Hi, I’m Tesh, and I’m a late adopter.
I am interested in the bleeding edge of technology and entertainment, especially as I’m trained to produce some of it, but I’m just cheap enough that I don’t bother trying to keep up as a consumer. I buy used cars. I buy books on sale and used books (getting old Battletech source books for less than $5 with shipping made me happy). I buy games well past their expensive heyday (the $30 I spent on the World of Warcraft Miniatures game and 18 other models for it were well worth the price, and my Magic the Gathering collection is all oldish and cheap, but still well worth playing). I haven’t purchased a game at full price since Frozen Synapse, but before that, it was Street Fighter 2 Turbo for the SNES back in 1993. (Paying $70 for it then pretty much burned me out forever on buying games when they are new.)
That’s why I love Steam sales like the recent Summer Sale event. For less than the cost of Batman Arkham City on day one, I was able to get several games… including Batman Arkham City. I just had to wait a while. (For the record, I got Warlock – Master of the Arcane, SOL: Exodus, Plants vs. Zombies, Lost Horizon [thanks, Andrew!], Future Wars, Demolition Inc., Dear Esther, HOARD, Swords and Soldiers HD, Wings of Prey, and Arkham City and its Harley’s Revenge DLC.) The Indie Bundles are also presently on sale again on Steam at the moment, just in case you missed one. I recommend this one and this one… but there are gems all over the place.
Similarly, I got Final Fantasy 11 and several of its expansions for $5 a while back, and RIFT’s Collector’s Edition, also for $5. I picked up the base World of Warcraft and its first two expansions for $30 last Christmas, and Cataclysm for another $20 a bit later. Notably, if I’d waited on that, I could have got those for even cheaper thanks to the Scroll of Resurrection promotion they ran a while back (which also came with a character promotion to level 80, itself worth a bit of money, really); if I’d picked up the base WoW for $5 as I’ve seen before, I could have gotten all the rest in that promotion. I kinda wish I’d waited on that, too. (I’m curious to see what the next ‘Scroll offers, actually. They set an interesting precedent. I’m looking forward to taking advantage of it.)
Just yesterday, Star Wars, The Old Republic went and surprised everyone who wasn’t paying attention by announcing an impending business model conversion, the pretty much inevitable “free to play” conversion. I’m pretty much certain to play it now, when I can make the time. They might even earn some money from me… though I’d have paid them more if they had listened to me almost 4 years ago.
I suppose this trend of mine could prove troublesome. I do have a nice flatbed scanner that doesn’t play nice with any Windows past XP (Memorex stopped making drivers for it), and my awesome Intuous 12″x12″ tablet that I picked up for $100 instead of the $1000+ it cost initially also doesn’t play nice with any computer that doesn’t have a serial port. (There’s a tangential rant in there about planned obsolescence, but I’ll save that for another day.) I might miss out on Collector’s Edition goodies, though those sometimes wind up on eBay later. I might wind up adopting a twentysomething who just can’t quite graduate from college, or a phone that doesn’t let me remote control the International Space Station. Still, I’m willing to take the risk. It’s been worth it so far.
It just takes a bit of time.
