buying games as soon as they're released

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now this is something i don't understand, and i've been wondering about. it looks like virtually all games can be bought for half the original price or less nowadays if you just wait a few months and watch for sales (which isn't hard to do). odds are you'll pay much less than half the original price if you wait maybe a couple of years

so... why do so many people still buy expensive games as soon as they're released anyway? is it a matter of compulsion or impulsiveness or something like that? like, "i just have to have this game". or is there a reasoning behind it?

it makes perfect sense if now and then you really want to play a game and you say "screw it, i'm paying full price for this, it's worth it". but as a habit it doesn't make sense to me (so many games are buggy and incomplete nowadays when they're released anyway). or are most of those full-price copies actually sold like that, to real fans of the game? (i mean people who really want to play that game and aren't paying full price for any other games)

It's very rare for me to buy a game at full price. I'll only do it if I'm super excited about the game, and simply must play it, or in one case where it was digital download only and the price wasn't going down. It had been out the better part of a year and the price hadn't gone down though. I didn't buy it immediately. Anyway, I get the vast majority of my games for far less than their starting price, and I love it.

Most people figure that they've waited long enough, in many cases. There's also those that know there's a high chance that they'll simply forget later on. Or, there's games with multiplayer in them: some of these dont retain communities for very long, so if you want to play that part of the game while it's hot, you gotta do it right away, because there's no way to know if that bit will still be big 6 months down the line.

It gets worse when you consider delays... for instance, I know that No Man's Sky is very, very likely to sell about a squillion copies on day 1, with few people willing to actually wait on it. They've already waited long enough, with one delay after another over the last couple of years, including the one final stupid one (thanks to Sony, I hear) that delayed it from this month to the middle of next month. Everybody wants it, it looks fantastic, and it's already clear that the devs have put a ton of effort into it. It's still technically possible that it wont go well, but at this point I really doubt it.

In some very rare cases (such as myself) there's also those to whom the money just... doesnt really matter. For me, there's just no reason to wait; it doesnt matter. I'm in a position of not having to worry about the cost. This is rare, but it still happens for some. Or there's those that are paying for something with a gift card; in that case, it's not REALLY costing them anything.

In other words, there's all sorts of reasons, but the main one is the simplest: nobody wants to wait the often very long length of time that it takes for things to hit a sale.

There is one last reason though: Steam. Not because of the sales. But instead because ALOT of games on Steam simply dont cost much to begin with. I can understand someone holding out on a game that costs $60. But it baffles me when someone does it for a game that starts out costing $10 or 15. And some of the best darned games on there (such as Isaac, for instance, a fantastic game that many players will get hundreds or even thousands of hours out of) cost right around that much.

It can be fun to ride the hype train sometimes, from the excitement and high expectations. But most of my preorders or early purchases ended with some level of disappointment.

Personally I always prefer physical copies. They also don't take up save space on the SD card, so I am only limited by what I can buy/get for birthday/Christmas.

i guess i'm just looking at it from a very unusual perspective. i'm often thinking about playing video games, but i don't actually play that often. and i never play anything multiplayer. it's this combination that makes my buying habits possible. because even if i see something and i think "wow, that is really cool!", chances are i won't be playing it before it's on sale anyway, because there are other games i've already been waiting longer to play before that one

i've been buying games regularly for a few years now. so i have dozens of games that i've never even played yet, and no reason to rush to buy anything. i check what's on sale (or especially humble bundles. it's how i first started to buy any games) and buy whatever looks interesting, and then i add other interesting games to my wishlist and wait until they're available for less than half the original price (or something like 80% off if it's one of those really expensive games)

in the end the average gamer probably fits my idea of an "occasional buyer". i'm used to thinking of it as more of a small but regular expense instead. i like video games, but i get bored of anything quickly, so that pattern works well for me