The Price is Wrong, Bob: Only a third of PC gamers pay full price
The Price is Wrong, Bob: Only a third of PC gamers pay full price
What's more, only 36 percent of those surveyed said they acquire PC games at full price, meaning the remaining majority prefer to wait for discounts or bundles,...
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I wait about a year after release before buying a game on my wish list. There are just too many buggy games these days. Why should I pay a premium price for an unfinished product? I also have a backlog of games in my library.
Precisely. I'll occasionally pay full price, but that's only from studios that have earned my trust, which is essentially just Nintendo.
Like you, I'm not paying a premium for a worse product.
Or Larian. But yes, I otherwise agree.
Also: never pre-purchase any game from any publisher.
Nintendo has an advantage because they use older hardware and try to extend its lifespan far beyond when it should have been replaced. Once they had a system with long battery life and decent graphics (for the time) in place, they cemented the practice. This forces the developers to use as many tricks as they can to make good looking modern games while not having to adapt to modern hardware. Its like a cheat code for squashing bugs in games, but it comes with its own costs. They have a large enough following that they do not need to change. They also get to charge more than other competitors can sometimes. Still, they have some good world class games.
No, it's quite the opposite, Nintendo is at a disadvantage because they need to make modern-feeling games on decade+ old hardware. Their platform is attractive because of the quality of the games they offer, it has almost nothing to do with the hardware. They've pretty much always been behind WRT hardware performance, but they're almost always ahead with gameplay experience. We bought a Switch largely to get access to Nintendo exclusives, and we almost never use it in handheld mode so that wasn't a selling point.
What AAA studios seem to forget is that gameplay and performance should always come first, and graphics should be a secondary concern. If Cyberpunk 2077 was cartooney and delivered on all of their gameplay promises, it would've had a much better launch. Likewise for other major AAA launches, players like fancy graphics, but gameplay and performance are far more likely to kill a game than simpler graphics. Yet AAA studios consistently have rocky launches because of their lofty graphical targets.
Nintendo games work really well at launch, both from a performance and gameplay perspective, to the point where I really don't feel the need to look at a review to decide whether the game will be playable at launch. Yet I feel the need to do that every time for major AAA releases, except maybe Rockstar (they push hardware limits and are very stable and fun at launch).