We need to talk about unplayed games

67 thoughts on We need to talk about unplayed games

1. I don’t know if you are right or wrong, but I certainly know that the constant sales and pay what you want stuff, while financially sensible from a sales point of view, causes me to resent developers and feel increasingly unwilling to pay for games. This is, of course, exasperated by the ‘premium price for alpha/beta/whatever’ access stuff that is a trend these days partially due to kickstarter.

   It just feels incredibly disrespectful to ask people to buy your game while you are working on it to let you keep working on it, and then turn around and sell it for a fraction of that price before it is out of alpha, or similar.

   Further, given that practically every indie game will be either 75% off or in a pay what you want bundle within months of release, why would I ever want to pay ‘full’ price? I was perfectly happy to do it when things stayed at that price for quite some time, but the early adopter tax has gone from 100% months or a year down the line to well in excess of 1000% within a month.

   I know this is excessively jaded and bitter, but I don’t feel like you (indie devs) respect my money, or even want me to support your game by paying a reasonably price for it.

   1. Apparently I was massively off topic, sorry. At least it wasn’t entirely unrelated.

   2. Entire article is a little presumptuous IMO. For us to be “played”, we’d have to be ignorant of what’s going on. We’re not. We know we’re building backlogs. We LIKE that. I was introduced to Steam in May 2013 and now have 250+ games, less than five of which I’ve paid more than $7 for. I haven’t played them all and I probably never will. I’m aware I might not play a game when I buy it.

      So why do I do it? So I have the choice in future. Like recently, I fired up Space Pirates and Zombies on a whim and LOVED it. I was only vaguely interested in it at best when I obtained it and there was a good six months between obtaining it and playing it, but it paid off in the end because when I was bored one day, it was there and I was in the mood for it.

      So yeah, it’s not so much “being played” as catering to the alternative outlook on new games some gamers have. Some of us are less interested in playing new games as and when they come out, than playing the games they got for cheap when the whim strikes them.

      1. This is the same for me. Sales let me build a backlog, and when I finish (yep, finish) a game, I sit back and look at my list of games and think, “Okay, now what am I in the mood to play next…?” Buying those games gives me a lot of options, and there’s always something on the list that fits my mood.

         Similar to what happened with you, one day I finished a game, then I fired up To The Moon, on a whim, and ended up loving the hell out of it. So effing good. And I’d just picked it up during a sale because the price was awesome and I’d heard good things. And one day I was in the mood to try it, wasn’t in the middle of any AAA titles, played it, and loved it.

         Sales also let me take risks on games I normally wouldn’t buy. If I find a game by a small indie that I’ve never heard of, I’m much more likely to try his game if it’s $5 than if it’s $10. Evoland, for example. Looked interesting, but didn’t know much about the people behind it and certainly wouldn’t have paid more than $10 for it. There was too much risk that it could simply suck. But at less than $5, I bought it, played it, loved it, and was happy the dev got a cut of my money.

         Multiply that experience by a hundred indie games, and I’ve helped (in my own small way) put money in the pockets of devs who otherwise would have a hell of a time getting recognition, let alone some income. Sales are a way I can balance my desire to support devs and reduce risk on unknown devs struggling in a crowded market.

         1. This doesn’t really make sense, guys. You don’t need to own 250 games or spend several hundred dollars to have options. The whole damn catalogue is always there for you to look at. You could just buy the games you actually want to play… Clearly you like owning the games the way stamp collectors like stamps. So just admit that.

            1. Having 250 games in your Steam library is just about buying games at opportune moments – in this case, when discounted. I don’t think that’s the same as stamp collecting at all, where the collecting is the end goal in itself.

            2. I fully admit that I get part of my satisfaction in hoarding games like a stamp collector would, and an “endorphin rush from getting a bargain”. So what? Is this, somehow, unethical? Is it a disgusting perversion? Is it in any way contradictory with what the other posters said before — allows you to play games you otherwise wouldn’t have taken a risk on, discover some gems on the way, and simply leave on the side the games that don’t catch your interest without angry feelings?

               As for Cliff’s post about being “played”, this baffles me equally. I am, I think, relatively aware of what I’m doing, in particular that I won’t play half of the games I buy, and still perfectly happy to give my money to indie developers — probably several times more money than they would get without bundles/bargains. It also increases the relative value of indie games vs AAA games, which by the way didn’t wait for sales to be full of filler (I don’t really see the connection from bargains to filler here).

               Seriously, there is a need to sort out between the completely irrelevant or bullshit arguments and the serious ones in this discussion. One effective possible drawback is that it becomes necessary for an indie developer to appeal to the largest audience possible in order to break even — it may hurt niche games developers, who would be otherwise profitable selling to a smaller base at a higher price. I am not even sure how much of this argument is true though.

2. My name is Sergio and I am a game sales alcoholic.
   There are some games that I preorder but almost all of them has disappointed me: this is why I don’t usually buy a game at day one.

   I like the idea of early access, but almost any game I have bought this way was early abandoned (eg. gnomoria, prison architect) or is abandoned until an update is published (eg. kerbal, automation)

   This is why I now had all the game I wish to play in my wishlist on steam and wait for a discount. In this list there are some DLC from paradox that I will buy with a 1% discount (but for a reason passing my self-understending i wouldn’t buy full price at 9.99 and 19.99) and some games like Rome Total War 2 that I’ll wait until the price drops under 10€.

   In the end: I think is a market problem. Big day-one-broken games spoils the buying experience for everyone

   1. What?

      Prison Architect and Gnomoria have not been abandoned. PA receives monthly updates. How can a game be abandoned until it receives an update ala Kerbal? Which gets them fairly frequently though not every month.

      Abandoned suggests its no longer supported or getting updates what so ever. What do you want from them daily updates or something?

      1. Sorry. I’ve written it wrong. What I meen I’d that I have abandoned it:

         When I first started to play prison architect it was a good system but to repetitive to be played. Now I have moved on to other games while the home got more and more features.

         With kerbal is another story: the game is right non at a really enjoyable state with research and tech three but I have suspended plaing it waiting for the next update.

3. I agree with many of these sentiments, but let me add to it.

   Maybe gamers need some self-control as well? I hardly buy anything any more unless it’s a game with quick play sessions and/or I know I’ll finish it.

4. I am a gamer who does not get invested in games for very long. It’s not an attention span thing; I can watch incredibly long and static movies or books for days. I just prefer to experiment with games. I spend hours bouncing between a variety for hours, goofing around and seeing what’s out there.

   To be blunt, games are not overly important to me; I do not spend a great deal of time getting to know every game intimately unless it really attracts my attention. My narrowness of taste is matched by its randomness. It’s hard for me to predict what I will like, and even harder to know what I will like enough to really sink into. Doing research on a game takes time; time I could spend just playing the game itself, which has a better payoff in usefulness anyway.

   For someone who finds “newness” as the opposite of a selling point, a Netflix streaming model would work better for me, but such a service is not available. (PlayStation Plus is a close attempt and I love it, but the day-to-day variety is lacking.) So I do the next best thing: I buy a bunch of cheap games on sale and I bounce around them for the months afterward until the next sale rolls around.

   Game devs might say I’m experiencing their games wrong, but I’m pretty locked in to my ways and I’m pretty content with those patterns.

5. I go two ways, I either buy a game at release for full price or I buy a game when it is on sale a year later for 75% off.

   I have a limited budget because I am still in school, so I try to choose five or six games over the year that I want to buy full price. And only after I have read features and previews about a game. I only buy full priced games I know that I am going to enjoy. Also if a game is in the $30 or less category on release and it comes out with amazing reviews, is in a genre I really enjoy, and the Lets Plays look promising I may pick it up if I don’t have a game I am really into at that moment.

   Also there are certain developers I am willing to buy every game on release just because they always make games that I know I will enjoy. Your games are in this category, along with a few other developers like Valve, Irrational Games(rip), and a few others.

   This then brings me to the heavily discounted games. I am of the opinion that if I can find one good game out of 20 that I buy, all for the price of one full priced game, I have made it worth my while. And by good game I mean something I am putting 20+ hours into, or completing the games story. Its all about finding a gaming experience I enjoy out of multiple genres, and being able to try out things Im not sure I will like for a very cheap price. It gets me to try everything there is to offer in the gaming world.

   I have something like 425 games on steam, and according to steamdb I only have playtime on 52% of those games. But I have gotten a huge amount of enjoyment out of the top 10% of my played games because I have found gaming experiences that I immensely enjoy from having the chance of trying these multitudes of games.

6. I’m one of those people with a backlog of games that I may not even play. Some of those games I bought because of nostalgic reasons. Some just to support the developers. Some I bought in alpha / early access and now waiting for them to be fully developed.

