Welcome to my nightmare.

This year, I’ve officially, unofficially made a resolution (it actually started in December after looking at the 30+ games I had purchased in the previous 3 months — but then the Steam sale came….and that went out the window).

I’ve reinstated my Gamefly account and will rent everything my heart desires. What I buy now will only be the titles that I will play months down the line (of the 30+ I bought, Demon’s Souls is really the only game I’ve continued to play).

Just finished Darksiders, and I think I would like to buy it. But now I can wait for a price drop to the 20′s instead of buying it flat out. Sure the dev’s lose in the end, but I don’t want to have all these unplayed games in my house…unfortunately Gamefly sucks, I’ve had AC2, NSMB Wii, and a few other games I glossed over at the end of last year and they still haven’t been in stock.

S’okay though, I got plenty of games to bide my time with.

Moody, I am picking up what your putting down. I used to be a bad video game impulse buyer but changed my ways

Blackbeard kudos to you for implementing such a great financial strategy. Also the Steam sales were practically a steal! I think I will look more into the Gamefly.

As for Patrick. You aren’t only one step ahead but one evolutionary step beyond me. ; )

I am an absolute chump for downloadable games. I have at least 20 on my Playstation 3 and 4 on my 360. When I had my Wii I had about 15 Virtual Console games. My PSP GO has around 15 games on it, and there are a few I never bothered to re-download when I switched from my PSP to my Go. I have game expansions and DLC for games I don’t even own anymore. I have a handful of games on Steam that I’ve only bothered to play once (Half-Life 2 being the only PC game I downloaded and finished). I also have the LittleBigPlanet premium theme and pretty much every costume available for the game (that’s more for my fiance, though, it’s her favorite game).

I’ve never had a problem impulse buying full price console games because that involves a trip to the store and I’m lazy. My laziness was keeping my spending quite in check, but being able to download games while sitting down is revving it back up. Plus, it is a lot easier to spend $10-15 at a time then it is to spend $60.

The worst part is, like you, I never finish any of these games. The games on my Go are the worst, not in quality, but in terms of “times I play them”. I have some games I’ve played once and never gone back to, just because I’m always downloading something new. Nothing keeps my attention and I feel like I’m downloading a new game every week.

When I was single a few years back I never thought about not buying games. I usually bought them day of or a few days after release. Now being married my wife can not understand why I buy games that I play once or twice. So I put my self on a self imposed monthly gaming budget. My main criteria of the said budget was that I could only buy 3 console games per month. But there is no limit to PC games! So yeah I still buy games that I will never play but I do have a nice collection. I am also a retro gamer and I still have a gaming box set up to play some old school games. So my logic is that one day these games will be old school and then I will take interest in these games lol.

I only got a 360 a year ago. Prior to that, I’d been strictly a PC gamer in some form or other since about 1986. I probably first got heavily into gaming in the early 90s. Back then, while graphics were good for the time (lots of really nice handpainted stuff), the graphics weren’t usually the central focus of a game. Instead, what made it was the content. Some games gave you just TONS of content (IE: the old X-wing games, lots of RPGs), some games relied on the complexity of their puzzles (IE: several adventure games — Shadow of the Comet being probably the most nefariously complex for one sequence where you had to develop photos with NO hints on which chemicals to use), and some games just had a ton of levels to ‘em. But regardless, you got your money’s worth. The equivalent of a $60 game back then really delivered (to my mind at the time) $60 worth of entertainment and then some.

As graphics became ever more the centerpiece of the gaming industry, content fell by the wayside. However, the $60 (or equivalent) price tag remained, regardless of the actual quality and scope of the game. End result: I am no longer an impulse gamer….at full price. I only got skunked a few times back in the day with some really crappy games (Mad Dog McCree comes to mind…). By and large, all my game purchases tended to turn out pretty well, as I recall.

Nowadays, however, you can have a graphcially impressive game that’s just….thin on content. You can blow through it in, oh, 8 hours of play. That’ll last me a week, maybe two. Online components are hit or miss for me. This makes the $60 price tag simply not worth it to me, and I say this as a gainfully employed 30-something. Why would I blow $60 on a game that fails to meet my (admittedly high) standards, when I can spend it on a nice evening out, or on home repairs or whatever? I’m not saying I don’t still enjoy and appreciate gaming, of course, but I am definitely a discriminating consumer.

