You must log in or register to comment.
Friendly reminder to never buy anything at full price, even if it’s stuff to help good devs.
Why?
Getting in the habit of willing to be patient and reducing money spending are pretty good general habits.
That is true but it shouldn’t be a hard rule. For example, do you not think the launch price of Hollow Knight: Silksong was fair?
Shockingly good price, but that doesn’t tend to be the norm. Its more an outlier with retail price of games these days with even games with f2p monetization charging way higher.
You say “reminder” like you just made a factual comment. Its literally a completely subjective value appraisal by you.
There are plenty of reasons to buy at full price:
-
You want to support the dev (many of these reasons can be suspect to me but its still a valid reason for a perspective buyer)
-
You want to play the game right now, as opposed to waiting to where you wont want to play the game
-
Many multiplayer games are most fun initially before the awful meta and hyper online people screw the fun out of it/force it all to be competitive af/necessitate you needing to look up guides
-
Speaking of multiplayer, you might want to play with friends/be social
-
It’s just not that much money to you
Personally, I’ve stopped trying to do any sort of trick to save money on games because I realized I actually probably ended up spending more on games that were on sale that Id just never actually bother playing than when I just bought a game the second I felt like playing it and then played it. It ended up being a bit of a fallacy for me, and I imagine its the same for many other people.
Buying at full price is evil. It means you were coerced by the devs to pay their whimsical inflated fake price.
Is buying literally anything at full price also evil to you then? Everything that isn’t rare loses value to time.
Of course. Gotta cheat the system and buy at discounts. Fuck the economy
-
This is me.
i sometimes just buy dlc when i can afford it - though i really want rimworld’s odyssey i just can’t yet afford it. I am loving biotech though!
I considered odyssey, but then I realized it would break all my mods, because they aren’t through steam, and I have multiple weeks spent getting those appx 750 mods working properly. Not worth it when a lot of the mods I like most have been shelved with the major changes. I’d need an entirely new setup.
Maybe someday though!
with my five mods i think im … only scratching the surface. i beat it once on biotech but in proper form; my newborns were annoying so i used them to launch the ship after i sterilized every adult so that wouldnt happen again.
If you play on steam, and want to try a very easy-to-load set of mods that completely reworks the whole game, check out the progression mod pack. (Link is for the 1.5 version since you don’t have odyssey, there’s a 1.6 version as well and I think there’s a link for it on that page)
It’s around 1,000 mods, many of which are compatibility/patch mods, the authors of them worked closely together for compatibility, and they have a community-driven mod sorting tool to reduce errors. You can single-click to add all and follow the directions to have them properly sort for best experience.
I use around half of the mods on that list, very much recommend. You don’t have to have all of them enabled if there’s content you don’t like or whatever.
I do mostly sandboxy base building, rather than accomplishing main objectives, so I frequently have hordes of kids running around my base (highest pawn count ever was 86, I just sort of let people do their own thing and accommodate them). The first bit is kinda annoying, but growth vats for newborns are great if you can’t spare people for feeding and play time :)
thanks!! i’ll take a look!
Commenting here just so I don’t lose this post. Thank you <3!
Pretty sure the steam version of rimworld is DRM free. Try copying the game files elsewhere and running the executable to see if it just works. That’s how it was with the old DRM free builds Tynan would email you, and I think it still works like that now?
Lost all my grumpy coin cause devs were a bunch of meth addicts.
Oooh which game was that?
Schedule 1
I bought a 2 hour long indie “experience” at 67% off.
No regerts. I am barely making ends meet and feeding a child and wife.
so we’re all clear. What is the difference between selling 100 copy’s at $5 vs selling 5 copies at $100?
Dev’s lock in prices at $100 and only discount down to 5%-10% because industry standards and publishers or some bullshit. They don’t care if I eat, I don’t care if the eat. Doesn’t matter how good the game is. This is how it’s always been in capitalism and to participate means neither of us care about the other one. If we maintained what these sales were like during the hayday, I’d go to bat for any of these devs. But I’ve seen the sales in the past few years. Minimal at best then posts like these saying “support them”. Eat shit.
You’re not a starving artist any more then we are. You want to create a world of maximized profits then don’t ask for sympathy and support when it takes away from my labor too. I will play the game like you and demand cheaper while you demand more money. Go figure games now are not great and maybe profits are up because prices don’t drop anymore, but there’s likely more starving artist types developing games now then there were during the great days because guess what got everyone into gaming then? Cheap sales and game prices we all could afford and play on our jank systems. Now they fuck us and say “support our full price game or you’re a piece of shit”
RiveR- Solo 🏴☠
I could hear this. I feel very fit now.
