History of my preorders or full purchases:
Full price purchase:
L4D+L4D2 Diablo 3 - Probably the only culprit here. But cmon, Blizzard was good at that time. It Takes Two Binding of Isaac Rebirth PUBG Psychonauts 2
Preorders:
Portal 2
The rest is just acquiring good games for low price. Especially humble bundle (that specific one was extremely juicy IYKYK)
Another option is to just price it respectfully. I picked up Silksong on release. I have one day of play time because I’m not into the genre at the moment.
There are plenty of games I would purchase if they were priced low enough from genres I would not normally play just out of popularity and curiosity. I have a lot of them on the Steam backlog that I haven’t even touched just because they were on discount. Some devs do it for mansions, other devs do it for love. Both end up shorting themselves, and the ones probably winning out in terms of profit are the ones selling on a time discount curve somewhere along the middle.
That’s what they are doing with the pricing: They start up way to high, to catch those who will pay that price. Once they reach the point where sales are stalling at that price point, they lower it, so that more price-sensitive players will buy. That cycle continues until they get a deal from Epic or Amazon to give the game away for free, because that way the publisher still gets more money than from pirates.
It still supports the devs. Sales are a chance to pick up the market segments that will only buy at that price.
I bought a 2 hour long indie “experience” at 67% off.
No regerts. I am barely making ends meet and feeding a child and wife.
I feel like they cheat by keeping their regular price high.
Back in the day, a game was $60 new and $20 without sale after a few years.
IMO that’s still better than keeping your prices high and doing crazy sales. This way it gets lots of people to buy it out of impulse hence the popularity of the unplayed library meme.
I remember those days.
Release at $60, lower to $20 after a few years, $5 on sale with “only” 75% off.
Though I’ve noticed that every major steam sale has 10 selected deep discount games that are at least 90% off. The prices for these select 10 feel like steam sales we used to have 15 years ago.I’m pretty sure there’s actually an EU law that says that you’re not allowed to do that. If a product is on discount more or less forever then it’s not in fact on discount.
There is a maximum amount of time a product can be on sale before that becomes just what price is now.
Its almost like gambling and the gamification of a sale brings out the gamers who feel savvy by buying a cheap game instead of quality releases, not saying thats every game on sale
I used to buy Steam games without a care in the world. Now to spend even 5 bucks I make myself go through a quality control checklist so vast it would impress a space shuttle commander. There’s just been too many abandoned games, terrible sequels, fake reviews, unnecessary game launchers and disappointing Steam sales. That’s not to say there isn’t still an excellent bunch of games on there, but they’re all hidden deep in the forest and I have to go sniff em out like a basset hound.
If I spend a fiver on a game and it entertains me for two nights I still consider that fine value to entertainment ratio. If I went out somewhere in real life with the boys I’d be spending a minimum of $50 and that’s for a single night out. So I buy a lot of indie games in the $5-10 range without much guilt over it. Weird single-dev projects with pixel art and a 5 year span in early access are my favorite kind of art.
Now if you’re asking me more than about $20 for your game then yeah the quality control checklist comes out. But my standards are much lower for the $10-tier and I’ve found some really good games in that tier. Not ones that I’m still playing, maybe, but ones that I had a good time with for a few days to a few weeks and that I remember fondly.
Firewatch checked that box for me. Two of my kids did a playthrough too.
I’m more of the just stick to the indie goats type of guy, those which give you unlimited replay ability, but reading your comment made me fondly remember Yes your Grace!
A little game which i got through in two days and probably never touch again but absolutely loved. It made feel more like a King (of a really small realm) than a crusader kings or civilisation.
How dare you not sharing your list with us uneducated
Be our messiah
Well ok but I did say it was long. Tbh, my checklist is almost a minigame itself now 🤣
So once I’ve found a game that looks interesting, I do the following:
Google video search for the game’s title and filter to past week, then month, then year and that shows me how many people are actually talking about this game right now and who’s doing the talking.