   Some I bought multiple times from multiple places (which is why I like Steam, so I don’t have to mentally manage that.) Off topic, I was cleaning my house last weekend, and found an unopened Skyrim DVD that I bought at full retail value. Things like that keep me sticking with just one distributors.

   Anyway, there is a very narrow genre of games that I play, and I usually watch Let’s Plays a long time before I buy them. And for some strategy games, the older games (i.e. Distant Worlds) are much more “fun” than the new ones, however pretty they are.

   I do, however, fall into the “sale” trap. For example, I bought Redshirts, which is heavily promoted here, on a Steam sale. I played it once to completion, and don’t plan to play it again. I wouldn’t have bought it if it weren’t on sale anyway. There are a bunch of games like that. I guess my point is that the sale has its place. If it weren’t for the sales, I would not even tried some of those games.

7. An interesting thing for me, is that for me I’m exactly like this on my mac. But on PS3 I’m the exact opposite, I own two games, the latest call of duty and fifa which I upgrade bi-annually. They both get pretty decent playing.

8. Lots of good points here. I suspect there’s a variety things going on with unplayed games from the player’s perspective. My unplayed game collection is eerily similar to my unread book collection: huge piles of long, deep experiences waiting to be had. It’s possible that having too many games/books discourages me from partaking of them with the earnestness they deserve, and deep discounts encourage large collections. But I’m not convinced that the insignificance of the purchasing experience (packaging, promotion, financial investment) is what is depriving me of the interest or momentum or whatever needed to get me to play my purchased games to the end. As with the books, I’m more inclined to blame my own psychology: cognitive biases around opportunity cost, insecurities about reading/playing and being a reader/player, poor time management.

   I otherwise agree with your points about the industry skewing towards non-players like me, regardless of why I’m not playing. There’s a new market of people paying $5 for casual games, and there’s a sense in which gunning for this market by discounting larger games encourages a casual attitude toward those games that may be depriving potential players of those rich experiences. Unplayed Steam libraries may be a symptom of that.

   1. Tangentially related, Joseph Bernstein of BuzzFeed wrote about difficult games and the consumer feedback loop:

      http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/the-glorious-and-necessary-torture-of-dark-souls

      Some art defies being consumed so easily. This made me think of this post in the way that casual purchasing of media gives way to casual consumption, as if purchasing is a major part of the consumption experience. Unplayed games and unread books satisfy an urge that is ostensibly about experiencing art, but may actually be merely about buying it.

9. A few people have said this but I do both.

   I buy some games at full price. I won’t delay buying a game because it might be in a sale. But deep sales sometimes make me buy things I’d never have considered otherwise. For example a year or so ago I bought portal 2 for £5. I would never have bought it at full price, it simply didn’t appeal to me at all… But when it was on sale I kind of though ok maybe it will be good so I bought it… And then didn;’t play it for 4 months… And when I did, wow, what a good game!

   My point is that I think that steam handles their sales reasonably well. I’ve not been put off paying for a game I want, but I’ve bought other things simply because they looked good value too that I would never have considered before.

   Perhaps I’m the only one :P

10. Let me tell you why you are partly wrong. Whenever I see a game on sale, if it is a game I have not heard of before, I look for trailers, gameplay, some reviews/informations/forum posts EVERY TIME. If it is a game that I have on my bucket list, then I just buy it. The only game I wanted to buy during a sale and I discovered I already own it is Battlefield 2 and the Vietnam DLC on Steam. I have very few games in my Steam account that I regret buying while they were on a sale. I bought several HumbleBundle packs in time. Sales are good if they are accompanied by some sort of involvement from the developer. Most of the times developers just cash in the money and they don’t give 2 cents on the new players. I would send each of them an email congratulating them on the purchase, at least. The quality of the games has been reduced a lot, I am often pulled back from buying a new game when I hear that it has too many bugs. Developers should not be the first ones to throw the stone, knowing that very few games (not matter how new/good/innovative they are) are worth buying on day 1 (or preordering).

11. Rule #1 Never buy a new game before finishing the first one, unless it’s a dreadful disaster.

    This really comes down to consumer mentality, I don’t think you can shift the blame entirely on the publishers. After all, they’re a business and they’re in it for the money.

    Most people have a bad habit of buying a game and tossing it out the next day. They have no self-control over their spending, so they end up with dozens of games unfinished, because it just doesn’t keep them hooked. They’re looking for something fresh, something new and engaging. They set their expectations too high and end up feeling disappointed.

    The solution is to simply do your research before investing in a game, whether it’s $5 or $60. Find something you’re going to like, watch some gameplay, read up some reviews that suit your interests, and THEN decide if you feel it’s worth the price or not.

    I know a lot of people who buy shovelware just because it’s a dollar. They tell me, ‘It’s cheap, so why not?’. That’s the wrong kind of mentality which is unfortunately taking a toll on these buyers.

    Although, there are smart consumers make smart purchases. They know what they’re getting into, they don’t fall prey to silly marketing techniques, and they certainly don’t buy something just because it’s cheap.

    So I guess the title should really be “Are we smart enough to buy games?”.
    For the most part, no.

12. The issue I have is that if games weren’t so expensive to begin with I’d buy a lot more games on release date.

    Unfortunately, after bills I only have so much money to spend on luxuries like games and if I’m unsure about the quality of a game then yeah I’m sure as hell gonna wait till it’s on sale.

    £40 for something that might not be up to snuff is quite a gamble these days.

13. Game launches, I agree with to a certain extent. That water cooler moment has definitely died off in our office. But I think it’s a reflection of the “games by numbers” approach to development these days. We’ve played big budget shooters, RPGs or adventure games to death. There’s virtually no innovation. If a game deserves a day one purchase, it still occurs but they’re few and far between.

    I do have a massive list of games on steam, with less that 10% actually completed but the majority of those games are from indie bundles. I’m happy to part with cash if it’s going towards indie developers who are reinvigorating creativity within the games industry. Even if I don’t actually play the game.

    I only have 2 physical titles for my ps4, being BF4 (a mp component I continuously return to) and Lego the movie for a bit of leisurely and pleasant down time. There’s nothing out there that warrants a day one purchase for me.

    I think a large portion of the audience now are well into their 30s and above, people who have grown up with games and experienced the cyclical nature of hardware generations many times over and we’re tired of the same games. They don’t justify £40-50 on day one.

14. My “un-played” listing in steam is made up of games that I played when I was younger. I re-purchased these games on steam as when I moved I couldn’t bring all my games with me. I couldn’t even bring my computer. Due to the distance I moved, I had a complete wipe of all games I had ever played. I purchased these games due to the nostalgia I felt and due to the sale that was discounting the price to where I felt that I could spend 5€ on 12 games in the bundle just to replay the 1 or 2 games that I wanted. I also then had the other 10 games to try out if I ever felt the urge to go back in the series and try the earlier games. I may not be typical in that sense, that I don’t have many uncompleted games in my library, even if my Steam Account begs to differ.

15. I feel the need to pitch in as well. I am talking from an interesting perspective of a self-appointed games collector. At the moment I have close to 2000 (yes, 2k) games just on Steam. No, I am not rich. I am just shopping around. Maybe it’s an age thing but recently I am getting more pleasure of acquiring a game than actually playing it. I have no illusion that I am going to play through more than 20% of my backlog but I still don’t mind paying. Do you want my money? Then give me an incentive to buy your game, aka a discount.

    Now with all that said I still buy new games and pre-order them (latest ones being: Banished, Thief, Titanfall). I pay full price for them (or get the pathetic 10% discount). But I will never buy a full priced game if I am not really into it.

    Al in all if you want money from people who don’t really care about your game – give huge discounts. If you don’t then you won’t see that money anyway. In my opinion that’s not a loss for you, that’s a profit that you wouldn’t be able to get it otherwise…

    1. Buying cheap games in bulk on Steam does not count as collecting games. Your “collection” is a file on Valve’s servers stating which games your account is allowed to access. People with shelfs full of game boxes are collectors.

       “Do you want my money? Then give me an incentive to buy your game, aka a discount. […] Al in all if you want money from people who don’t really care about your game – give huge discounts.”

       Do you really not see how crazy this is? You don’t even care about playing anything, you just want to buy something just because it’s on sale. For what possible purpose? It makes no sense. Physical copies would at least look nice in your room, but with Steam you’re throwing away money for nothing. Unless, of course, you play what you buy. Which you won’t.

       This is just one of the many mental dysfunctions Steam sales have led to. They may be profitable for companies, but they cause psychological harm to players (or buyers, as the case may be). There are any number of stories on the Internet about players feeling burdened and overwhelmed by their backlogs. Also many services for analyzing and managing backlogs.

