. It is a well known fact that if your computer can play the latest games satisfactorily, it can pretty much run circles around every other application. Most modern games require fairly powerful hardware to run. Of course, you'd need a monster of a system to be actually able to enjoy the latest games in all their glory, with most of the bells and whistles turned on. To optimize power consumption of a laptop, usually less powerful components are used. For example, the performance of an NVidia GeForce GTX 780 (which is a powerful graphics card) on a desktop would be much better than on a laptop (which uses the 'M' variant, designed for lower power consumption). Also due to their compactness, laptops tend to be more expensive than desktops in the same bracket. For example, if you consider a laptop and a desktop having similar specifications, the laptop would cost significantly more than the desktop, even though it is likely to perform slightly worse.

Now comes the part about battery life. Games are extremely resource intensive. So, playing the latest games (on a desktop or laptop) pushes the hardware to its limits. This in turn consumes significantly more power. Hence, playing games on a laptop when it is not plugged into a power source would completely drain the battery very soon. The only viable solutions to this problem are to only play games on the laptop when there is access to a power outlet, or carry additional spare batteries (fully charged). None of these solutions are actually desirable, and in some cases may be downright inconvenient.

Here comes the final and most significant drawback of a laptop - the ability to upgrade. Under normal circumstances, only two components of a laptop are upgradable - the hard disk and RAM. This means that the two most important components which affect gaming performance - the graphics card and processor - cannot be upgraded at all. In some exceptional cases, it may be possible to upgrade the graphics card (but not the processor), but the process would be too tedious and time-consuming. Considering the rate at which hardware is advancing and the fact that game developers tend to push hardware to its limits, this is a really serious limitation of laptops.

Of course, there are some other minor advantages of using desktops instead of laptops for gaming, but there isn't really a need to mention them here because it is possible to obtain those benefits on laptops too (with a bit of work). Anyway, it should be clear by now that laptops can't even approach desktops in ANY aspect - performance, comfort, upgradability and pretty much everything else - when it involves gaming.

PC gaming isn't for everyone - TOTALLY true

Not too long ago, I used to wonder why most people prefer gaming on consoles rather than PCs, although the PC clearly offers several advantages over consoles. For example, PC games usually have much better graphics than their console counterparts, provide support for modding which extend a game's life much beyond that intended by the developer, choice of keyboard-mouse or controller, the freedom of upgrading only the required components etc. Agreed, a gaming PC costs almost twice that of a current-gen console, but it can still perform all the usual functions of a PC apart from gaming (which compensates for the cost to a certain extent). It is quite common to hear PC gamers proclaim themselves as the 'Master Race', and refer to console gamers as 'Console Peasants'. But the actual reason why console gamers don't prefer to game on PCs, is not that they can't afford a gaming PC. Its entirely different. I'll just provide a couple of examples (which are my personal experiences) to illustrate this.

I came across a weird problem when I tried to launch a game called 'Dead Space 3' on Windows 8.1, although it used to run perfectly on Windows 7. It displayed an error which said 'Sorry, this game cannot be run in a virtual machine', although I never even had any virtual machine software installed on my PC. I tried implementing various 'fixes' for this issue provided on the internet, but none of them seemed to work for me (although some of those fixes had worked for a few people). I tried fixing the issue for around 90 minutes, but nothing worked. Finally, I was able to get the game to run, but only after entirely disabling hardware virtualization from my motherboard's BIOS (this solution wasn't mentioned anywhere).

Then again, I was unable to launch a game called 'Clive Barker's Jericho' (It showed an error which said 'Clive Barker's Jericho has stopped working and needs to close' whenever I tried to launch it). After a bit of internet research, I found out that this was happening due to improper 'NVidia PhysX' drivers on my PC (which wasn't really accurate). The strange thing is, although PhysX is a feature supported only on NVidia video cards and I have an AMD card, the game required these drivers to be installed. I removed the present driver, downloaded the latest one and installed it, but the game still refused to run (although now it was a different issue). It launched fine, played the intro videos and then crashed to desktop. Again, the internet was my savior (although it took quite a bit of time to find the solution). Apparently, the game only runs with an older version of NVidia PhysX and doesn't recognize the new version, so I needed to have TWO versions of the NVidia PhysX drivers on my PC (a legacy version for this game, and the latest version for other games).

As you can probably see, solving such issues is almost always a hassle. I was probably able to solve these issues due to three aspects - I hold an engineering degree in Computer Science, I have a passion about computers, and I have exclusively been a PC gamer for more than 15 years. But for a console gamer who only uses the PC for day-to-day tasks (such as internet browsing, word processing etc.), it would be really difficult to troubleshoot these kind of problems. This is compounded by the fact that even a fix which works for 99 people, is not guaranteed to work for the 100th person. Although the examples I mentioned are quite extreme and rare, many games do require some sort of tweaking, to be able to run satisfactorily. When a gamer buys a game, he does so to play and enjoy it immediately, and not spend hours troubleshooting/tweaking it just to make it run satisfactorily (and still not sure of resolving the issue). Even game developers can't totally be blamed for this, because it really is a herculean task to make a game run well on all PCs (due to the PC's heterogeneous nature).

Hence, PC is a suitable gaming platform only for hardcore gamers who want the best, and also possess moderate-to-high troubleshooting skills. So I guess its high time we PC gamers stopped calling ourselves 'the master race', and realize that console gamers are just gamers who want to play games without hassles, even if that means compromising on several PC-specific advantages.