I look at the Steam reviews and initially filter to only show negative ones. I find it’s a lot easier to see if the game’s been review bombed that way. Also, a lot of negative reviews complain about features I find positive so that’s helpful too “This game was way too easy! I finished it in 30 hours and I still had all my hair at the end, harumph!”. I also check phrases like “Abandoned by the devs” or “Yet another asset flip” or “Beware! The EULA is a privacy nightmare”.
I then switch to positive reviews and read the short ones. The dissertations are just way too much detail at this stage (or any stage really for me).
At some point early on I check the Steam update history. If the last update was years ago I factor that in. I also try to keep on top of relevant news like that time the entire staff of Annapurna Interactive quit, making a sequel to Stray unlikely.
Also, if it hasn’t had that many recent updates I’ll join the Discord and see how active that is. That’s usually so revealing. Often in a positive way like with the G-Rebels devs.
Then I go through my top YT game reviewers like Raptor, Scarlett Seeker, Splattercat Gaming, Orbital Potato and Nookrium and see if they’ve talked about the game.
I look for the title on Allkeyshop to see if there’s a cheaper EU unlockable Steam game key available.
I check for trainers in case I need an escape hatch if it turns out to be too grindy or tedious but still worth playing.
If all the searches have been positive so far I’ll wishlist it around this point. If there’s a demo I’ll play it. If it looks amazing from the start I’ll install the demo after looking at a couple of gameplay videos.
I also have a 21:9 monitor so I hop into the Steam discussion group for the game and look for confirmation that it’s compatible.
If it’s too expensive I’ll check SteamDB and look at it’s price history. My personal limit is <7 bucks for an old game and <18 for a relatively new one (unless something exceptional suddenly appears like Eriksholm).
I’ll check if there any Steam sales coming and if the theme is likely to match the game I’m looking at.
I really do actually do all this by the way. It’s the only way I’ve been able to get more sensible about the games I buy.
I would throw in isthereanydeals and gg.deals into the mix. Those provide good historical tracking of multiple stores for games, so you can really be sure you are getting the historical low during a sale.
Actually that’s not a bad list at all. But reading this I am asking myself: isn’t that more a list to detain YOURSELF from adding too much on your pile of shame :D
Oh yeah definitely :) Also I’ve noticed there’s kind of a new feeling of satisfaction when a game does somehow make it through this assault course and I buy it finally. It feels like an achievement in itself.
I got one!
Valkyria Chronicles 1 and 4
i got stuck in valkyria chronicles 1 right before you get the valkyries or whatever they’re called in game.
I’ve gotten stuck a couple of times.
What chapter are you on?
uh, alicia is about to become a valkyrie i think? there were a lot of tanks and this was a while ago
ah! That one is hard.
(I put my tanks behind their spawn and started shredding their rears.)
I pretty much only buy games that are either very well-known to be good (famous on the level of Skyrim, Stardew Valley, etc.), or that I saw a “let’s play” of.
My experience too. Being burned day one release sucks, looking at you Back 4 Blood.
I avoided B4B because I remembered why Turtle Rock broke up with Valve after L4D and the disaster that was Evolve.
Yeah, I learned about it all after. L4D is one of my favorite arcade shooters of all time, I really wanted a part 3.
I’ve started just waiting a bit. If a game is actually good, waiting a few months won’t really matter. If the game is dead by then, it was never worth the money in the first place.
Also, I got burned by No Man’s Sky back then.
Same. I’ve got a huge library of rpg games I can play, don’t really play games that I need to have day 1, I just watch a few hours of someone play it and I’m good.
No man’s sky did make a full 180 recovery though, I bought it after the fix for me, my kid and some friends so we could play together.
The only way that modern AAA games should be bought.
Unless they require linking an EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, or other bullshit account requirements, in which case they get added to the ignore list.
or Battle Pass, Micro, >10 DLC.
I kept waiting for Starfield to drop in price. Impatiently, I sailed the seas to see if it had improved since launch. Sadly, it’s still a HUGE turd and now it’s off my watch list. The first big Bethesda title I don’t own.
I beat it on game pass and had fun. The base building is kinda impressive but there’s little reason to spend a bunch of time on it because nobody will ever see it. It’s not amazing but I definitely don’t think it deserves turd rating. That said everyone should just play expedition 33 instead.