       My Steam account will turn 10 years old soon, and I’ve only bought about 140 games (no Humble Bundles yet, and almost no bundles in general), or even less if you discount retail games activated on Steam. But is “only” the right word here? It’s at least much better than people who joined last year and already have over 250 games, like one commenter here.

       1. You do speak a lot of sense. But I don’t even have a DVD drive any more and in UK all the houses and flats are so friking small that I wouldn’t be able to store a vast collection so virtual library is a perfect solution.

          I question my motives often as well. But the matter of fact is that increasing my Steam library gives me pleasure (not to mention the ability to play anything at any time I want). Whatever the reason that brings profit to the developers, publishers…and Steam. And everyone is here to make money (among other things).

16. It’s all bull. I coughed up the full price for GTA 4 on Day One, and then bought it again, as the Complete Edition with both DLC, when it was on a -75% sale. I did the same thing for Borderlands 2, Fallout New Vegas (hauling my ass to the brick’n’mortar store at 8PM in pissing rain), hell, I’ve even preordered both recent XCOM games and Deus Ex: Human Revolution (Collector Edition in the last case). If the game is worth it, I’m willing to buy it on Day One. But I refuse to do it for all those boring Battlefield: Call of Honor: Modern Warfighter thingers released yearly with pretty much the same assets reused edition after edition. I refuse to do it for stuff that’s absurdly priced in relation to its quality and concept. Seriously. You can’t force me to cough up thirty bucks for yet another village sim with inhabitant AI written to be as temperamental and suicidally lazy as possible (as a feature, not a bug) or yet another block-jockeying game that, as an “early access” title, has the block-jockeying limited to three basic features. If I can describe the game as “yet another…” or “clone of…”, I’m not paying the full price for it.
    Anyway, here’s the kicker: during the first -75% sale, the profits from GTA4 sales went up fourfold. They got four times as much money while selling the game for a quarter of the normal price.

17. A few problems of course:
    1) The focal minority that generally populates video game websites make up, what, 1% of gamers? They might make up 10% of sales, but the feedback you get from this will not be a good survey of gamer purchases.
    2) Sounds like a cop out, but blame mobile games. They are free, they are simple, they are quick time wasters. They have trained a large % of gamers to not care about a full experience. They just want a quick fix,so who cares about the content after level 3.
    3) Stop charging $60 for games. Just stop it. Oh, you made a FPS shooter? But this one has MECHS in it?!?!? Great, I don’t care. 10 FPS come out every month. Slap a $20 price tag on it, because I’ve played the game already, only with a different skin.
    4) You are right when we are expecting sales right after a release. Because we see it happen all the time. Unless you are Nintendo, your game is going to get a price drop soon, so it’s easy to just avoid spoilers for a bit and wait for a sale.
    5) Stop spending millions and millions of dollars on development. If you spent a month making sure facial experessions look good, especially in a game that is fast pace and always moving, YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME AND money. Focus on the game play, and tell these idiots who cry, “60 FPS or I’m not buying it” to go play a game somewhere else.
    6) If you are selling a game digitally, don’t charge $60. You are loaning me a file – we don’t even own it anymore if we buy digitally – so $5 is the right price. Or tell Sony/MS/Steam that we actually own the game, and it’s not going to go away when they feel like it.

    Hope that helps.

18. In a way, developers did this to themselves and should therefore just accept it. If there’s a new Call of Duty every year, a new Battlefield every 2, now Titanfall (and everything else I’ve forgotten about) – how do you expect me to play all that? I’m in my 30s and been playing games for a long time but I don’t have time for multiple “watercooler” games each year. If I already paid for BF4’s ‘season pass’ garbage, why should I pay the equivalent for Titanfall which will only take more time away from the game I’m already playing and payed for? Why would I buy another game that forces me to spend countless hours unlocking things when I’m already playing games like that? I suspect for many gamers, like me, there’s a lot ‘progression fatigue’ from all these hot new games I’m supposed to pay full price for. Enter Steam sales: suddenly, I don’t care that I don’t have time to get anywhere near max level, unlock the cool guns, or get the fun hats because I’m only paying 50%.

    Another reason the developers bring this on themselves: patches. Why on earth should I buy a game at full price on release that will require X number of patches before it’s even consistently playable? Here’s a tip: finish a game before you sell it and I’d be more inclined to buy it. As it is now, I’d be buying a game full price hoping it gets finished. By the time modern games are patched to playability, it’s already on sale. Not my fault, not Steam’s fault, your fault. BF4 burned me good on release, thanks, Day 1 Purchase! Damned if we do, damned if we don’t. The rest of the industry affects your games as well. BF4’s horrendous launch (at least on PC) means I won’t trust the next game, and I certainly won’t pay full price.

    And my third: multiplayer/co-op. My gaming time is limited; if you don’t have multiplayer or co-op that I can play with my friends, you are relegated to the 50% off or less pile. Sorry. I like a lot of single player games, like Skyrim, but if I only have so many hours a week to play games then I’m going to spend that time with my friends if I can. Skyrim would have been awesome as co-op, and I’d probably still be putting time into it if that was the case, but it isn’t, therefore: sale.

    Developers can’t give me more time to play games, but they can stop wasting my time. Until then, they shouldn’t complain about profitable long-tail game sales.

19. Your final point is self defeating. Why would I want to pay full price ($60/$50) for a game I KNOW I’m only going to play for less than a few hours? That’s just stupid. Assuming you play only an hour then quit, The math works out to be $60/hour for your entertainment. You must make a lot if money. That’s too rich for my blood.

20. agreed, the final point actually acknowledges why sales are better for devs and customers: the price for physical games was driven by manufacturing and distribution, but how do you decide the price of a digital product, game, music or book? many people still wonder that.

    the main point of digital sales is, people decide how much they want to pay for it, and it’s not a bad thing. if the game is ten times cheaper but then attracts hundred times more people, it’s a win for the devs with more money and audience. and if you want to throw away your money and buy it full price (remember, the ARBITRARY full price), so be it.

    but if you only play it for an hour, you’re the problem: you’re the reason why devs don’t bother polishing the second half of their games, or even make it and settle for a few hours with a lousy online component.

21. I get a rush from getting a bargain and a game! Score!

22. “Gamers are being played, played like a fucking piano, every time you see the word SALE.”
    Unless the objective was to put it for that “sale” price from the word go, and simply charged a higher price because they could, I don’t see how this is anything but a bonus for an individual who wants to buy a new game.

    “This is a big psychology trick that is being used to siphon money from gamers, and it’s a bad thing, and if we can (and I think we probably can’t) we should stop it.”
    While you might make an argument for a gamer spending money on multiple sale titles rather than a single non-sale title, it still falls flat as they still ended up with more games than they would have had if they had bought just the one game. The quality of the games, at this point, is irrelevant as the sale games could either be good or bad games, and similarly so could the non-sale game. More games still equates to a better chance of getting at least one good purchase.

    “It kills off game launches.”
    No, it doesn’t, at least not on the whole. There will always be the guy that gets the game first at full-price, and if he likes the product, he’ll tell you about it. If no one buys the game, then it is likely that either the game is not of interest to you or those around you, and thus you wouldn’t buy it at full price regardless. If it DOES go on sale, and it previously did not interest you heavily enough to buy at full price, then you might buy it on sale only to discover that it is great, and that your friends should get it too. Now, if it never goes on sale, in this situation, then it never gets bought, the dev never gets money, and no one ever talks about it regardless. The sale is only beneficial in this scenario.

    “The game is ignored until the first 50% or 75% off sale.”
    I believe you have a very limited set of gaming friends, then, or only buy games on sale yourself, and the problem is specific to you. I check out all new games, as long as they pertain to my interests. If i see something that i find even passably interesting, i can basically guarantee that a friend has already bought it and will tell me about it. Mentioning what we’ve played recently is what all of the gaming communities, of which i am a part, do on a regular basis. I think you just need to broaden your friends.

    “You don’t get that ‘water cooler moment’ where everyone talks about a game.”
    I also question this as water cooler moments are almost exclusively related to AAA titles, such as Call of Duty, which are generally bought first day anyways. Waiting for a sale for CoD is an unlikely scenario. I could have a water cooler moment for a game like, say, mount and blade: warband, but chances are it’ll be a bit one sided as next to no one has played that fantastic game, regardless of it going on sale or not.

    “That means some multilayer games launch without the proper size of players, and the company isn’t making enough to retain support staff to patch and improve the game at launch.”
    This really only happens with indie games, of which I still do not believe are as big of an issue in the first place. Here’s an example, “Stellar Impact” is a Moba style space-warship game. What i recall playing of it was that it was good, and fun, but a bit broken and unpolished. This, along with it being a rather niche item in a rather saturated market, led to it not having a very large community. Sadly, now, i am not likely to get a game started any time soon. If it went on sale, however, it might actually increase the player base, especially now that some of the kinks have been worked out.