🏴☠
The only way that modern AAA games should be bought.
I kept waiting for Starfield to drop in price. Impatiently, I sailed the seas to see if it had improved since launch. Sadly, it’s still a HUGE turd and now it’s off my watch list. The first big Bethesda title I don’t own.
I beat it on game pass and had fun. The base building is kinda impressive but there’s little reason to spend a bunch of time on it because nobody will ever see it. It’s not amazing but I definitely don’t think it deserves turd rating. That said everyone should just play expedition 33 instead.
I will be cold and dead in the ground before I play a game about a frenchman.
Well France doesn’t even exist in the game so I think you’re safe. They even are tongue in cheek about it and you can literally dress like a baguette stereotype for the lolz
As a huge sci-fi fan, and fan of most of Bethesda’s games in the past, I disagree. Turd rating is accurate. It just all felt like a waste of time. Like you said, the base building seems like it could be good, but it is never relevant. It’s like this for almost every piece of content. They’re just all on islands that don’t interact.
My biggest issue though is the writing. It’s so boring. It’s like they watched a bunch of sci-fi and put tropes from them in the game, but then they never explore the consequences of them. They just exist for a quest and are gone. Why sci-fi is good is because it uses these stories to explore humanity, which would be made even better with an RPG where the player has agency. They just don’t though. You get a few boring options that don’t actually effect anything and everything goes on as normal. It’s just a bland game that doesn’t respect your time.
Again you’re describing a not excellent game but a turd, there are real turds out there but this is just a middling attempt which is particularly disappointing from a formerly excellent studio
You can disagree, but no, I feel it’s a turd. I felt like best thing I can say about it was that it was a waste of time —and that’s not a positive thing. I’ve played really bad games that I still feel respected my time more than Starfield, which in my opinion is one of the worst sins of video games. I’d put it up there with Ubisoft games for not respecting the player’s time, but at least their gameplay is good (or used to be, but I haven’t played one in a decade or more).
I agree with you. People have a tendency to be too kind to things in ratings, but anything that literally feels like a waste of time is not even worth a rating. Turd is accurate. I see this with movies and TV-shows a lot, where people say “it’s not very good and you feel like you wasted your time at the end of it but 5/10.” What???
In college I took some classes on Brecht (for those who don’t know: extremely important 20th century play-right and theater theorist), and one thing he wrote always stuck with me. I can’t quote because I have a shit memory, but it was something like this: if the guy sitting in the front row takes a cigar out during the beginning of your piece, by the end of the piece he should be sitting there with his cigar still unlit.
What he means by this is simple, and he says it more clearly in his Kleines Organon: the single most important thing, before anything else, is that what you make creates “Unterhaltung” for the audience. “Unterhaltung” is am interesting word choice; it can be translated as both entertainment and conversation. The old school of Brecht only saw the latter, but today it is believed that he meant both.
Thus, even the great Brecht agrees with your sentiment: if it is not entertaining and creating conversation, if you really feel like you wasted your time, it is a complete and utter failure!
Okay, that went on a little longer than I expected… but it’s all just to say that you’re well justified!
There’s a Star Trek Voyager game out at the moment which is basically what Starfield should have been, but set in the Star Trek universe.
I think the big problem Starfield has is that it tries to be really big, but they don’t really have that much content so it’s just all spread out. While at the same time you don’t actually get to feel that bigness because moving between locations is just a loading screen. You don’t get the long quiet sections like you do in something like Elite Dangerous. So they made a really big, really spread out world, with fast travel, it’s the most pointless game ever made.
I usually pre-order the deluxe digital.
Not even pre-ordering the Premium Edition? How the mighty have fallen!
Sounds like something somebody with a username like that would do.
What can I say I’ve got to spend that money my tenants give me somehow.
Yup, still tracks.
Unless they require linking an EA, Ubisoft, Rockstar, or other bullshit account requirements, in which case they get added to the ignore list.
or Battle Pass, Micro, >10 DLC.
Note that Steam lets you ignore entire publishers. Go to the publisher page, click ignore. Done!
History of my preorders or full purchases:
Full price purchase:
L4D+L4D2 Diablo 3 - Probably the only culprit here. But cmon, Blizzard was good at that time. It Takes Two Binding of Isaac Rebirth PUBG Psychonauts 2
Preorders:
Portal 2
The rest is just acquiring good games for low price. Especially humble bundle (that specific one was extremely juicy IYKYK)
Been subscribed to Humble Monthly for several years now. My gaming library is… Not small…
I have to give them away lol
Ah, how I miss flashsales
Reminder that steam strong arms indie Devs into doing these big sales in order to give them visibility on the Steam store.