As a huge sci-fi fan, and fan of most of Bethesda’s games in the past, I disagree. Turd rating is accurate. It just all felt like a waste of time. Like you said, the base building seems like it could be good, but it is never relevant. It’s like this for almost every piece of content. They’re just all on islands that don’t interact.
My biggest issue though is the writing. It’s so boring. It’s like they watched a bunch of sci-fi and put tropes from them in the game, but then they never explore the consequences of them. They just exist for a quest and are gone. Why sci-fi is good is because it uses these stories to explore humanity, which would be made even better with an RPG where the player has agency. They just don’t though. You get a few boring options that don’t actually effect anything and everything goes on as normal. It’s just a bland game that doesn’t respect your time.
There’s a Star Trek Voyager game out at the moment which is basically what Starfield should have been, but set in the Star Trek universe.
I think the big problem Starfield has is that it tries to be really big, but they don’t really have that much content so it’s just all spread out. While at the same time you don’t actually get to feel that bigness because moving between locations is just a loading screen. You don’t get the long quiet sections like you do in something like Elite Dangerous. So they made a really big, really spread out world, with fast travel, it’s the most pointless game ever made.
Again you’re describing a not excellent game but a turd, there are real turds out there but this is just a middling attempt which is particularly disappointing from a formerly excellent studio
You can disagree, but no, I feel it’s a turd. I felt like best thing I can say about it was that it was a waste of time —and that’s not a positive thing. I’ve played really bad games that I still feel respected my time more than Starfield, which in my opinion is one of the worst sins of video games. I’d put it up there with Ubisoft games for not respecting the player’s time, but at least their gameplay is good (or used to be, but I haven’t played one in a decade or more).
I agree with you. People have a tendency to be too kind to things in ratings, but anything that literally feels like a waste of time is not even worth a rating. Turd is accurate. I see this with movies and TV-shows a lot, where people say “it’s not very good and you feel like you wasted your time at the end of it but 5/10.” What???
In college I took some classes on Brecht (for those who don’t know: extremely important 20th century play-right and theater theorist), and one thing he wrote always stuck with me. I can’t quote because I have a shit memory, but it was something like this: if the guy sitting in the front row takes a cigar out during the beginning of your piece, by the end of the piece he should be sitting there with his cigar still unlit.
What he means by this is simple, and he says it more clearly in his Kleines Organon: the single most important thing, before anything else, is that what you make creates “Unterhaltung” for the audience. “Unterhaltung” is am interesting word choice; it can be translated as both entertainment and conversation. The old school of Brecht only saw the latter, but today it is believed that he meant both.
Thus, even the great Brecht agrees with your sentiment: if it is not entertaining and creating conversation, if you really feel like you wasted your time, it is a complete and utter failure!
Okay, that went on a little longer than I expected… but it’s all just to say that you’re well justified!
I will be cold and dead in the ground before I play a game about a frenchman.
Well France doesn’t even exist in the game so I think you’re safe. They even are tongue in cheek about it and you can literally dress like a baguette stereotype for the lolz
I usually pre-order the deluxe digital.
Sounds like something somebody with a username like that would do.
What can I say I’ve got to spend that money my tenants give me somehow.
Yup, still tracks.
Not even pre-ordering the Premium Edition? How the mighty have fallen!
Patient gamers ftw!
I don’t even play the majority of games I buy. I give game devs free money.
Retirement planning
Me, 83 years old on my first day of retirement booting up a game I bought in 60 years ago because it was only $6: “wow, this sucks”
This is my future and I hate it.
My man
Reminder that steam strong arms indie Devs into doing these big sales in order to give them visibility on the Steam store.
Basically if you don’t do sales Steam wont show your game to anyone.
You mean the game will only show up in the list of games that are available on sale if the games are actually in the sale? Because that’s just literally how that works
Wow, it’s like people want the games that are part of the big sale going on! How are you twisting the ability to sort by what’s on discount into being evil?
Because the big sale only happens because steam presses Devs into it in order to get promoted. So Devs that don’t buy into the sale, get sent to the back of line.