    “When a game is in a one-day 75% off sale, how much research do you do before buying? Did you watch a lets play? the trailer? did you read any reviews? how many?”
    Citadels when on sale recently on steam for 10 bucks. I could probably lose 10 bucks and not care, but I decided to watch a lets play and found it to be terrible. I then went on metacritic and found it had a score of around 20 from critics and less from gamers. As a result, regardless of the sale, I didn’t buy it. But lets say I did buy it, maybe it would turn out to be just what i wanted. Maybe I would not have given it time of day prior, say on release, particularly with those same lets plays, but now with 10 bucks i throw in and find that it scratches just the right itch for me. The point is, the sale still doesn’t hurt anyone.

    “Admit it, you have bought a game based on the name, a logo and a screenshot because it was under $5 haven’t you?”
    Sure, and some have been great and some have been terrible. The five bucks i invested i did not expect to get a AAA title from. It was a gamble at the point, either I got a mashed up pile of crap, which i expect at 5 bucks, or i didn’t. The fact that it was on sale did nothing otherwise. You could say, well that’s 5 bucks you could spend on something better, but the reality is, i had already decided to waste that 5 bucks. Maybe instead i could have bought something else, sure, but that still doesn’t mean that the other purchase would have been any better either.

    “If so, this is a problem. We are rewarding games with cool names & screenshots over actual quality.”
    This is called marketing. I’ve seen plenty of movies, games, and media of all sorts get my money just because they looked cool but delivered garbage. Sim City was a good example of a game i payed full price for yet got handed a pile of crap in exchange. If it were on sale, at least I’d be able to spend the rest of my money on a Sim City clone that would better sate my city building desire. The sale would have been a POSITIVE for me instead of a negative. If someone bought it on sale, instead of full price, then they still didn’t really lose anything as they paid less for it than i did and they got the same pile of crap.

    “We are handing power to people who run sales.”
    And they save me a lot of money too!

    “If anyone can sell $50,000 in a day with any game just by being on the front page of a sale, then that makes the people who manage the sale webpage the kingmakers. Is that right? is it fair? is it an optimum maximization of everyone’s satisfaction and enjoyment? Or is it more likely making hits out of games who are well known (or liked) by the owners of the big portals?”
    The fact that there is well-known games, and them going on sale, doesn’t really harm indie games. The indie game has to weave its way into a market where Call of Duty and Battlefield and World of Warcraft reign supreme. You want to know the scary thing, though? Call of Duty, Battlefield, and World of Warcraft have incredibly stable prices, and almost never go on anything resembling a decent sale. Indie games can go for 75% off. This isn’t because someone is evil, its because the publishers know what people are willing to pay for the things they want. It sounds a lot more, to me, that you don’t like the big-name games in general, not sales.

    “We devalue games.”
    The value I have on games is directly related to the enjoyment that game delivers upon. I think i spent around 30 bucks for Mount and Blade: Warband. If i had known how great the game was in the first place, I’d totally have paid 60 easily. The problem is that most game devs have publishers and deals that have a bigger influence on the product they produce that is good for the product. Most of the great games we have were original IPs that tried something new and different and made a name for themselves, only to be bastardized later when a big-name publisher told them that they clearly needed quick-time events because market research says that quick-time events are the new thing. Just look at EA’s series of games. They make a good first one and then run them into the ground with a steam roller. Either that, or the charge stupid prices for years, with next to no sales, on products that are not very much different than the previous installment [I’m looking at you Sims 3].

    “We expect games to be $5.”
    I expect indie games with around 10 hours of game play to be 5 dollars. I expect games like Skyrim to be 50 to 60, but sometimes find that they SHOULD have been 5 instead [not skyrim, though, it was fantastic].

    “We don’t ‘invest’ money in them, so we give up and discard them at the first time we lose, or when we get confused or stuck.”
    This is YOUR run at games. I invest into games what I want. I like the mechanics and the new systems and I enjoy what i has to offer. Once I get out of it what i want, I move on. I don’t feel compelled to complete a game like Dark Souls, regardless of how good it is, because i have gotten all the enjoyment out of it that I could and have moved on to something else that i find entertaining. Dark Souls, though, is, i think, a good example. The game is fantastic, without question, but its so punishing that I don’t enjoy it and investing in it isn’t something I WANT to do. The fact that I don’t take the time to master it is not the game or the sale’s fault, its my choice.

    “Some games are complex, tricky, hard to master, take a while to get to the point at which it all makes sense.”
    And those games cater to a different audience, clearly, than the guy that wants an immediate thrill. You know what I love in my games? Complexity. You know what I get most often, not complexity. Why? Because that’s what the average gamer wants and needs. That is not a problem with game sales or devs, that’s a problem with me. I am different than other gamers. I want to invest a stupid amount of time into a complicated system to achieve a town of my own, or master some other element, or whatever. Devs not making more complicated games is regrettable, but they’re in a business, and that business is to make money, and the money is where the non-complexity is. Thankfully, we’re seeing more crowd funded games which is allowing us to get some of those complicated games.

    “We are increasingly likely to not bother with complex games, if we paid $5, we want something quick and disposable.”
    Again, i feel as though you are making generalizations. If i pay 5 bucks for a game and it turns out to be complex, awesome. I don’t expect it, though, as 5 bucks likely does not cover a lot of development of the game. I’ve bought games that would have been 60, but were on Xbox Live Arcade for 20, such as State of Decay. That easily could have been a full-release, 60ish dollar game. It wasn’t though, and it was fantastic. If it HAD been a 60 dollar game, I hazard a guess to say that it would have been even better, or had more content, or whatever. But at 20 bucks, it wasn’t disposable as the price tag might infer. Still, if it were to go on sale, that doesn’t devalue that game or any other game.

    “We don’t play beyond the first 10%. There is not a single game in my steam collection I’ve finished.”
    Again, that’s you. I’ve finished quite a few but even I must admit that there are games that I have bought on sale that I haven’t even opened. Why? Because they are good games and i want to support the dev, but i don’t want to spend a huge amount of money to do so. In exchange, i get a game that I might actually give a whirl sometime in the future and find that I really like it. The game being on sale just means that there’s one more person that COULD play the game where before there was not.

    “I have another X games sat there I can experience the opening level of instead. And yet… gamers insist on 50 hours of game play.”
    Because most games, games that people buy at full price, are a larger investment and that requires more resources, and we want more out of our money. Having the game go on sale does not harm anyone if the game turns out to be 50 hours. They just got more value for their money.

    “Cue 49 hours of back-tracking and filler,…”
    That depends on the game, costs, publisher, and development cycle. There’s a lot that goes into this, including meeting deadlines and trying to find crafty ways of adding value to the product with minimizing cost. The only game I can think of that did this specifically overtly was Dragon Age 2. That was the exception, and also an EA title going back to my whole driving an IP into the ground statement. The game going on sale, still, is not a factor in this reasoning.

    “because game devs KNOW that 90%+ of buyers will never see the game ending anyway…”
    Wild assumption. First this assumes that the dev has some sort of an intention to get you to stop playing their product. I do not know of a single dev that goes out with the intent to make a shitty product. Whether or not you get to the end is up to you, and a game like Skyrim, with its massive amount of content, is very easy to play and put down and never see the end. This is not an intentional attempt by the devs, it is a result of delivering a relatively superior product that has more content than you have patience to play through.

    “D3 has never been lower than 50% since release back in October, with no immediate plans to re-do that 50% off or go lower.”
    This isn’t some concerted effort to value their product, it is because WE value it higher, because we are willing to pay more for the product even well beyond its initial release. Blizzard products are not very good examples as their products never go on sale, they don’t have to, their brand and product are so highly rated and valued, by us, that we basically shoot ourselves in the foot. Hell, people pay for expansions to World of Warcraft when they already pay 15 bucks a month. On a rough estimate, they have around 7 million subscribers. Doing the math, that’s around 1.2 billion a year. Are you trying to tell me that they couldn’t make an expansion, for free, for the kind of money they are pulling? Even with a very liberal 600 million going toward running the game and staff, they still have well over the budget of even most AAA titles, yet people STILL pay for the expansions. Keep in mind, too, that the expansion are developed over multiple years and that money is STILL flowing in. They likely have around a billion that they could EASILY invest into developing the most insane expansion to an MMO you’ve ever seen. Why? Because they don’t have to. Their brand is so strong, their product so valued, they don’t have to put it on sale. This isn’t a fault of Blizzard or any indie dev, they simply delivered upon an, arguably, superior product and got a lot of popularity from it.

