The success of Switch has led to a sea change in the way Nintendo approaches digital sales. While deep discounts on first-party titles are unlikely to materialise any time soon, it's now relatively common to see the company's big-name evergreen games with 1/3 off their normal price. Other companies discount their games much more aggressively, and it's possible to pick up huge AAA releases from big publishers for very reasonable prices just a few months after release.
For smaller developers, however, Switch eShop has turned into the Wild West when it comes to sales. It's not uncommon to see games discounted by up to 99%, selling for mere pennies, or even for free. How publishers and developers hope to benefit from making such little profit is puzzling, especially when the game doesn't contain in-app purchases or DLC add-ons. Can the visability provided by selling your game for a single cent really make a dent in your sales numbers?
"The goal for the discount is to get into the top selling charts as that’s where a LOT of organic sales and visibility comes from," SMG Studio's CEO Ashley Ringrose tells us via email. "The steeper the discount, the greater chance you have to get there."
SMG has been on Nintendo's digital storefront since the early days and has steadily built a library of games on the console including Super One More Jump, OTTT and most recently co-op removals 'sim' Moving Out. It's also three years exactly since the excellent co-op puzzler Death Squared debuted on Switch and Ringrose has been tracking its sales successes and failures and how they correlate with discounts since the beginning, all with the conscious goal of experimenting.
"What if I do the same percentage off three times in a row in quick succession? What does deep discounting do for the ‘tail’ end of sales? Does going on sale affect other platform sales?"
"There was no strategy other than to try and learn," he continues. "That’s why we even did a 10% off sale. For instance: I wondered if the percentage off was less relevant and it was JUST the exposure on the sales section that drives the increase." In his experience, such a small discount isn't worth the trouble. "Don’t do 10% off. Hardly anyone noticed or bought it."
Over the last three years, Ringrose has used the game to test theories and find the best approach to sales. "Other tests were trying to debunk myths or assumptions from myself and other devs about how sales work. What if I do the same percentage off three times in a row in quick succession? What does deep discounting do for the ‘tail’ end of sales? Does going on sale affect other platform sales? I have thoughts on these but no definitive answers, as each test doesn’t factor in stuff like the state of the world, other games and sales on at the time, etc. As someone who likes robust data, most of the stuff you get back has so many asterisks next to them it’s hard to form solid conclusions."
That being said, the graph above provides some fascinating data points to analyse. It appears that being available for ‘free’ on other platforms apparently didn’t affect the game's Switch sales. In fact, if anything, it may have slightly increased sales on Switch over time.
"We’re on Xbox Game Pass now and I think [the increase is] because not everyone has an Xbox (with Game Pass), but many people have a friend who does. So they are having a good time playing our game and tell their friends. You get more coverage and mentions organically now as more people have access to the game."
Death Squared launched elsewhere before arriving on Switch on 13th July 2017. The game's primary coloured characters and local multiplayer focus immediately felt at home on the console, though, and good sales gave it (and the team) a much-needed shot in the arm.
Switch saved Death Squared from obscurity and financial failure.
"Switch saved Death Squared from obscurity and financial failure. That boost from Switch not only made sure the game made a profit but also gave us continued reason to keep talking about it and supporting the game to drive sales on other platforms. It also gave us more confidence to continue in the console space that lead to Moving Out. It wasn’t just the Switch sales but the new coverage and reviews of the game. We launched in 2017 just between Breath of the Wild (and the Switch launch) and Horizon Zero Dawn and just got ignored at launch."
Things were looking particularly grim at the start of that year. "I remember going through with the team on a 2017+ plan and this was less than two months until release. And I said Well, we don’t know if we’ll do more console games because it depends on how Death Squared goes. Then after the initial launch happened I was like Ohh I don’t think we’re suited for console/PC dev at all. This is not good, but we had the meeting with Nintendo and slated for a July release. I still wonder what would have happened if we were a launch title (because we would have been ready). Ahh to dream."
To date, Death Squared has sold close to 300,000 copies across all platforms "with Switch being over 60% of those". Breaking the 150K barrier on Switch is a significant acheievement and Ringrose still plans to honour a promise to make the game free if it hits 250K Switch copies sold.
