I wait about a year after release before buying a game on my wish list. There are just too many buggy games these days. Why should I pay a premium price for an unfinished product? I also have a backlog of games in my library.
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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Precisely. I'll occasionally pay full price, but that's only from studios that have earned my trust, which is essentially just Nintendo.
Like you, I'm not paying a premium for a worse product.
Nintendo has an advantage because they use older hardware and try to extend its lifespan far beyond when it should have been replaced. Once they had a system with long battery life and decent graphics (for the time) in place, they cemented the practice. This forces the developers to use as many tricks as they can to make good looking modern games while not having to adapt to modern hardware. Its like a cheat code for squashing bugs in games, but it comes with its own costs. They have a large enough following that they do not need to change. They also get to charge more than other competitors can sometimes. Still, they have some good world class games.
No, it's quite the opposite, Nintendo is at a disadvantage because they need to make modern-feeling games on decade+ old hardware. Their platform is attractive because of the quality of the games they offer, it has almost nothing to do with the hardware. They've pretty much always been behind WRT hardware performance, but they're almost always ahead with gameplay experience. We bought a Switch largely to get access to Nintendo exclusives, and we almost never use it in handheld mode so that wasn't a selling point.
What AAA studios seem to forget is that gameplay and performance should always come first, and graphics should be a secondary concern. If Cyberpunk 2077 was cartooney and delivered on all of their gameplay promises, it would've had a much better launch. Likewise for other major AAA launches, players like fancy graphics, but gameplay and performance are far more likely to kill a game than simpler graphics. Yet AAA studios consistently have rocky launches because of their lofty graphical targets.
Nintendo games work really well at launch, both from a performance and gameplay perspective, to the point where I really don't feel the need to look at a review to decide whether the game will be playable at launch. Yet I feel the need to do that every time for major AAA releases, except maybe Rockstar (they push hardware limits and are very stable and fun at launch).
Or Larian. But yes, I otherwise agree.
Also: never pre-purchase any game from any publisher.
PC gamers already often have to wait for games to come to PC, so it’s no big thing to wait a little longer to get those games for cheaper. We’re already not getting it day one a lot of the time, so there’s no FOMO.
I want to play FF16, but since I’ve already gotta wait a year to get it, I’m fine waiting until it’s on sale. Same with Horizon Forbidden West. I’ve waited this long to be able to play the DLC (I have the game on PS4, but the dlc was PS5 only), I don’t mind waiting longer.
Buggy unoptimized releases has also trained more people to wait, and enough people have been burned by supposed publishers that can be trusted.
Yeah that's huge, why pay full price for a buggy game when i can buy the patched/optimized version of the game for half price a year later??
Often even when its on sale i have already lost interest.
I think most PC games are just PC games. The ones that are ported from consoles are a minority. Even though they are high profile because there's a lot of marketing behind them.
OTOH, there's now PC games getting poorly ported to consoles, which I think is only fair.
I almost never buy games at full price, but that doesn't mean they're pricing them incorrectly, from the viewpoint of the company that made the game. It's a deliberate marketing strategy that works. It's sometimes called the "skimming" strategy of pricing. (It has nothing to do with embezzlement.) It just means charging the highest price the market will bear at a certain time and ratcheting it down, and at each notch, finding a new market.
If 20% of your market will buy the game at $50, and 80% will buy the game a $25, you probably still want to charge 50 first and then bring it down to 25 gradually, as this will maximize your revenue.
I'm no capitalist, but maximizing a value function is just math.
I'm a patient gamer. I wish list interesting games, when there's a sale, I pick up anything under $5. I have a huge back log.
I wish list interesting games
And that's how I got to 400-something wishlisted games
The trick is to un-wishlist games that you pass up consistently even if they're on a good sale. That's what I do, so my wishlist is well under 100 games.
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I’ll pick up maybe one or two games a year at full price. Just about everything else goes in a wishlist and I’ll just wait for a sale.
I used to buy most of my games at full price. Now I buy almost none of them that way. If there isn't a launch sale, I'll wait until the next sale for it... Or maybe until it's in a bundle.
That doesn't mean I don't think the game is worth that price... I just have so many games already that it makes no sense to rush to buy a new one when I know it'll be cheaper real soon.
I initially was waiting for Star Field to be less than $70 after launch, instead I lucked out and no longer have any desire to get it for anything higher than free
Thanks for reminding me I gotta get the free games on epic for this week.
When you look at number of sales they seem to happen the most years down the line. It's more revenue talks when people talk about games making most of their games at launch, since full price is worth multiple copies. But, majority of those who end up purchasing the game during its lifetime seem to be price sensitive.
Real talk: how many of those choose the high seas?
I have like hundreds of untouched games in my library. Really couldn't bother.
About the only time I actually pirate a game nowadays is if it's not available for me to download day one on Steam. Then if I did like the game, I usually end up picking it up when it makes its way to steam, after it goes on sale.
I only pirate games I can't buy from the publishers anymore, so things like old console games, or delisted PC games. I may pirate a game that I own for a console so I can emulate it.
But honestly, I mostly play on PC and have a ton of cheap options, so I don't need to pirate unless I really want to play something I can't find.
For as much difficulty as there is finding good copies without issues that don’t come bundled with undesirable extras or restrictions to online play it’s better to just wait until it’s legit on sale. If someone is so cash strapped that buying isn’t really an option (but then how does one afford a gaming PC), then you gotta do what need to.
much difficulty as there is finding good copies without issues that don’t come bundled with undesirable extras or restrictions to online play...
For clarity, this simply isn't as "difficult" as you make it sound, especially since the subculture that supports such is both welcoming and quite helpful in its self-policing. With very little effort at all, one can be assured of quality results, and oftentimes even better than "official" releases (see: buggy AF Denuvo "protected" titles, etc).