    “I understand that varied price points to suit different gamers is good, I understand the reasons for sales being economically efficient ways to maximize global utility. But this implies utility is derived from the product. We are no longer selling products, we are selling discounts. The endorphin rush is now from getting a bargain, not the fun of actually *playing* the game. This is bad.”
    Again, I think this is a situation of what you do. Most sales, particularly steam’s huge holiday sales, I don’t really buy anything. Why? Because I’ve already bought them all because I’m not patient enough to wait. Even if i were patient, that still wouldn’t devalue the product, it would simply mean my desire for not spending so much money outweighed my desire to buy it.

    “Am I right? Am I wrong. TELL ME :D”
    Sorry, I think you’re wrong. I might agree on some points, and give some concessions, but on the whole, sales are only a good thing for gamers. Devs? It might be bad for them, maybe, but its great for gamers. And to counter the argument before it gets made, devs will still make the product expecting it not to be on sale, and for it to sell well, because that’s the point of making the product. I don’t think any dev makes a product with the explicit intent of it going on steam sale, they want it to be good enough to be purchased without a sale.

    1. Kyle, I agree with most of your points when you’re talking in the context of the “informed gamer”. But do you honestly believe that all gamers

       a. Have the inclination to check out all the new games “that pertain to their interests”
       b. Have the time (or brain cells) to check out said games?

       I’m not trying to be aggressive or obtuse but you assume that people inform themselves. Never would I pass up on a day-one purchase just for the possibility of having it 10% cheaper the following week. If you’re passionate, you’re passionate.
       Anyway, this is all very subjective and we all have different experiences based on who we game with. My opinion is that the sale-mentality needs to be curbed, we see a lack of risks in AAA titles and we, gamers, only have ourselves to blame.

       1. Even if there were fewer informed gamers, having the game on sale still exposes them to more games, even if those games are garbage. This gives them a better education in what to expect from games in the future, and to be a bit more hesitant is buying impulse purchases.

          And yes, it is all very much subjective and dependent upon the person, and accordingly the post is about how sales are a bad thing for some reason. I still stand by the fact that game sales are only a good thing, and can only really be a good thing. Even if a game, say Sim City, were to go on sale for, say, 10 bucks, and i were to buy it, I still got a game no matter how crappy it might be for considerably less. Now i have more money, get the game and experience of it, and i can learn for myself that its a pile of dogshit. I can enter the conversation about it being terrible because I now have firsthand knowledge. If i had to pay full price, i might be a bit more sore to see that its terrible, and further, be more hesitant to buy games from them in the future, which may not actually be a bad thing. Even the soulless EA sometimes puts out great or even good games. The sale lets me not feel as bad about a bad purchase and really value a good purchase.

    2. This wall of text doesn’t change the fact that sales cause people to buy mountains and mountains of games they never play, eventually resulting in the dreaded Steam Backlog. You are just rationalizing.

       1. “This wall of text doesn’t change the fact that sales cause people to buy mountains and mountains of games they never play, eventually resulting in the dreaded Steam Backlog. You are just rationalizing.”

          And this is bad because… ?

          I have a huge backlog on steam. I have games I will likely never play or even install. Yet i still own over 500 games on steam. I’ve paid full price for quite a few of them, and the actual total of money spent is rather… depressing to think about. Still, it is my passion and i like having a lot of games, i get kind of game ADD from time to time and want something new and fresh. Having a backlog doesn’t hurt me at all. You might see it as a bad thing that I dont complete the games that i own, but I like to think of it as getting exactly what i want out of it as i desire. If i get bored of the game 5 hours in and think, hmm, i want to try something else, if i have no backlog i’m stuck. I either play something like, for example, League, or i go and play the game that i find boring and just trudge through it. Having a backlog is nothing but a net positive.

23. I am a 30 something recovered gamer, with 3 kids and a career.
    I love video games, yet I am reluctant to pay full price for any game.
    I have been burned too often in the last few years with AAA titles preorders, and then the alpha funding (which then go on sale before it’s released).
    The market has been polluted with broken, substandard games.
    This also leads to why games are not being played 100% through; there have been few games worth being completed in recent years. It doesn’t matter if I spend $60 or $5 on a game, I will not waste my valuable time on garbage.

    Just a note about recent online multiplayer games: How often as a game gone live and then fails because the servers can’t handle the load? With Titanfall being the most recent, and Simcity being the most epic fail, as a consumer I wait now until the initial wave has gone through before I even think of venturing into these waters.

24. I don’t think this is true, with the exception being that people may impulsively buy games on sale rather than do their research first. I have bought many a game on sale and I do have quite a backlog, but that’s because I do give each game my full attention and spend a lot of time with it. If I start a game, I want to get the full experience from it, regardless of how much I paid for it.

    As for impulse purchases, while I have bought games I was sorta interested in but maybe hadn’t fully researched, I mainly just buy the games I’ve wanted. The perk to having a backlog is that there’s always something to play, so even if I want some big new release I can hold off without really sacrificing anything. Sure, in a perfect world where I don’t have to worry about money perhaps buying everything day-one would be better, but unfortunately that’s not the case for me and waiting a few months to buy a game at half of the cost matters.

    The rest, for the most part, is really irrelevant. I don’t particularly care about chatting about games at the water cooler the day it’s released. If a game is good, my friends and I are still happy to talk about it down the road.

25. I disagree that sales are a problem. I’m one of those hoarders. I have a huge backlog. I get a few hours a week of game time, but have dozens of “high priority” titles, and dozens more of “marginal interest” fare. That didn’t stop me from pre-ordering the collectors editions of several games that I was strongly anticipating.

    Just this morning I spend about 6 bucks on a GOG sale for titles I’d never even heard of, based off a screenshot and a few user reviews. For $1.79 each, I consider that a bargain even if I only play them for 10 minutes. My purchase of those games will not stop me from buying the titles I’m passionate about at retail, but it does benefit the retailer of the underpriced games. Without the sale, I never would’ve bought them, and since the production per unit on a digital sale is practically nothing, they’ve gained something from me that they otherwise wouldn’t have.

    My spending habits may have a slight negative impact on myself, but they’re beneficial to the gaming market. I don’t see any devaluation of AAA titles. And I also don’t feel like I’m being played – in this morning’s GOG sale, there were over a dozen titles at the $1.79 price point. I bought three. I’m an informed consumer. No one is manipulating me, and I’m deciding to spend my money on an attractive retro product because at 70% off, my expectations are lower, and I might just find a hidden gem that I really enjoy.

26. You’re not right or wrong, the games sales consequences on the industry are not all black or white. You just listed the detrimental aspects, ignoring completely the positive ones.

    For example, most indie games can’t afford a decent marketing coverage. Sales are a chance for them to reach a wider audience, and then word of mouth help them further. The Binding of Isaac would have never find such an audience without the help of steam sales.

    Also many people have a backlog of unplayed games, but is it really hurting them? If they would have spend less only buying full prices games, then the deal would be better for them but it would mean less money for the devs. If not, then the buyers are the ones benefiting from the sales. In both cases, there is no global loss, just a shift in each party benefits. It would still be a waste with physical copies, but with downloaded ones the impact on natural ressources are hardly significant.

27. Hrm. I feel that both the issue you’re highlighting and the points you’re making are very valid. But that the perspective you give isn’t inclusive enough of the varying sides, arguments and counter arguments etc of the entire issue to really make too much sense of what’s really going on.

    Yes, you are right. But you’re right about things that are just some of the obvious conclusions about issues that need to be discussed in their own right, and not just used as validation for what is your obfuscated topic “Game Sales are bad”.

    The expectation of deep discounts diminish the impact of launch dates. Yes, when it comes to huge launch titles this is true, it’s one of the reasons that the Call of Duty series for long periods of time did not deep discount older titles (the other being that deep discounts on what is essentially the same repetitive game play could kill sequels). Where as, deep discounts for the ocean of under appreciated games including the majority of indie titles, deep discounting is a means of expanding audience and paying bills.

    It’s a step away from selling based on quality … Yes….? No…? Maybe…? It’s situational. Just because you’re deep discounting, doesn’t inherently mean your game has suffered from lower quality development. Sales practices do not directly relate to a persons ability to make good games. But what you obviously meant is, it’s a step away from buying based on quality – unfortunately people don’t buy games solely based on their quality (unless it’s bad – in which case they don’t buy), perhaps a poorer quality game at a lower price point sells more copies – but this is simply pricing towards the expectated valuation of your consumers – if you need to deep discount to sell, then unfortunately your game isn’t worth the recommend retail price – at the end of the day your price should be representative of the quality of your game and other attributing factors such as length, replay-ability, features etc and how your product compares the current market. Supply and availability has increased dramatically (online distribution, the number of studios and indie developers) whilst demand is attached to comparatively fairly slowly inflating numbers of purchasing consumers many of whom have been groomed on Free 2 Play.