Beyond discounting, we wondered if there were any other tools available to increase visibility and help draw attention on the eShop, whether through getting highlighted by Nintendo, being made Game of the Day, switching thumbnails, icons, and other methods.
"I’ve tried to be active on Reddit as much as I can or trying to find new 'content marketing' ways to talk about the game on social. Getting Highlights and Game of the Day is all out of our hands. With so many great games on the eShop now it’s hard to expect a 3-year-old game to get featured. I do look to see if there’s a 'Games you can play with the whole family' feature.
"What we haven’t had time for is more updates. We did a free one in January 2019 but it hardly shifted the sales up. It did fix some issues and we added a colour-blind mode so those are good features to have."
Of course, if there are peaks, there must be troughs, too, and we wonder what a bad sales week looks like. Is ‘zero copies sold’ something Ringrose occasionally sees? "We’ve had some 0 days in certain regions but luckily haven’t dropped. In fact 3 years on we’re still going OK. On a good week (even 2+ years on) we’ll sell more on Switch than we did opening week on Steam! But that’s also because we did so badly on Steam’s launch. I still remember seeing the stats that we had sold just 2 copies in Latvia after 6 months."
"I never got in touch with them. It would have been an amazing story. We’ve since sold 45 copies in Latvia so they must have told their friends!"
Ringrose has also been a vocal advocate of releasing demos if possible, something the SMG had at launch with Moving Out and which the team added for Death Squared as soon as they could. "It wasn’t a huge boost in sales but it did seem to increase the daily average. We did this six months after release (as it had tweaked story and had to go through certification again) so it was a good test to see what happens.
I think the demo works well in our case as we’re not a 'beautiful game' so we have to rely on people having fun with it.
"I think the demo works well in our case as we’re not a 'beautiful game' so we have to rely on people having fun with it. So people hear good things and the demo gives us a way past their 'I dunno…' barrier. So I credit a lot of the ongoing sales to this demo. And I've tried to tell other devs to join the demo club! But there’s plenty of reasons NOT to do a demo also from a risk factor for the devs. So I can understand."
Although the demo seems to have had a positive effect on sales, the content update for the game didn’t really move the needle. Will this affect how and when SMG approaches updating games in the future?
"A little. It’s why we didn’t do ANOTHER update after this for the last year. I know we said 'FINAL FREE UPDATE' but it would have been funny to say 'FINAL FINAL FREE UPDATE'. We’re lucky to have multiple titles to work on. As the team had RISK, Moving Out and No Way Home there wasn’t enough time to keep updating Death Squared. Plus any 'big' ideas we had we’d rather save for a sequel."
As publishers struggle to be seen on the increasingly bloated eShop, there has been a sharp increase in games getting discounted in the extreme. Some publishers are experimenting with rolling promos or launching free for a limited time if you own certain other titles. What are Ringrose's views on these strategies? Does he think they’re effective ways to grow sales in the long term?
"We’re just as guilty with the deeper discounting now," he admits. "I think that Rolling Promos sale is interesting as again it’s something new. I’m not sure why giving away the games is a good idea though. But again maybe word of mouth is the end goal. I do think that a one cent game is silly. There should be a minimum floor to the price."
Despite being relatively late starters in the digital sales arena compared to other platforms, Nintendo apparently gives devs more freedom than the competition over how their games are discounted.
"What I do like [...] is having the control over our sales. Other platforms restrict this MUCH more heavily to the point if you’re not in control you have to apply to go on sale as it’s an editorial decision. This is very tough. As a dev you realise that even with all these people who have played your game you have a limited channels to talk to them. It’s even harder when you launch a new game and there’s no 'easy' way to tell existing players about that new game on most of the game stores."
Death Squared is still more than holding its own against the rest of SMG's Switch software lineup. "Death Squared is doing better than our other titles on the Switch (not including Moving Out) even though it’s older and more expensive. But it’s also the only title on so many platforms and Xbox Game Pass and the recent [Remote Play Together] update to Steam that allows online multiplayer [...] is fuelling a late resurgence."
People buy what they want, when they want to play it, or when they see a good deal. Someone says 'Hey you should play this game it’s great' they’ll go get it. Most won't pull up a site and study the historical sales data
As we stated at the top, after over 36 months of experimentation, Ringrose is convinced that minor discounts don't do much, especially following a deeper discount (as borne out by his data) - that is unless you're a massive breakout indie smash like Cuphead or Untitled Goose Game.