Basically if you don’t do sales Steam wont show your game to anyone.
So who would see their game if Steam didn’t allow their game on their platform?
Seems like the devs would make way less money selling 0 copies
UUhhhh no? Steam doesn’t automatically change games’ visibility if it’s never on sale; it makes games on sale more visible, which encourages Devs to put their games on sale, meaning people who have never seen your game have seen it and might buy it. So in the end, MORE People have bout the game than would have otherwise, and if set at the right price, the Devs still get their cash and now have a larger market. I’m so glad I took Microeconomics in High School :)
And maybe if you studied beyond highschool level you would be aware this is a well studied thing in economics. If you sell a priority service and there is a limit to the resource in some way you are shutting out the people that don’t pay. Like its the same problem as dating apps that sell priority matching, if enough people buy I to it you either have to buy into it as well just to get a fair chance, or except you will never get seem.
Yes the Devs that buy into it get more sales. The entire point is it works for those people, if it didn’t they would have no reason to buy into it. But the people who don’t buy into it are then inherently disadvantaged.
This post brought to you by a person who studied beyond highschool level and the phrase “buy into it”.
Why would consumers want the store to not prioritize giving visibility to games on discounts during sale events?
If people want to discover games they can go to steam queue and see what is recommended that they may be interested in. But, the last thing I want a company to do is hide sales for me and pushing full retail products.
That to me would be anticonsumer. Might not be what sellers want, but visibility to discounts so my money goes further is what I want as a consumer. I go as far as using isthereanydeals to check to see if other stores sell for cheaper than Steam and alert me to targetted price drops.
That works when we’re talking about big businesses and AAA games, but the problem is when we consider indie developers, who struggle to get attention so are pressured into putting their game on sale when they don’t want to just get some attention.
And why would consumers who are trying to get the most value for their money care about that financial aspect? They aren’t a business. They are consumers looking for deals. Not to be paying full price for games as an act of charity. Many look at the store because they are looking to see what is discounted for the day. And wishlist and use deal trackers like isthereanydeals.
People who get hyped and preorder are the ones willing to pay more because they value first access. After that its mostly value based consumers left with different price thresholds. If you want the full price paying demographic you have to front load your marketing budget before the game launches.
Its like you want the store to be advertising old full priced games and suppressing sales which is the opposite of what consumers want to see.
And why would consumers who are trying to get the most value for their money care about that financial aspect? They aren’t a business. They are consumers looking for deals.
Sure if you don’t give a shit about other people, and then you can use the same logic to justify sweatshop clothes and any other shitty businesses practice you like.
You consider sales to be equivalent to sweat shops?
So do you go out of your way to avoid sales and pay full price for everything?
Anyways, pretty confused why you expect the store part of a business to not prioritize promoting sales, since that’s what consumers want in that section. The discovery queue is where titles that might be of interest is shown without regard to discounts. Its like going to the mods section and being upset there’s only mods being displayed.
You mean the game will only show up in the list of games that are available on sale if the games are actually in the sale? Because that’s just literally how that works
There are plenty of examples to the contrary of this. In particular, I know that factorio has literally never gone on sale on principle, and has only ever gone up in price upon leaving early access. Despite this, it shows up with some regularity in the store.
It’s certainly the case that Steam can be a rat race for developers to get attention, but I don’t believe your framing is accurate.
I thought about mentioning factorio in the original comment, but yeah as you say there is some exception, factorio. Being wildly popular and the game that more or less birthed an entire genre helps and even if you don’t play the same game it’s still entirely possible to succeed through word of nouth. But for less popular indie games it’s still true.
I mean… yeah?
steam is running a business and game devs are too.
if you develop games because it’s a hobby, more power to you, but the platform you’re using (steam) requires capital to operate.
And same with consumers. We aren’t a charity throwing away money for no reason. We actively seek out discounts to get more for our money. We want discounts to be given priority.
sure, Karen.
The entitlement in these two words astounds me
are you certain it’s entitlement?
If you’re referring to how consumers were previously described, then I wholly agree. consumers should get what they paid for.
that said, if the price is too high for you don’t complain. don’t whine about it online. don’t buy it.
I don’t complain online, I wait for a sale to bring it into my buying range, it’s entirely the business owners choice if I buy their product, that said that money represents hours of your life, why spend more than absolutely necessary when buying?
Sure, Ubisoft.
man I wish. that’s a game company that knows how to make money.
they treat their customers like absolute shit, year after year. yet still people keep buying their garbage.
🤔 I wonder why?
By knowing most consumers don’t have the self control to not spend money and fall for marketing hype. Probably call those who don’t get sucked in and end up being more price sensitive and waiting or not buying karens for not being part of the initial revenue made.