    Developers and consumers are giving away power to their distribution platforms – Yes. … What’s the alternative? Isn’t that the point of distribution platforms, you create an inclusive marketplace from which you can leverage a larger audience than you wouldn’t otherwise have access to to promote your wares to more people? Is the alternative, publisher based DRM and indie Donation/Shareware titles (circa 1985-1999)? Or is the solution, not to stop deep discounting when necessary, but to instead invest more into these marketplaces to have a bigger say in how they operate? I can’t currently perceive a perfect solution, but it seems obvious that the ones we have whilst potentially flawed aren’t inherently bad. And nor is reaching your audience at the cost of the occasional sale that actually increases the added value of your creation, even if it devalues individual sales.

    We devalue games … Yes. Does expecting a game to be $5 mean I devalued it…? … Not necessarily. Some games simply arn’t worth their RRP, and some games are simply not worth their full price to the wider market, as not everyone will receive OR play a game to receive the maximum amount of worth from a given product. Your $15 game, might be worth $5 to me – I won’t but it. You discount it, I buy it and get my $5 value, if I enjoy it and I get $15 worth out of it, well perhaps your marketing was poor, your concept too complicated or your design unfamiliar, your sale has educated me in the value of your game and the capability of your development house, I’II likely value subsequent work higher and pay more – if your game is likely to fall into this category, perhaps you should be planning paid DLC to derive value from the wider audience you’ve acquired or are likely to acquire.

    We don’t play beyond the first 10%? Maybe. For a lot of people. For some games. Personally some of the games I haven’t played beyond the first 10% were full price non-discounted titles … (*cough* Kingdoms of Amalur, Max Payne 3). I don’t not play games because I bought them cheap, I don’t play them because I don’t think my current investment of time will yield me the most amount of value. So yes I have games I’ve bought on sale, that I haven’t played (Braid, Binding of Issac), but others I’ve played extensively, gone on to buy multiple copies of and given to friends (Guns of Icarus, Chivalry:MW) because they were more valuable experiences to me.

    It feels like your argument pushes aside the facets of these issues, as “understood”, but I don’t feel you can do that when using these grey issues as black and white pillar points to hold up your argument or debate point.

    It feels subversive, like I’m supposed to agree that game sales are bad, or “unplayed games” are bad, without looking at the weak foundation of the argument or blindly agree that sales are wrong due to whatever negative personal experience has impaired my judgement…

    The always truth is, there is no utopian future when it comes to selling things within a financial system that does not proportionally equate product value to monetary value.

    And strangely, this is good because it allows games that are either so fringe they’re worthless to the majority of consumers, or games that cost so much to make that they should be priced beyond the range of nearly all consumers to be competitive and to find a shared market.

    Unplayed games are just a by product of a fringe market … are people getting screwed? Maybe. Maybe people are just stupid. But if they didn’t have the money, they wouldn’t be spending it. And maybe developers need to “continue” looking for fairer ways to take advantage of that fact … until peoples income is so invested in quality that they don’t have the time to invest in things they may never be interested in playing.

    But if that happens, I’d be worried for the future of smaller emerging developers and of the kinds of schemes large publishers are willing to try (holding back content to release as DLC, layered payment processes, Purchase, Subscription, Paid for Content AND Micro Transactions) etc.

    Things could be a heck of a lot worse than they are right now, in fact, they’re pretty good beyond the fact that a few developers are having trouble capitalising on potential income due to their perceived need to live by sales rather than building and captivating an audience to whom they can up value their product.

    Do we need to talk about unplayed games? Not really. If they were worth talking about, we’d probably have played them. What we (Consumers and Developers) need is to better understand our market.

28. Part of why sales are attractive is because new games that are supposed to be of a consistent high quality have problems. Digital updates are making it easier to ship games in a worse state than before, but in time for christmas or the end of the financial year or other deadlines. So people get burned buying full price games, that’s a big problem.
    So I hope the industry recognizes this and can keep games on a high quality level and keep their prices related to that.

    There was this saturated market in the eighties and a crash followed. Nintendo turned it around by offering consistent high quality games for a high price.
    Maybe we’re in the same situation but ridiculous sales tactics combined with the game library management meta game are staving off the collapse?
    More on my blog: http://dromedarydreams.com/blog/the_price_psychology/2014-03-21-44

29. Gamers are not being played by the word sale. Gamers are played by paying $60 for a game with uninspired and retreaded mechanics. It’s not a bad thing at all. There are many $60 games that truthfully, are not worth it.

    “It kills off game launches.” Well, so what? The only reason anyone would buy on launch day is if they followed the game, were waiting for it, and already had a group. If they didn’t have a group, well, they wouldn’t have that water cooler moment anyway. Heck, if there’s a group of friends who can’t afford a game on launch day, the first big deep discount creates a 2nd launch day. Discounts don’t get rid of launch days, they create more!

    “It’s a step away from selling based on quality.” Boy, would that be a paradigm shift! I research plenty before buying. I read and watch reviews with a critical eye, filtering out hype for facts. I read the developer’s page. I may avoid the Let’s Plays for spoiler’s sake. I have never, ever bought a game based on a logo, or a screenshot, just because it was <$5. I reward no one with my money if they do not have a quality product.

    "We are handing power to people who run sales." I'd really like to know who these people you mention, are. Do you mean physical stores or digital distribution services? Steam, for example, had to coordinate a sale with the makers of the game before they could put something on sale. Just last week or so, Steam eliminated the middle man and allowed creators to offer discounts without having to coordinate. Either way, "power to the people who run sales" is still in the creator's hands. "the people who manage the sale webpage the kingmakers" No, no, no, no, no, no. There's some games I would never, ever buy no matter how deeply you discount them.
    Source: http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/02/26/new-steam-tools-allow-developers-to-set-their-own-discounts-plan-sales/

    "We devalue games" Again, I don't understand where this idea comes from. Are you saying I find value only in how much I paid for a game? Or, 'I paid $60 for this game, so I'm going to spend more time on it'? THAT is what devalues games, when their content is secondary to their price. If I find a very fun game at a discount, that means I found more value for my money. "we give up and discard them at the first time we lose" It sounds like you have some issues if you rage quit at the first game over screen and there's nothing I or anyone can say to convince you otherwise. "We are increasingly likely to not bother with complex games. If we paid $5, we want something quick and disposable." Why would anyone buy a disposable game? If I paid $60 for a "simple" game, I'd be repelled. I want, and am not intimidated by, complexity.

    "We don't play beyond the first 10%." Whoever does this is just foolish with their money, or someone else's money and doesn't care. "There is not a single game in my steam collection I've finished. Not ONE. And I almost always buy full price." Then YOU are the fool, or you have much more money to burn than I. Do these ten-percenters also buy movie tickets and walk out after the trailers? "They may have wonderful endings, who cares?" Obviously, not you. Why are you writing this article at all? Was it simply intended to inflame opinion and to be controversial? "Gamers insist on 50 hours of gameplay" Maybe for a JRPG? Once upon a time, games could be finished in 45 minutes to an hour. I've played and replayed those games over and over, much more than 50 times.

    "Because game devs KNOW that 90%+ of buyers will never see the game ending anyway…" I don't know where you're getting your figures, but I'm looking at worldwide Steam statistics for Duke Nukem Forever, one of the most misunderstood, maligned, and hated games in recent years. It's a $60 game that 25% of gamers finished. 16.9% of players finished it on normal. And this is just Steam online and doesn't take into account the number of people who finished it in offline mode. On a separate note, why do MMOs get expansions? They're loaded with END GAME CONTENT. That's because people reached the end of a game that theoretically HAS no end. Mass Effect 3 had to deal with bad PR of having a disappointing ending. An ENDING. I don't know where you're getting your numbers, but you lose a lot of credibility when you can't be bothered to do the slightest amount of investigation to back up your numbers. I'm disappointed in you. You can do better. You can do more. You should raise the bar on your own work.

    "There is some mileage in building a reputation for maintaining high prices for longer… D3 has never been lower than 50%" Unfortunately, that's Blizzard for you. Diablo 2 has maintained a relatively high price for the amount of time that it's been out. It actually deserves to, it's a quality product. D3 is a different story and, against my better judgement, I bought at full price. I might have felt better if I bought it at a discount, because I also bought Torchlight II at a fraction of the price, and it was a much better game.

    "Utility is derived from the product." Shouldn't it? "We are no longer selling products, we are selling discounts. The endorphin rush is now from getting a bargain." There's an old saying among my people, "100lbs of shit isn't worth a bucket of crap." I might get an endorphin rush from getting a bargain on a game that I like or want, but you can't throw 75% discount stickers at me and expect me to buy junk.

30. “It kills game launches.”

    So? There’s no intrinsic value in a “launch.” One day the game is not available, the next day it is. Companies need to respond to the market that IS, not the market they want.

    “It devalues games.”