"Oh I think 10% in general is a no go. It’s just too small of a discount for anyone to care about. My current theory is 95% of people don’t pay close attention to a games previous sale price (this would increase the more popular a game is but I think it’d max out at 90%). People buy what they want, when they want to play it, or when they see a good deal. Someone says 'Hey you should play this game it’s great' they’ll go get it. Most won't pull up a site and study the historical sales data and tell their friend 'Ok I’ll play this in the next 30-65 days as I feel we’re close to a highest discount ever trend'. Some DO though!"
On the whole, Ringrose seems upbeat and energised by his findings, no doubt buoyed by the warm critical reception to SMG's dual co-op jewels. However, Death Squared's success was hard-won and there are several things he would change given the opportunity to start afresh with the game and its marketing. He mentioned in a previous conversation wishing that the name didn't mention ‘death’.
"Oh yeah I still regret the name," he confirms. "And that 'alcohol reference' on the ESRB rating. The biggest barrier I think was the art/visuals. People just react so differently to a 'beautiful' game. Sadly the gameplay can be much more shallow if the game looks gorgeous but it also fuels all the marketing, the gifs, etc. Our game shined when people played it but that is the biggest barrier.
"So, if [given a] fresh start I would have focused more effort on bringing the art to a 'WOW it’s beautiful' level, a more universal name, and the extra time for online multiplayer. Oh, and removed the one line that references 'ethanol' so I didn’t have that alcohol reference."
In this day and age, however, constant updates and rolling content drops mean that games are constantly evolving, ever-changing beasts that can be near-unrecognisable a year after launch. "In fact, that is one thought I’ve been tossing around for a while is what would happen if I just commissioned new art and re-released the game with a new name," Ringrose muses. "Like a marketing remaster! Or if I just make it an update. But that’s easier said than done and we’re better off putting that energy into a sequel or a NEW game."
So, while three years of collecting data and experiementing has yielded some fascinating results, there remain many unclear factors for indie devs when it comes to successfully strategising your way through the eShop sales gauntlet. Anything from a mistimed promo to a poorly thought-out title could prove the difference between making or breaking your game. While having 'death' in the title might put parents off buying it for their kids, in the course of conversing with Ashley for this piece we found ourselves accidentally typing 'Death Stranding' an embarrassing number of times. Perhaps it's our lockdown fogginess still in effect, but that repeated mistake on our part may not be a bad thing for SMG.
"Haha I wonder if that has helped our SEO in the stores?" Ringrose ponders. "People start typing and see us…"
Our thanks to Ashley for his time. Death Squared is obviously available on Switch eShop; Death Stranding is not.
Comments 59
I typically wait for sales and imagine others do the same so this isn't surprising to me, but it is interesting to see the spikes graphed.
It's impressive how much awareness I see for a game like Death Squared now then when it first came out.
Makes me hopeful to see what they do with that information and a potential sequel.
@justin233 Companies over value their games a lot of times in the first place, make a game $19.99 and a decent amount of people will buy it, but sell it on release at $9.99 and now we are looking at far more people willing to buy it so sales numbers go up and people who may not have considered it in the first place will likely drop $10 on it. Price really does matter to many people and even selling lower you are likely going to make roughly the same amount selling at $19.99 because of the sheer number increase on sales.
Just waiting for my physical copy to arrive from 1Print.
Maaan, the life of a dev is tough if that kind of sales graph is what they call a success. Much respect to these guys and their perseverance (I admit it's flown under my radar as well, but I've seen some gameplay of Death Squared, and it seems like the perfect "hidden gem" sort of game to do this analysis on).
“ Most won't pull up a site and study the historical sales data and tell their friend 'Ok I’ll play this in the next 30-65 days as I feel we’re close to a highest discount ever trend'. Some DO though!" “
I feel personally attacked
Anything less than 20% off probably won't draw me in.
@Jokerwolf
I don't think pricing is that straightforward. If you price your game too low, buyers might think it's substandard junk and skip it. If you price it too high, then it's tougher to get gamers to commit to the purchase.