Fortunately, having hopped on the console bandwagon WAY late in the game, there’s a TON of stuff out there that I can buy used. This ends up being the perfect balance for me. For example, $60 for Conan on the 360? Are you high? But for $15, it’s a steal. $60 for COD2 or COD3? No friggin’ way. I’ve never gone for the “cinematic rollercoaster ride” that is the staple of games like COD and MOH. Not at full price anyway. But for $10, I come out way ahead even though I NEVER touch their online components. Likewise, with the plethora of downloadable games (Huzzah for the return of Monkey Island!), and the rise in retro gaming (which, really, you HAD to see coming), you can find affordable, quality games for a fraction of the usual $60 tab you pay for full-price, brand-new console games. These days, I only buy used games — which gives me my “need a new game” fix, without breaking the bank. When nothing’s jumping off the shelves at me, I can usually find some inexpensive deal on Steam or XBLA to download. To date, I have bought 0 new console games, and I’ve had my 360 a year, as I mentioned. I think BF: Bad Company 2 will be my first full-price purchase, but that’s probably going to be it for 2010.

I own more games than all of you combined!

yep

You might own more but how many have you beat omega?

I am happy to see I am not the only one. I am really interested in everyones own set of issues similar to mine. It just shows the different backgrounds we all come from.

I agree Solo. Most games today lack substance. While appealing and great, graphics seem to be the focal point of development. Few games really balance this in terms of substance and graphics. As for my Full purchase title this year, I have decided GOW 3. That isn’t an impulse when I have waited for this long ; )

Unfortunately, my general sense is that the economics involved these days pretty much necessitate the focus on graphics above all else. Even a fantastic game with sub-par graphics will be tarred and feathered by the bulk of reviewers and gamers out there, or at the least will include a line like “If you don’t mind graphics that look like they came from 2004, this game is great.” Graphics, however, eat up a huge amount of the budget, often to the detriment of many other factors (QA, plot/story, content, etc.).

This is likely necessary if games are going to be sold at $50-60 a pop. To get a bigger budget, you need an established track record (a la Bioware), and it’s only with that bigger budget that you start to see really top-notch games come out. And while Bioware has sold fantastically well for just about all of its games that I can recall, I’d be curious to see the profit margins for, say, Dragon Age or Mass Effect. Yes, these games are blockbusters and deservedly so, but how much more profit are they actually turning than, say, a closed-ended, relatively short game like Conan or something along those lines? I don’t mean in the sense of absolute dollars (obviously the Bioware games would blow Conan away), but rather the percentage of profits.

I think this is a big part of why episodic gaming release and re-done retro games are becoming popular as a business model. It just makes sense, really, especially with retro games. All your concept and art work is done, you just need to make sure you can code it for modern devices. Plus, because it’s a retro game, you know people have different standards for it. Who cares if the re-release of X-Com on Steam looks exactly like the original? Actually, that’s kind of the point, no? Likewise, people expect less from their games when it’s something like this month’s release from Telltale Games, rather than the next EA Megablockbuster entry to the Battlefield franchise or whathaveyou. While graphics count in these smaller-scale games, you can spend more time developing the content itself with the understanding that nobody expects photorealistic visuals.

This has, I think, allowed some forms of “budget” gaming to really begin to shine, far more than the old “slop bin” games you used to see at Electronics Boutique or your local software store (before EB/Gamestop gobbled it up). Plus, with the broad-based delivery mechanisms of, say, Stardock, Steam, or XBLA, you can reach a LOT more people than you could in the past.

Frankly, I love the fact that this shift has occurred. It didn’t really exist even four years ago, when people had to resort to abandonware websites or pray that their old CD wasn’t scratched if they wanted to do oldschool gaming, and it’s no surprise that people have figured out (FINALLY) that there’s a market both for the older games AND for games that harken back to the older STYLE of gaming. Granted, still not as much as the next Call of Duty entry, but enough to warrant spending the cash on a remake of Monkey Island, for example, or to spend on a game like Castle Crashers or whathaveyou.

Solo I whole heartedly agree with you. The shift of budgets and priorites has changed gaming as we know it. However this shift isn’t all for the bad. Budget gaming has become aa very successful market and I find it necessary in this day of age. Some of the best games of this age have come from this market.

I do agree that graphics as with budget due factor in reviews for the most part. As graphical standards are set so are consumer expectations. Sadly such games as Dragon Age can suffer due to these expectations even though they are great.