    Good. $60 is too much money. With some minor exceptions, I won’t bother buying a game until it’s below $40. I held back on Skyrim until it hit the $30 mark, then I bought the whole enchilada at once: the game + all the DLC. The fact that I got bored with it after about 20 hours simply validates my decision not to pay $60 and then pay full price for each DLC when it first came out.

    “People don’t finish games: look at me, I haven’t finished ONE game in my library!”

    I believe you just lost all of your credibility. Turn in your controller, and sell your console. If you want games you can finish, Milton Bradley has quite a selection.

31. This is such a rich man’s argument. A lot of us don’t work in jobs with water coolers. (Yeah, I know you mean this is a metaphor, but the point still holds.)

    Things go on sale. Washing machines. Lawn mowers. Clothes. Bread. Hotel rooms. It’s a pretty well established model. It doesn’t “devalue” Whirlpool or whatever. Second-run theaters aren’t devaluing the experience of people showing up on the first Friday night to watch the latest Hollywood blockbuster.

    You’re out of touch.

32. “never pay more than $20 for a computer game.”-monkey Island

33. I’m really sorry Cliff, but it sounds like you don’t understand the basics of how sales work in Capitalism.

    A product is often sold at a price that the products creator believes they can make the most income. However, there are a certain portion of the population that will buy a product at a lower price, but can’t afford/aren’t interested in the product at a higher price.

    This is where sales come in. A player who’s excited, or has plenty of expendable income will go ahead and buy the game day one, or near day one. This is just how it is. However, players who are more thrifty are going to wait and pick it up used, on sale, pirate it, or not buy it at all. There are certain games I wouldn’t have ever bought if they weren’t on sale.

    Now imagine you’re a developer, trying to sell games, instead of an indie developer putting down people who are selling more units than you. You’ve sold your game, and made profit. Everyone who was excited about it got it. But not everyone was sold on it. That’s when you put it on sale. Suddenly, people who would have otherwise not played your game now have access to it, and gasp, liked it.

    Once they like your game, they’re more likely to buy the sequel for full price.

    Sales are just a lazy way of doing demos. Why else do the previous installments of a series go on sale when the new one comes out? It’s good marketing for the developer, and helps make the IP into a household name.

    So to counter all of your points:

    * Most of the games I buy on sale would have been things I’d never buy on launch.
    * Game sales work like demos. If you buy it cheap, and it’s a quality title, then the next title by the same developer should see an increase in sales. In a way, it’s the ultimate demo/lets play.
    * Handing the power to people who run sales? Are you sure I didn’t step into some conspiracy theory site? So are we handing power to the people who own game stores if we buy from them, because they’re allowed to pick and choose who’s front page and who’s not?
    * Devaluing games? Look at the rest of my post. This is how capitalism works. If a product is at a price where it makes it’s most profit, but there are people who wouldn’t buy it at that value, often the product will be offered for a reduced cost.
    * I’ve completed a good chunk of my steam library. This says more about you than the rest of the world.

    Last but not least, who are you to tell us who to buy from? Sales have existed for other media for a long damn time now. Just because it hits your precious video games you decide to make a stink? Cry me a river.

34. Allow me to retort…

    *”It kills off game launches.” Please see Cod, Titanfall, Dark Souls II. This CAN apply to single player games but the real multiplayer gamers out there know that you have to be in from the start to get the best experience. In fact the people who wait are usually the guys and gals that we dont want in our lobbies anyway. The guys and gals who whine about a game being ‘unfair’ when they get shot in the head by a camping sniper.
    Having said that, this is a valid point from a single player gaming standpoint. There is a growing concern that developers who want to craft a solid single player only game are not going to get the sales they used to. This is bad for indie devs in particular, but it is a potential problem for everyone. If devs are, more or less, forced into including multiplayer it will hurt the single player in the long run.

    *”It’s a step away from selling based on quality.” No, that statement only applies to lazy people. I watch/read at LEAST 3 reviews of any game I buy, both critics and users. I watch some gameplay and I consider the cost vs enjoyment factor. A game under $5 gets the same considerations I would use for a full price purchase. It has a better chance of getting picked up based on the lower price point, but only if I feel it will provide that much entertainment. My personal rule is at LEAST 2 hours of enjoyment per dollar spent.

    *”We are handing power to people who run sales.” For the duration of the sale. Also note that they already have this power. Not to mention that games have to be displayed in some manner. There are ALWAYS some games on the front and others that are in the back. If you want to catch the attention of MOST gamers you don’t lead with Bejeweled, you lead with Call of Duty or Dark Souls. During the sale the smaller titles have a BETTER chance of being on the front page if anything.

    *”We devalue games.” Your whole argument here is nonsense. Every game I buy gets played. I do sometimes find some games are a disappointment, but not because I get stuck or they are too complex, in fact more often it is the opposite. If someone is quitting on a game because of complexity they are just not willing to take the time to learn the game. These people would dismiss 4x strategy games but love them some Tetris. That is great, but they should have donr some research before buying Endless Space instead of Dead Space.

    *”We don’t play beyond the first 10%.” I am guilty of this from time to time myself, but sales have nothing to do with it. Often I simply get so focused on 1 game I dont play the others for a long long time. The sale is not to blame, my tendency to get tunnel vision is to blame.

    So are we getting played? No more than everyone else and to an extent ours is a far better deal anyway. Sales CAN be marketing trickery. Mark up the price then bring it back down to the normal MSRP and call it a sale. THAT is wrong. Giving gamers great deals on games? Not so bad.

    Ultimately it is up to the individual to decide what they want to buy and play. If you have no self control then your list is brought sharply into focus. For those of us who do understand how to make a logical decision based on research and understanding of a product it is only a great way to get a deal.

    Do not get me wrong though, great opinion piece I just disagree.

35. There is a reason I have three hundred games on Steam and only 4 on Origin. Keeping an over hyped, stink-burger triple-A title at full price will do far more damage to gaming then a winter sale ever will.

36. Might be a good idea to touch up the article replacing D3 with Democracy 3. Some posters assume it’s Diablo 3 you’re talking about and seem to be oblivious as to where they’re posting.
    Or have you been using that as sneaky marketing tactics?! O_O

37. Now tell us how bad free to play games are. You must hate those too, right?

    Most of the console gamers I know still pre-order and buy stuff at release. Keep milking that cash cow. PC Gamers have choices, and that is nothing but GOOD for gamers. The points you make are bad for PUBLISHERS not gamers, and if that forces changes to the publishing model once sales and FTP hit the consoles, so be it.

38. Well said, Cliff.

    Interestingly, many of the people who applaud game sales, and buy hundreds of games they’ll never play, are also the same people who will rage on about how free-to-play games are terrible, and how they’d never fall for that. Yet the psychological mechanisms are entirely the same – creating artificial shortages, time pressure, offers, collectibles. More so in the last few years that Valve have refined their game on Steam. According to Valve, many people now spend more time on Steam, than actually playing games.

    Amusingly – or sadly – the people who are manipulated most easily, are also the ones who tend to be most adamant that they are not being manipulated – despite the trivial effort it is to do a little bit of research on the psychology of sales. A little research would show that – yes, we are suckers (all of us) – and that Valve works every dirty angle. Every single one. But I guess the cognitive dissonance is too much; people are invested in their beliefs that “Valve are the good guys”, and “I only buy what I want”.

39. I think we also needs to look at the fact that most of the games that have launched are a little to completely broken. I have bought two games on launch day in the past year, Saints Row 4 and Weapon Shop de Omasse. One was only $8 and the promo video cracked me up, the other was by a team that has not made me regret anything I bought from them in 5 years.
    The evil sales are the only thing that reminds me of a game existing. I had forgotten about Dust: An Elysian Tail because i missed it when it came out and when I played it I was so happy that the sale included it.
    The sales are not making us less of game players but more. It helps to expand our gaming palette so that we know more what we like and don’t like. It it like finding something on sale in the Super Market and you think “Huh, well for $1 I’ll give it a shot.”
    If Demon’s Souls was not given with PS+ I never would have tried it. I played it, loved it, and bought a new copy of Dark Souls and once I complete that I will move on to Dark Souls 2.

40. As a gamer with very little disposable income due to family illness these sales and bundles have been awesome for me. When games go one sale for a couple of dollars I’ll pick up 3 or four and I’ve bought several bundles of 10-12 games for under $6.00. I’m not concerned about my backlog at all. It is comforting because I always can find a new game to play. By stocking up I have a nice backlog for when I’m completely broke.

    I also have insomnia so I finish a lot of games :)

41. $5 game purchase without research? Hell, I won’t even buy a $5 bundle without googling for reviews and checking out TotalBiscuit’s WTF Is!