It's a delicate balance. I enjoy sales, so its an effective tool for getting attention and create momentum but I also take risks and are a lot more likely to buy indy/small developer games now then I have ever been in my life. And I like that!
Ultimately, a game develop will try to get the attention of as much as the market as possible but you gotta understand, you'll never capture everyone. Some folks love casual, some folks love small dev games, some want a budget game, some only want big developer-big games.
Who else just scrolled to the comments not knowing what the heck is going on in this article 😂
I love how the graph has a tiny little spike at a moment when the game wasn't on sale, and it's labeled as "???".
I have such a sizeable backlog anyway that I almost always wait for a significant sale. My wishlist on dekudeals is pretty lengthy and I have the notifications set for a sale usually between 33% to 50% off depending on the original price.
I've definitely seen sales help plenty of digital Switch games climb up the charts...I tend to check the eShop charts really often for some reason.
Personally I always would like the Switch version - it's accessible on the TV but handheld mode really helps clear out my backlog, and seeing them on the small screen still has that wow factor. My issue is usually price, because most of the time I can get a better looking version on PC. I think it's just difficult to optimise it within the developer's budget while keep the price similar to other platforms.
-But I'd always recommend supporting devs (particularly indies!) by buying full price when you can though. Vote with your wallet and all that
Cool feature and an interesting read. Nice work!
Just bought Sniper Elite 3 due to the big sale.
I check the sales every week. When a random game is down to $1-5 and catches my eye I'll check the reviews. If reviewed well I'll usually give it a shot at such a low price...not much to lose.
Great interview piece. I've idly wondered these sorts of things myself. Of course, a lot of these games, while not a triple-A title, still seem above average in regards to most of the games on sale, which are mostly just app store game spillover, with a few gems in the mix.
I do wonder how much the sea of junk helps the gems float to the top, or if they all just get burried deep under the page scroll for the deals list
@ramberk It is all about how you advertise it too, your game will speak for itself if it is good and has some hype. Games that I have had on my radar get bought if it is a genre I like period, but when they are priced properly for the content you get it sells itself in most cases.
It's certainly a complex topic and I do feel for the developers. Quality products and reputation is in my view the ladder to better prices. The eShop currently contains far too much junk and is hard for buyer and dev. Also there is a tendancy now for indies to go from low to mid prices with sub prime product - some with no back catalogue or history! The masturbation game highlighted by NL the other day shows that Nintendo aren't even checking what they upload!
It's great to see all this, rare to see such an in-depth look into sales figures, let alone sales figures at all for digital games.
When did I buy it... looks like in the bit labeled -51%, and I enjoyed it at least. Why then...? It was the first sale I saw it in on the eShop.
Won't be getting the physical though, it'd end up £50 or more with shipping and customs to the UK. :s
Wonder if there'd ever be a triple pack physical or something with all three of the mural icons... (I doubt it though)
Death Squared... I guess not liking that name may be why it got retitled 'Rorororo' (ロロロロ) in Japan, though that kinda looks like just some censored/missing text in itself... (Characters the Switch doesn't support tend to show up as squares xD)
Also what was that alcohol reference? Looks like the UK eShop has it as a 3+ with no content warnings.
Finally I get to read this article legitimately!
Great interview. So here's how I do it. I don't mind purchasing the complete price. $14.99 is reasonable. $19.99 depends of the game. I don't usually purchase games with higher discounts because in my case 1) i don't want more backlog of games I'll not eventually play 2) I want to do an investment for me and the dev. 90% will not do the cut, unless it is a game very succesful like Far Cry 5 that right now It's $9 I don't mind. With that weird mindset I get to play what I usually buy and don't accumulate that many games. It also helps to have wishlists and let Nintendo notify you.
Fascinating article. These types of stories are my favorite, by far, on Nintendo Life.
Personally, I won’t buy a game on sale unless it is at least 50% off, and usually it’s on my wishlist. Apart from Conduct Together and Infini (both good games), I usually wait until the Black Friday sale to really splurge on a bunch of games.
I also think there are a lot of games that are overpriced to begin with just so they can have a super sale. I've seen so many $20-30 interesting looking games that should probably be in the $10-15 range. Sure it's my opinion, but I have the same mindset for AAA games, too. There are a bunch of Nintendo and third party games that I won't buy unless they're dropped to the $20-30 range. Amazon and Best Buy are great for that, if you prefer to buy physical like me.
