My buying philosophy?! You thief you stole ma moralz!!

co opted them ! ;p

I've pretty much come to the conclusion that the best strategy for me personally (everyone else decide your own strategy, don't steal mine) - is to have a hard and fast general rule to not buy any brand new game by default on release day, nor any time before release day. I said "general" rule specifically because nothing is black and white in this world and there are often exceptions, but by having a general rule to begin with, then something needs to somehow prove itself to me that it is "the exception", and in terms that _I_ care about, not someone else's opinion/desire/preference/etc.

Reason I feel this way is that in the infinite sea of available video games I feel that there is well... funny enough... an infinite sea of video games that may interest me which have been around for anywhere from 6 months to 20 years and are at a fantastic price per entertainment value per hour. I don't calculate that out on a spreadsheet, but rather whimsical pre-purchase speculation on any given title as to what I may get out of it for my $3 or whatever. Since I could literally play games for the rest of my life just from my current pool of backlog, and I'm likely to accumulate more from great deals over time, I have to say out loud to any game company coming out with a new game:

"What makes your game so special in terms that matter to me personally as an individual that it will excite me enough to run past the thousands of games I desire that are $5 or less and spend $40-60 on your game instead? Go ahead, impress me. <clicks stopwatch to time their response>"

But without hearing what they have to say, or what anyone else might have to say for that matter, in almost every case - even if I'm impressed by the game a lot, I still yawn and pat my mouth and think "Yeah, sounds like it'll be a fun game when it shows up in a Bundlestars Bundle 5 years from now, you convinced me to wishlist it on Steam, thanks."

You see, even when I'm greatly impressed by a game these days, it takes a massive effort for any game or game company to impress my wallet open to the tune of $40-80 or more for a single video game. And with the way the industry is these days being anti-consumer and using business strategies to maximize profit rather than maximize enjoyment of their game and let it sell itself, I find myself unimpressed by the "full package" of what passes as a game these days even when the trailers look amazing, because lets face it - trailers are marketing and while not always full of bullshit, they often are.

Take for example the game "Raven's Cry". Just watch the amazing trailer for it and tell me it doesn't look damned impressive: http://store.steampowered.com/app/281130/

That really blew my mind and made me insta-add the game to my wishlist. With no intent to buy it at full release price of course, but to monitor it over time and express interest and keep track of it. Ok, so the game came out at the end of January this year and.... it totally tanked. The reviews on Steam and across the web rip the game apart for being boring crap and buggy as hell. The developers released their last patch for the game one month after it was released and appear to have never been heard from since. It is 4.5+ months since the last patch and there is nothing but anger and frustration in the reviews from people who bought it and are finding bug after bug after game breaking bug making the game unplayable.

But the fucking game is listed as $60.99 *STILL*! What the hell?? That is a massive insult to gamers. That makes me wish legislators would enact legislation that forces software companies to fix their buggy ass software and put it on par with every other product that is sold in stores. Sell broken crap and people get a refund or you're forced to do a recall and fix it.

It just blows my mind that a company can put out a broken ass game like this and have massive discontent and disappointment over how buggy and unplayable and incomplete it is and totally get away with it charging full price of over $60! The game has a rating of "Mostly Negative" with only 24% of people saying something good about it. In Steam metrics that is totally murder for a game. I've not seen a game on Steam with a _lower_ score than that ever. I think even Bad Rats has a higher score than that!

Hell, even Daikatana has a positive score of 47% on Steam!

What the hell gaming industry? What the hell?!?! Prove to me your damn game is worth $40-80 before I spend a cent or it ain't happening.

One game from one company in 8 years has proven to me their game was worth paying full price for when it came out (well, prerelease discounted anyway), and that was The Witcher 3. It lived up to my expectations and beyond for the money spent. Based on that experience alone, CDPR and GOG now have money in my wallet sitting here earmarked for their next game - a blank cheque so to speak. It's a collection of all of the money that I did not and will not spend on any other games from other companies that treat their customers like crap. I'll fill up the Warwick trebuchet full of money and launch it at Poland to pick up Cyberpunk 2077 or The Witcher 4 when it comes out. Every other company out there needs to prove themselves to me first if they want my Canadian monopoly money. Until then I'll grab a surf board and surf through my GOG and Steam existing game library to pass the time.

I have to say "no thanks" to Raven's Cry, Batman Origins/Knight and every other game that gamers stuck an axe in the developer's heads over though. I wont even buy those games in the bargain bin for $5 with Yanet Garcia hand delivering the Steam code at my front door while jumping out of a cake naked.

I'm just saying.

And I buy games only after watching pure gameplay - youtube videos (i prefer unknown people because even slightly famous youtubers nowadays subscribe contracts to "say only good things") - or the best way to do it is watch a stream.
usually this gives enough information about game itself, then i do "what drm does it use" research.
Ah, buying games is so complicated theese days =\

no it isnt
wait 6 months for all the crap to be ironed out and any dlc crap to be released
wait a few mor emonths to see if there is a super duper special version
or just wait for a sale

there wil be sales all you need to do is be patient

Well, it seems NVIDIA is helping fix it.

The studio, Reality Pump, was shut down recently. I've been told that the publisher, TopWare, gave the devs a ridiculously tight budget. The team was small, someone stated that it was less than twenty people (which is downright absurd for a project of this scale in this genre), and the development length was insanely short as well. Keep in mind that the project was originally started and messed up by another studio, when Reality Pump took over they had to basically start from zero. My guess is that the publisher perceived it as a continuation of the failed project rather than a completely new one and treated it as such. As a result the resources and time the devs had was a fraction of what a game like this really needs.

It's a damn shame and the closure of Reality Pump is a true tragedy for the Polish games industry. Maybe they weren't huge and maybe none of their games had the quality that studios like CD Projekt RED or People Can Fly were able to deliver but it was one of the earliest major Polish game studios which had been around for twenty years at the time of its closing and was behind two internationally renowned game franchises, namely Earth 21x0 and Two Worlds. It's sad that they started and ended as a subsidiary of the shitty company that TopWare is.

Ah that sucks! I Reality Pump seemed like a really promising studio, Two Worlds was a decent B-level series and I was looking forward to Sacrilegium (though it had gone silent for some time).

Ah well, maybe if they'd spent the time developing the game itself instead of their own proprietary DRM solution they might still be in business. ;)