You say “basically” as if you are privy to how the steam store works when at the same time making up how it works
I worked for a game developer for 4 years
There are plenty of examples to the contrary of this. In particular, I know that factorio has literally never gone on sale on principle, and has only ever gone up in price upon leaving early access. Despite this, it shows up with some regularity in the store.
It’s certainly the case that Steam can be a rat race for developers to get attention, but I don’t believe your framing is accurate.
I thought about mentioning factorio in the original comment, but yeah as you say there is some exception, factorio. Being wildly popular and the game that more or less birthed an entire genre helps and even if you don’t play the same game it’s still entirely possible to succeed through word of nouth. But for less popular indie games it’s still true.
UUhhhh no? Steam doesn’t automatically change games’ visibility if it’s never on sale; it makes games on sale more visible, which encourages Devs to put their games on sale, meaning people who have never seen your game have seen it and might buy it. So in the end, MORE People have bout the game than would have otherwise, and if set at the right price, the Devs still get their cash and now have a larger market. I’m so glad I took Microeconomics in High School :)
And maybe if you studied beyond highschool level you would be aware this is a well studied thing in economics. If you sell a priority service and there is a limit to the resource in some way you are shutting out the people that don’t pay. Like its the same problem as dating apps that sell priority matching, if enough people buy I to it you either have to buy into it as well just to get a fair chance, or except you will never get seem.
Yes the Devs that buy into it get more sales. The entire point is it works for those people, if it didn’t they would have no reason to buy into it. But the people who don’t buy into it are then inherently disadvantaged.
Why would consumers want the store to not prioritize giving visibility to games on discounts during sale events?
If people want to discover games they can go to steam queue and see what is recommended that they may be interested in. But, the last thing I want a company to do is hide sales for me and pushing full retail products.
That to me would be anticonsumer. Might not be what sellers want, but visibility to discounts so my money goes further is what I want as a consumer. I go as far as using isthereanydeals to check to see if other stores sell for cheaper than Steam and alert me to targetted price drops.
That works when we’re talking about big businesses and AAA games, but the problem is when we consider indie developers, who struggle to get attention so are pressured into putting their game on sale when they don’t want to just get some attention.
And why would consumers who are trying to get the most value for their money care about that financial aspect? They aren’t a business. They are consumers looking for deals. Not to be paying full price for games as an act of charity. Many look at the store because they are looking to see what is discounted for the day. And wishlist and use deal trackers like isthereanydeals.
People who get hyped and preorder are the ones willing to pay more because they value first access. After that its mostly value based consumers left with different price thresholds. If you want the full price paying demographic you have to front load your marketing budget before the game launches.
Its like you want the store to be advertising old full priced games and suppressing sales which is the opposite of what consumers want to see.
And why would consumers who are trying to get the most value for their money care about that financial aspect? They aren’t a business. They are consumers looking for deals.
Sure if you don’t give a shit about other people, and then you can use the same logic to justify sweatshop clothes and any other shitty businesses practice you like.
You consider sales to be equivalent to sweat shops?
So do you go out of your way to avoid sales and pay full price for everything?
Anyways, pretty confused why you expect store part of a business to not prioritize promoting sales. The discovery queue is where titles that might be of interest is shown without regard to discounts. Its like going to the mods section and being upset there’s only mods being displayed.
This post brought to you by a person who studied beyond highschool level and the phrase “buy into it”.
I mean… yeah?
steam is running a business and game devs are too.
if you develop games because it’s a hobby, more power to you, but the platform you’re using (steam) requires capital to operate.
And same with consumers. We aren’t a charity throwing away money for no reason. We actively seek out discounts to get more for our money. We want discounts to be given priority.
Do you have a better method?
I mean it’s that, or pay for marketing via other means. Either way, you’re spending money for exposure.
I never buy games at retail price anyways, so I do kind of get it past launch. I don’t care about buying a game until it is on sale and its a big part of why I wish list games to keep track of when they go on sale to see if its hit the price point I want.
So who would see their game if Steam didn’t allow their game on their platform?