My inner nerd absolutely loved this article! I'm obsessed with data, variables, buyer psychology, etc. This was quite satisfying 😁
All this does little to address the fact that since the rise of the indie "scene" the gaming industry is more bloated than at any point since the Atari 2600. Everyone wants to make a living in the video game world, and everybody wants to be a game dev, but there's not really enough spending out there to justify 20,000 games for sale per year. 90% of the are going to crash and burn. When you have an industry increasingly split as "hobby project because you can never make a living out of that" and mega-corporate content factories like Activision and EA, you get a very confused consumer landscape with money stretched very thin.
I really don't know how the majority of these indie devs find enough customers, at any price, to keep the lights on. It's not that all their products aren't worthy of a few bucks, but among all the people spending money how many are spending money one one specific game enough to pay for the cost let alone profit? I feel like Death Squared gained legitimacy by being on Treehouse/Direct during a console launch window. Otherwise it would have been another simple puzzle game lost in the mists. They more or less stated that here but I don't think anyone can jump into indie game development as an actual business plan at this point, just a side venture that breaking even is an unlikely win.
Most of the time the heavily discounted games aren’t even worth the money while most of the good games hardly ever go on sale in the shop (biggest discount you may actually see is around $2-$5 for these games).
@Apportal Same here, that's what I always do!
Some, what can be described as AAA games, that don't get a physical release, are very over priced at launch. But six months down the line there is at least a 40% discount in an all to regular eshop sale. That so soon discount has to be built into the price from day one.
Books DVDs and Cinema tickets, each have similar prices to other books, DVDs and tickets. But game prices are way out of left field and have little continuity.
Apart from Nintendo games, everything else on the Switch is just there because the Switch is the ideal platform to make more dollars, except the catalogue of games is becoming saturated.
Games like Paper Mario will suffer because of this over saturation and because of its high price.
I guess a lot of gamers would rather spend £50 on a selection of lower priced or discounted games than on Paper Mario.
Bioshock and Boarderlands, both physical and both are a 3 games collection..only £14 more than Paper Mario. For any one on a budget that's 6 games for £14 extra. Similar I guess for these games in the eshop.
@Solomon_Rambling lots of games are left at an extortionately high price just to lower them in an up to 70% off sale. It's these games that are inflated to get the high percentage discount.
Lego City is an example. Always in the eshop at £49.99 until a sale when it's down to £14.99. But physical copies new are only about £19.99.
It helps that Death Squared was / is a brilliant game. Good content will usually rise to the surface. Whether it rises before a dev goes bust is another question. We need more curated content. I rely on sites like NL to wave decent games at me, even more so with so much junk on the eshop that benefit no one. How to address the issue of exposure? Curation. It's the difference between MUBI's approach and Netflix. Although Netflx have trending, not that I trust the masses to have any taste at alll...
This is a very informative piece! Thanks for the good read, Nintendo Life!
"My current theory is 95% of people don’t pay close attention to a games previous sale price"
Yup I think basically all the developers think the same way. This is why we get the exact same copy and paste deals every few months. The real question is why does nintendolife cover the sales when they are exactly the same as before.
Even undesirable games can sell a lot of copies to bolster people's collections.
$9.99 - 14.99 is a sweet spot for what would have released on Xbox Live Arcade in the past. Lower than that and I start asking questions about quality, but over that I want to know what justifies the extra expense (online features don't appeal to me). The problem with the Switch is everything gets buried and just even finding something appealing is hard.
I'd like to see a similar interview about pricing and rolling sales with Capcom.
For me, I have a reasonable price in my head when I see a trailer. If the actual price is a lot higher, I wait for a sale to make the prices match my expectations. Sometimes I wait forever. With 'The Touryst' I bought it day 1 as it thought it would be 30 dollars or more but it was 19.99. With 'Streets of Rage 4'- I had 19.99 in my head but when iit came out at 24.99 so it became a "wait for a sale game" and I am still waiting. Another factor that puts me off is when the game is significantly cheaper on Ps4, especially if the game seems more suited to switch. I waited ages to get 'Hyper Light Drifter' and while it is a great game, having it much cheaper elsewhere prevented me form buying until a big sale.
