This is an honest question. I simply cannot fathom paying roughly $75 for a new console game. To the best of my memory, I only remember spending full price on Catherine several years ago just after it was released. Another related question, how do people justify pre-orders? The case of AssCreedUnity and the Battlefield games comes to mind, what if the game turns out to be terrible? What then? There goes $75 and a lot of frustration.
But at the same time I can't really fathom someone spending over $1000 dollars on card packs in Hearthstone in the hopes of building a complete cosmetically gold card collection..
For me: there are of course a few games that I would LOVE to play as soon as possible. Namely, MGSV, Persona5 and FF7 Remake. FF7 pretty much solidified my decision to buy a PS4.. eventually. But i'm not in a rush to play them and would feel fine waiting another year or so to play the games.
Also a few months ago I've started subscribing to PS+ and taking advantage of the deals and free games. For example, recently I bought Sleeping Dogs and Just Cause 2 for roughly $10. And it was certainly a blast (just finished Sleeping Dogs, and a few hours into JC2, which is awesome), but I thought, "man, $60 for a 12 hour game (referring to Sleeping Dogs), man I feel sorry for people who paid full price for this."
And that's true for a lot of games. It's just really confusing when I see people complaining about their pre-orders, or games not working, when it was their decision to spend their money, full price on a game that isn't out yet. Or get a game on impulse first day and complain about it not being worth it. Like... it was your money. I don't get it. You could have waited for more information about the product to make a more educated spending decision, but no.
I don't buy the "well I paid money for this so I expect it to work to my full expectations" argument, because that's the problem, those are your expectations, and you made a decision based on those expectations and the limited amount of info. available, to SPEND your money on it anyways. There is NO contract involved b/w the customer and game developer, in spending money at the store to buy a game. If it works to your expectations, GREAT! You can trust this developer/supplier more in the future, when you have to make another purchasing decision from them! If it doesn't work to your expectations, too bad! But you still have information on the developer to inform your future purchasing decisions, namely.. the next time you think of purchasing something from them you have reason to doubt that they will live up to your expectations!
Just like how if you go to a restaurant and receive bad service, you know not to eat there anymore, and not buy their food.
For me, in terms of games, this means Capcom. Fuck you capcom. How many iterations of SF4? Yeah I feel kind of bad about spending X amount of dollars on different versions of SF4, even if I didn't buy any of the DLC and skipped over AE (I bought Vanilla, Super and Ultra). But ugh, thinking about what they might do with SF5, just makes me say "nope, I know how you work Capcom, based on past purchasing experience, and the level of enjoyment I got from them relative to money and time spent in it was not really worth it, so no thankyou on SF5". BUT of course like anything in life, I'm open to being surprised, but I'll need some convincing, more information and good arguments to persuade me that anything Capcom puts out in the future is worth investing in.
Conclusion: Ugh, man I feel like that sort of turned into a rant. But a lot of the times it just feels like people are being reaaallly irrational when it comes to talking about games. But we here at GB are rational people... right?
Do people not give much thought when pre-ordering or paying full price for a game? Or is it just the media/forums that makes it seem like each individual spends lots of money on games, when in reality most individuals, like myself, only pay full price for a game once a year or something? Sort of like how the complainers are heard the most, but we never know about the 'average' spender?
Anyways that was fun to get some of these thoughts out. Thankyou for reading full, if you did. Also please leave comments, would love to hear different perspectives, or cases. Like how often have you paid full price/pre-ordered a game? For me I never pre-order, and pay full price game maybe once a year or something. :o
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