    And don’t blame sales for not finishing games. My backlog is growing at an enormous rate, primarily due to game bundles, and yet I finished 84 games last year, and 13 so far this year. I’d probably be past 40 for the year if not for CS:GO and that damned Marvel Puzzle Quest (seriously, why do I spend hundreds of hours on this game when I have much better ones in my backlog, including Puzzle Quest 2???)

42. I must confess: I’m laggard

    I don’t realize why I have to buy the full price for a game just because is new. New games usually need some patches, they usually didn’t run properly on your old faithful hardware, and it’s not simple to judge if the new game is really a good one.
    After a few years, if the game is really good you can still find many people playing it and there are tons of infos and mods around the web.

    A few months ago I bought Supreme Commander AND Supreme Commander Forged Alliance for 3.75 euro.
    These two games definitely worth the money I paid!
    Anyway also a laggard like me didn’t manage to “end” all the game I bought!

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44. How come developers like you always whine about sales but never seem to care about other people in the world that get ripped off by absymal currency conversation

    Yeah because you’re all greedy that’s why

45. While I cannot speak for everyone, both on a personal level and as ‘a consumer’, I disagree.
    I regularly buy games close to launch, including Democracy 3, and if cost ever comes into it, it is because I compare it to my wages. ‘That game will cost me ‘X’ hours of work, is it worth that’, so I concede long, replayable games are more likely to be bought at launch but the 4-6 hour shooter that I have no interest in playing multiplayer will also be bought if it brings something mighty good to the table. (Personal recent example, Bioshock infinite, bought because of interesting story at launch, played to completion and all DLC bought)
    I have 800 games in my Steam library alone, 20% completion rate, 3 (not 3%, three the number), have perfect achievements attained. So under your logic should I only have 160 games in my library? Please explain, even if all those games were bought at full price, how me buying 160 games is better for the industry, development, innovation etc than my buying 800 games. Are you going to pay the wages of the other 640 games teams?
    Again, only personal, but I flat out disagree that I get my rush from discount hunting. I’ve played games since I had to type them into my 1k ZX-81 and I don’t see my desire to play games, and enjoy playing games going anywhere. (Further to the above, my endorphin rush is, demonstrably, not from getting a sale, completing the game quickly or even at all or some esoteric achievement collection. I game to game. I enjoy playing, replaying, adding challenges to and finding different ways to play games.)
    Yes I have bought a cheap game with no research based on screen shots, logos or developer name. I have also bought full price games for the same reason. I stopped doing that recently because I received crap and I’m not going to start doing it again because of a cheap sale.
    From a purely personal perspective, if anything makes me stop buying games at release it will be the games industry itself.
    Broken crappy games, even from established developers and developers you have loved in the past. (I own both Aliens colonial marines and X-rebirth, both pre-order.*)
    Releasing GOTY’s quickly, seriously Bethesda I have loved most games you have been involved in but if I know you are going to be releasing a GOTY soon I will wait. (Dragonborn release Feb 2013, GOTY release June 2013).

    *I not only keep them in my library, I keep them installed, clogging up my hard-drive, bloated and unused. Occasionally they will update, encroaching on my consciousness again.
    Yes, [name], pre-order that game….. You love the genre… It has new mechanics… You can trust that developer, you really enjoyed their last game…. Loooook, it gives you a spangly deedleflapper that you can also use in that other game you love… Just click it, you’re already on the store page… Doesn’t that launch trailer look amazing… Just one more click and it will be yours…

46. I don’t think you are right. Well… you are, in some cases.

    You didn’t finish any game in your steam library, OK … But that’s your problem, not really *THE THING* with gamers. If I start a game, then there is a really high probability that I will finish it. I choose which games to buy, and even though I buy more games than I will ever play (because of sales), I buy only those I wish I would have time to play and I want to support the developer.

    I buy full priced games, I buy 10% off, 33% off, 50% off, 75% off … Sure, I love sales, because I’m from “poorer” country and my budged is different from someone from western world. But if I know that this game will be great, I’ll buy it on release date for full price.

    If I know I would like to play this game, but I really don’t care that much and I don’t need to play it right away, I’ll wait for time when I’ll have money and mood to play it, or when it will be in sale.

    And I can tell you for a fact, that sales teach pirates to buy games. Because I’m from “poor” country, I’m surrounded by people who don’t buy games because they can pirate them and to them, it seems crazy to waste money on games, even though they play all the time. Well, that WAS the case and IT’S NOT ANY MORE.

    First, they bought one game in a sale, then another, then a first full priced game, then an early access game…

    It really does help to convert pirates to consumers. And it doesn’t make players less enjoy the game, I don’t believe that. It’s about the quality of the game, not about price for which you bought it.

    And if new game is great, nobody who can afford it waits for a sale. And nobody who can’t afford it will buy it anyway. Huge number of my friends bought south park at release for full price. Huge number bought gay Diablo III. Huge number bought Banished, and we talked about it a lot.

    Sales are a good thing, because they allow poor people to show gratitude to creators of a good games. They are a good thing because they reduce piracy. They are a good thing because gamers can legally play more games than ever.

    Sales are a bad thing because they theoretically lower the value of games, which in the long run can break values of all games in the future. But the question is, will it really? I mean, if the game is good and you want to play it and you have the money, you buy it. If the game is really not that good but you still want to play it, maybe it just doesn’t deserve to ask full price.

    Sorry for my english.

47. I wish I could say you’re wrong.

    I think you’re painting a picture that is a good deal grimmer than reality, but what you’re describing is something not too far from the truth. Totalbiscuit recently did a video highlighting how companies have taken to dumping cheap games en masse onto steam, clogging up the front page with old, sometimes broken titles. The second everyone takes to that kind of behaviour, we’ve hit the state you describe.

    At the moment, thankfully, a lot of companies do still release games at full price and it takes a fair few months before there’s any significant price reduction. I think with steam, certainly, its big summer and winter sales in which masses of games are discounted at once play a big part in forcing substantial price reductions quickly, and encourage gamers to buy more games than they can play. Perhaps now that steam has allowed companies more freedom in setting their own sales, they’ll feel a bit more willing to wait before putting things on sale.

    I can’t speak for other platforms. The convenience of steam has sucked me in and I use the platform almost exclusively, but that’s another problem for another time that plenty of people have pointed out already.

    Personally, with the very limited budget for games I have at the moment, I do a fairly good job of avoiding buying in bulk. I look for games that feel affordable but will last me a long time. But I have been caught out by impulse buying in sales more than once before. The permanent stain of Red Alert 3 on my library forever haunts me.

    But one way in which I’ve picked up a lot of “junk”, so to speak, is through things like humble bundle. That’s not to say the games are bad. The humble bundles usually contain very high quality indie games. But any time I’ve picked up a bundle it’s been for one or two key games in the line up and the rest just haven’t been the sort of game that interests me. They sit there unplayed as dead weight in the bundle because it was still cheaper than buying the two or three I care about individually.

    Which makes me worry if the indie bundle craze is actually adding to the problems you’ve highlighted. Food for thought, perhaps? Are the bundles encouraging the sort of impulse mass buying behaviour that gamers should strive to avoid? What about the increasing tendency for AAA titles to be put in bundles? We’ve seen a least a couple of humble bundles filled with big names at tiny prices.

    We’ve a way to go before we reach the gloomy state you’ve described, Cliffski, but the path by which we’d get there has already been laid out pretty clearly.

48. The DRM makes Steam games worth no more than $10 to me, because I can only play one Steam game at a time. That might sound odd, but I have several children, too young for their own Steam accounts yet old enough to play half of my collection. If my kids want to use Sid Meier’s Railroads! to set up a virtual trainset for the 4-year-old on the creaky old computer, I can’t play EU4 on my gaming rig in the other room, even with Steam’s so-called “Friends & Family”.

    I’m still willing to pay full price for 2-3 games a year, which is the number I’m really comfortably able to spend scores (or hundreds) of hours on, but now buying physical media is awkward and the easy availability of crippled-but-still-adequate games at a low price are enough that I hardly bother, so I do graze.

49. I’ve found your publication quite peculiar at least. As many of the other commenters, i have several unplayed games in my steam library and I don’t see anything wrong with that I know that i’ll play them eventually. I usually get games on sales. Games that I wouldn’t probably buy at full price for many reasons, maybe I don’t consider that certain game is worth 30 bucks but I’m ok paying 7 for it, maybe I’m not quite sure of the game’s quality, If i pay 5$ for a game and it ends up being a complete pile of garbage, nothing happens, 5$ is not a big deal, but I’ll never risk paying 30 dollars for a game That I might or might not like. because of that I see nothing wrong with sales. I’ll never buy a game at day 1 anyway. games are launched in almost beta state. most games are patched many times during their first months of life making the experience of playing them an annoyance many times. games should came up finished, as they used to be.

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