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.
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.
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.
Another option is to just price it respectfully. I picked up Silksong on release. I have one day of play time because I’m not into the genre at the moment.
There are plenty of games I would purchase if they were priced low enough from genres I would not normally play just out of popularity and curiosity. I have a lot of them on the Steam backlog that I haven’t even touched just because they were on discount. Some devs do it for mansions, other devs do it for love. Both end up shorting themselves, and the ones probably winning out in terms of profit are the ones selling on a time discount curve somewhere along the middle.
That’s what they are doing with the pricing: They start up way to high, to catch those who will pay that price. Once they reach the point where sales are stalling at that price point, they lower it, so that more price-sensitive players will buy. That cycle continues until they get a deal from Epic or Amazon to give the game away for free, because that way the publisher still gets more money than from pirates.
Supergiant Games are worth a dozen run-of-the-mill “AAA” games but they’re always cheaper. They used to make relatively short games but Hades I & II are playable for hundreds of hours with new things still coming your way and they’re still cheaper and better.
I don’t play them anymore these days, but for me it used to be the Dynasty/Samurai Warriors series. Dunno what it was with younger me but they just hit for some reason
You may want to check out the new “One Piece” game on the same engine. It has the same game play loop, interrupted by a surprisingly nicely animated story line.
Then coming across a knee high wall or something you can easily just walk over blocking progression but, nope, can’t jump and the game isn’t treating it like stairs.
It’s such a small thing but can completely take the wind out of your sails when playing.
For me is Dragon Ball Dokkan Battle. Its a Gachal so it has its share of nasty monetization strategies and dark patrerns but since its PvE only, its not as agregious as other titles focused on PvP.
Dragon Ball was the first anime I warched so the Nostalgia factor is very high. I really enjoy the Character attack animations and the team building.
For a bit it was Destiny Rising, I quit D2 over a year ago but DR does genuinely do a lot of things much better than the base game and directly addresses a lot of my core complaints that made me quit after 10k hours in the first place. Stupid mobile gacha game with predatory monetization out the ass, and I was shrugging aside the handful of AI NPC voicelines.
Needless to say I came to my senses and dropped it entirely on a whim. Can’t support the AI bullshit, I found I’d spent much more than I thought on the game already, and the endgame is entirely just p2w or get a handful of mats you need every 2 weeks. The core of the game and a lot of the systems are legitimately really good, but the gacha core really brings it way down.
That entire franchise is just a warehouse full of monkey paws.
I recently picked up Warframe which I’ve shrugged off for a long time because TPS almost never clicks for me, but it pulled me in hard, and it’s wild going from FOMO-ridden powercrept anti-player D2 and gacha hell DR to a game that actually treats the players with respect.
I’ve been playing the android version of Bit Heroes. It’s terrible for multiple reasons but I’ve been playing it because the game can be played semi-passively, meaning that I can multitask while playing it. In fact, I’m actually playing it right now while I’m typing this comment.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne