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.
If I think back on how we paid 120francs (which is currently the same in dollars pretty much) for our imported SNES modules back in the days, I gotta say we were completely nuts. not that no game out there is worth that (to me), but most of them simply weren’t – and then consider the game time. /facepalm
That said, at least your money was not wasted in the case of SF2 Turbo. 🙂
The price drop is remarkable these days, to a point where I sometimes wonder if it’s a good thing. if I see the rows of games lining up on my Steam library and which I haven’t even touched, I ask myself if I’d appropriate more value to them if I still had to save up 3 months worth of allowance first….
on the other hand, I know fully well that price and individual value are different things – and there are still games where I will happily pay a high price in order to get my hands on. I’m not a cheapskate and I don’t wait for F2P or price drops in general, when a title really appeals (am also impatient). I guess the ideal situation is when we feel the price-performance ratio (or cost effectiveness) is balanced, for any purchase we make. so, the question is if too cheap or low price cannot affect our enjoyment the same way too high a price does. does that even make sense?
Oh, I had many fun hours with SF2T, that’s certain… it was just a big ticket item at a time when I was working part time for near-minimum wage.
I do think that “too cheap” can send signals that the producer doesn’t value their product as much as they might, but the valuation scale is such a huge variable that it’s hard to pin down. I’d refer to this classic article for more…
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html
…but in the meantime, I’d also note that I tend to get stuff when it’s on sale, not so much stuff that’s really cheap to start with. Sometimes I’ll get really cheap stuff too, but I always smile a bit when I see something I’ve wanted for a while go on deep discount.
Oh, and yes, it can subtly affect enjoyment of the product itself past the purchase. For me, at least, knowing that I paid less for a game makes me a bit more forgiving of its flaws, and a bit more generous with my time.
I look at price reductions from a simple economic standpoint. While development costs muddy the water, the cost to produce a game license (because that’s what you’re really buying) so close to 0 it may as well be. Therefore if a company can get any more sales by reducing the price from an initial premium, it is only to their advantage to do so. If it gets to the point where you’re only paying a few dollars (or euros) for it on Steam, it’s still worth it to the producer to sell it.
If reducing the box price of SWTOR and offering a F2P option indices more player to try it, that can only be good for EA/BioWare. It doesn’t alter any perceived flaws in the game, itself.
Indeed, the game can have flaws of design that are totally independent of the business plan. I’m sure I’ll run into a few… but I’ll admit to being more generous in my judgment when I’m not paying a lot for it.
Heh. You sound a lot like my brother. He only buys consoles of previous generations or that he can buy really cheap somewhere. For games he buys it only on e-Bay, shops specialized in used games or if they are on sale.
Some times I wonder if I should be a little more like that since I’ve been burned out by buying a few things that didn’t turn out to be as good as I imagined they would be. But I a more like Syl in that a lot of times I am just impatient so I buy it right away. In other times I just see paying full price as a way to vote with my wallet about the games I think are interesting and whose type should be produced more.
With Star Wars going free to play it seems like I will be finally see how the Imperial Agent story continues beyond… hmmm… I think it was about level 10 I stopped it. I liked the class story but not so much the rest of the game that I could justify paying a monthly subscription to it. With this model though I am more willing to deal with the parts that don’t interest me and might even buy something on their cash shop if I think there is enough value on it for me.
I hear ya’. I, also, am a serial late-adopter. Paying full price for any game is just ludicrous, especially in today’s day and age with Steam offering wicked discounts and used games at Gamestop. During the Steam Summer sale, I got off easy, but then my Steam library is already pretty comprehensive…
Alan Wake & Alan Wake’s American Nightmare
9 Magicka DLC Packs
Skyrim
The Dig & Loom
Torchlight
Disciples 2: Gallean’s Return
Fallout New Vegas DLC
All for the grand total of $70.64.
I love Steam and I hate Steam. For one, look at everything that $70 got me. Skyrim alone when it came out was $60. On the other hand… $70 is still a good chunk of cash!! Ah well… it’s a little too hard when the price is right. However, now my wishlist is looking a little sparse. I pretty much have every game I wanted. I guess we’ll see when the Winter sale comes along…
Waiting is the new haggling!