I mean it’s that, or pay for marketing via other means. Either way, you’re spending money for exposure.
Wow, it’s like people want the games that are part of the big sale going on! How are you twisting the ability to sort by what’s on discount into being evil?
Because the big sale only happens because steam presses Devs into it in order to get promoted. So Devs that don’t buy into the sale, get sent to the back of line.
Your entire argument makes no sense
Probably because you’re not reading what I’m actually saying.
Then explain better, because at the moment all you are doing is pearl clutching about people wanting a good deal on a product they want, what would your solution be?
I have explained plenty well. You are just refusing to listen because you have already set your opinion in stone and have either ignored or twisted everything I have said to fit that opinion.
If you have any desire to engage in good faith I suggest you go back and re read my comments.
You haven’t explained shit, you just keep saying Valve is abusing devs with sales, you never give a solution and your logic is spotty at best. How would you solve this issue?
Do you have a better method?
Probably wishes there were no sales at all and everything stayed at full price. They compared sales to coercion and sweat shops. They hate discounts.
That would end my gaming hobby or send me back to piracy, and I like giving hard working devs my money
You say “basically” as if you are privy to how the steam store works when at the same time making up how it works
I worked for a game developer for 4 years
I have been in the business 10 years, steam insider program is not how steam store works… it is mostly manual and if you know someone there, you have a chance. It’s some people’s work to curate, for good and bad… I prefer it to the inevitable short sighted collapse that a publicly traded company would
I never buy games at retail price anyways, so I do kind of get it past launch. I don’t care about buying a game until it is on sale and its a big part of why I wish list games to keep track of when they go on sale to see if its hit the price point I want.
I don’t even play the majority of games I buy. I give game devs free money.
My man
Retirement planning
Me, 83 years old on my first day of retirement booting up a game I bought in 60 years ago because it was only $6: “wow, this sucks”
This is my future and I hate it.
It’s rare, but there’s a few indie games where I did not wait for a sale, even knowing I wouldn’t play it for a while, because I wanted to be supportive to devs that made something I wanted.
I’ve even come across games, like If On A Winter’s Night, Four Travelers, that is free, but it’s such a great game, that I just had to buy the supporter pack :) (I even waited a bit for it to go off sale :) )
does that have anything to do with the calvino book?
I read the book’s wiki page, but it doesn’t seem to, besides the title. The game does have a narrative frame of strangers meeting at a masquerade ball on an odd train going through a winter landscape, but most of the game is the self-contained stories of 3 of these travellers, it doesn’t directly talk to the player.
Moonring is another free game who had to add a $5 megadungeon DLC after being harassed by fans for months to give them a way to support the game monetarily
This thread has some bangers. Thanks for sharing!!!
I really like this “supporter DLC” model. And it legitimately warms my heart to see a lot of people saying they go out of their way to support indies this way.
That is how gaming should be. <3
Transport Fever 2 🙏, only time I ever spent 50€ on a game.
They’re releasing 3, so there might be a second time soon…
Dwarf fortress. I bought the game and researched for a week how to play
That was me with Dispatch. Got the Deluxe too
Support your Indies. They are the future of gaming once the AAA industry collapses in on itself.
It still supports the devs. Sales are a chance to pick up the market segments that will only buy at that price.
I feel like they cheat by keeping their regular price high.
Back in the day, a game was $60 new and $20 without sale after a few years.
IMO that’s still better than keeping your prices high and doing crazy sales. This way it gets lots of people to buy it out of impulse hence the popularity of the unplayed library meme.
I remember those days.
Release at $60, lower to $20 after a few years, $5 on sale with “only” 75% off.
Though I’ve noticed that every major steam sale has 10 selected deep discount games that are at least 90% off. The prices for these select 10 feel like steam sales we used to have 15 years ago.Its almost like gambling and the gamification of a sale brings out the gamers who feel savvy by buying a cheap game instead of quality releases, not saying thats every game on sale
Not much these days with sites like isthereanydeals providing historical price data. Might be in the old days where retailers could say something is on sale, and consumers being in the dark on if it really was a discounted price and they weren’t overpaying compared to buying from another store.
Now consumers know what the usual sales price is and can wait for it when it comes to games of interest. And with many different storefronts sales are frequent enough now you can wait until the next sale pops up without waiting too long.
One area though that has been like gambling though has been pc parts. With sudden events causing parts like ram to suddenly sky rocket.
I’m pretty sure there’s actually an EU law that says that you’re not allowed to do that. If a product is on discount more or less forever then it’s not in fact on discount.
There is a maximum amount of time a product can be on sale before that becomes just what price is now.