Seems like the devs would make way less money selling 0 copies
It’s rare, but there’s a few indie games where I did not wait for a sale, even knowing I wouldn’t play it for a while, because I wanted to be supportive to devs that made something I wanted.
Transport Fever 2 🙏, only time I ever spent 50€ on a game.
They’re releasing 3, so there might be a second time soon…
I’ve even come across games, like If On A Winter’s Night, Four Travelers, that is free, but it’s such a great game, that I just had to buy the supporter pack :) (I even waited a bit for it to go off sale :) )
Moonring is another free game who had to add a $5 megadungeon DLC after being harassed by fans for months to give them a way to support the game monetarily
This thread has some bangers. Thanks for sharing!!!
I really like this “supporter DLC” model. And it legitimately warms my heart to see a lot of people saying they go out of their way to support indies this way.
That is how gaming should be. <3
does that have anything to do with the calvino book?
I read the book’s wiki page, but it doesn’t seem to, besides the title. The game does have a narrative frame of strangers meeting at a masquerade ball on an odd train going through a winter landscape, but most of the game is the self-contained stories of 3 of these travellers, it doesn’t directly talk to the player.
That was me with Dispatch. Got the Deluxe too
Support your Indies. They are the future of gaming once the AAA industry collapses in on itself.
-95% and an All-Time Low mark on isthereanydeal.com is like my personal catnip.
Same! A Humble Bundle with 3+ games that mildly interest me was another, but they’ve been getting lamer and lamer.
Best humble bundle I ever bought was a $15 bundle that included Euro Truck Simulator 2 because I wasn’t sure if ETS2 would be fun enough. I’ve since purchased every map DLC, American Truck Simulator and every map DLC for that too, plus a smattering of the cargo, truck and paint scheme DLCs, and I’m very likely to continue purchasing the DLC that keeps the studio constantly updating these 10+ year old games at a really healthy pace
The first and only humble bundle I’ve bought was the WB with all the Arkham and Injustice games in it. I already owned like a third of the games, but I wanted the rest because it also had Mad Max. And it was only $12.
The only game I preorder is GW2’s yearly expansions. Everything else is c/patientgamers material, waiting a few years and paying just a small fraction of the release price to get all DLC, fixed bugs, and tons of fan resources that were created meanwhile 👌
Lost all my grumpy coin cause devs were a bunch of meth addicts.
Oooh which game was that?
i sometimes just buy dlc when i can afford it - though i really want rimworld’s odyssey i just can’t yet afford it. I am loving biotech though!
I considered odyssey, but then I realized it would break all my mods, because they aren’t through steam, and I have multiple weeks spent getting those appx 750 mods working properly. Not worth it when a lot of the mods I like most have been shelved with the major changes. I’d need an entirely new setup.
Maybe someday though!
Pretty sure the steam version of rimworld is DRM free. Try copying the game files elsewhere and running the executable to see if it just works. That’s how it was with the old DRM free builds Tynan would email you, and I think it still works like that now?
with my five mods i think im … only scratching the surface. i beat it once on biotech but in proper form; my newborns were annoying so i used them to launch the ship after i sterilized every adult so that wouldnt happen again.
If you play on steam, and want to try a very easy-to-load set of mods that completely reworks the whole game, check out the progression mod pack. (Link is for the 1.5 version since you don’t have odyssey, there’s a 1.6 version as well and I think there’s a link for it on that page)
It’s around 1,000 mods, many of which are compatibility/patch mods, the authors of them worked closely together for compatibility, and they have a community-driven mod sorting tool to reduce errors. You can single-click to add all and follow the directions to have them properly sort for best experience.
I use around half of the mods on that list, very much recommend. You don’t have to have all of them enabled if there’s content you don’t like or whatever.
I do mostly sandboxy base building, rather than accomplishing main objectives, so I frequently have hordes of kids running around my base (highest pawn count ever was 86, I just sort of let people do their own thing and accommodate them). The first bit is kinda annoying, but growth vats for newborns are great if you can’t spare people for feeding and play time :)
Commenting here just so I don’t lose this post. Thank you <3!
thanks!! i’ll take a look!
