My work laptop is busted at the moment and I'm sitting at work twiddling my thumbs waiting for it to be repaired... Which, of course, means time for a blog post!
I'm a bad gamer. There are a lot of reasons I say this, including my penchant for easy games and my lack of interest in puzzle challenges in action games, but I also say this because I never buy games anymore until they are cheap. Like $20 or less.
There was a time when I'd buy games on the day they came out. My husband probably recalls waiting in line with me to get Halo 3 and how excited I was to get home and tear in to some multi-player with some friends. But aside from the recent expansion for World of Warcraft (Cataclysm), Halo 3 was probably the last game I bought on day one.
Sometime after buying Halo I realized something that changed my buying habits: I just don't play games all the way through very often. I buy them, play them for a bit, enjoy what they offer, but then get bored before I finish it. I have very rarely finished a game and can only think of a few that I have actually completed. It was that realization that made me think "are these things really worth $60?"
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoy the time I put in to a game, but a game that I only get 10-15 hours worth of solo game time out of that costs $60 versus a board game that both myself and my husband have gotten countless evenings of enjoyment out of for $35... In that light, the $60 just doesn't seem reasonable anymore.
So now I buy games when they reach "greatest hits" status and cost $30. Or a buy two, get one free sale comes along. Or I see a fantastic deal on Amazon. Or I wander into GameStop and see a 4-year old game that I never got around to playing selling used for $5.
Why does that make me a terrible gamer? Well, for one, I still never finish those games. But (and more importantly to some of my developer friends) my purchases never feed the developer machine. Because I buy used, where neither the publisher nor developer ever get a dime, or I buy waaaay late in the product life cycle, where only the publisher is cashing in on the game anymore, my money doesn't really go to support the games I like.
But you know what? I'm still not gonna pay $60. Smart marketers know that customers like me who live in the tail end are still valuable. I'd rather buy and play old games that have proven themselves though reviews and friend recommendations than risk a hefty front-end investment now for something that I know I won't get full value out of anyway.
That makes me a bad "gamer," but I don't really care. I'm the one playing all the good games, enjoying what I find fun, and still having money left over to do other things, so I'll be bad gamer for quite some time to come. Besides, everybody loves a bad boy from time to time! ;)
1 comment:
I'm not so sure it's a matter of you being a bad gamer, as games generally being a bad value proposition. Only getting 10-15 hours out of a game is nothing unique, and honestly that's probably more than a lot of people are going to put into one.
We've kind of reached the strange confluence where games are excessively expensive to produce, largely failures at entertaining, and far shorter on average than they used to be. Still there are large audiences that will shill out the $60, so it's not like the industry is dying. Still that's really not a pace we can expect people to keep up forever.
I'll save the soap box speech for later. Anyways, the point is exercising your right to decide what you purchase cannot make you a bad customer. This is video games, not matters of state, you have no obligation to protect the status quo. You have in fact become an excellent gamer, the kind that actually fits games into the appropriate place, for them, in their life.
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