On the 3DS it felt like everything was $10 or less meaning that it felt like true “impulse” buys.
Now the games are $20-$40 and that stings more.
read the whole thing but i'm commenting about the first paragraph: so how come nintendo selects aren't a thing on switch? is it too early in the consoles life still, seems off to me how stingy they've been when they knocked down prices by half for good. that bit about a 10% discount being unexciting with the double coin deal going on is funny too.
lastly are we ever gonna know how well that 10days of xmas thing went?
I'm at the point I almost never buy anything digitally full price. The only exceptions are "must have" games that I'll immediately play. The only one of that in recent times is Castlevania Anniversary Collection. Before that, it might have been Fast RMX and Blaster Master on launch day!
Oh, I got Bloodstained Curse of the Moon at full price. As for the sequel just out, I'll be waiting for at least a 30% discount. I did similarly with Horizon Chase Turbo, even though I really liked it at a friend's house. Blazing Chrome was one I waited for 50% off, and I'll probably jump in for the Contra Anniversary Collection when it's 50% off too.
For lesser games, it must be at least 70% off, while others I'll jump in at 90% off. I bought The Way only because it was $1 or something ridiculous.
Interestingly, one game that still hasn't discounted is Double Dragon 4. I've still resisted buying that.
As for first party games, I get physical copies. They are cheaper for a start, and even when Nintendo finally do a digital discount, it's still not as low as street level prices. Major third party games I get physical too as, again, they are cheaper.
@sfb haha yeah you are the 5%
@Eel hha yeah I couldnt work out why. Could have been a creator/article or feature somewhere but couldn't trace it back. And as a dev/publisher it's so annoying!
@NEStalgia RE business sustainability. It's like any business you need to balance costs. Spend $5M making a small game and you'll struggled to be profitable. The allure always is (like any creative field) to have a breakout hit. Spend $1M on a game and make $100M. Look at cinema. There's so many "cheap" Horror films made for $1-$10M as they make solid profits. It's much riskier to make a $100M film than it is a $300M film.
@bluesun Alcohol warning was we have a line from IRIS that says "is that ethonol on your breath" and we had no time to re-submit with it removed :/
@Vek thanks! and yes the better the game or the better the initial hype the less you need to discount as you just continue to sell well for years. And also have so much $ from the initial success that a sale isnt even needed. You're already rich!
If I see a game on sale for more than about 80% off, I assume it's probably not a very good game. I don't mean that to be rude, but generally speaking price isn't the main reason a game does poorly. Yes, we all love getting a game cheaper, no doubt there, but if a game is good and people want it, they will buy it.
So if I see monstrous discounts in price, I assume that something is wrong.
I saw one of the devs talking about Death Squared on some Reddit posts and it looked fun so I bit at launch. Had a lot of fun with it. That personal touch of reaching out to the community worked on me. Love articles like this btw
The strategy of discounting makes a lot of sense on the eShop, but far too many small studios make the mistake of thinking they're smarter than us and overpricing to compensate.
Deponia, I'm looking at you: a fantastic point and click game that I would definitely buy again for the Switch. But $60 for something that you can routinely get for $2 on PC is a slap in the face. They could discount it by 60% and it would still be a joke. They could grab attention with a 90% off sale (although they never have) and it's still not in impulse-buy territory.
I know you need room to discount in order to get noticed, but remember that at the end of the day people are going to look at the actual price, not just the percentage off.
Here's a question, as opposed to a rant: with (I'm guessing) about 20% of the entire eShop "on sale" at any given day, surely just discounting your game is not enough to get noticed if you're languishing down the bottom of 15 minutes of stuttery scrolling through the "on sale" list. What is the trick to get to the top of that list?
The whole 'test and learn' approach they talk about is very popular in agile IT development and its clearly worked well. But it tends to very much focus on short term results. Try something, if it shows quick returns then do more of it, otherwise drop it.
I wonder if the longer term impacts get lost, i.e. devaluation of video games. It shows here with the number of comments from people saying that they only buy eshop games on discount, as we get conditioned into waiting for a sale. I do the same.
Having said that, the free to play model has probably done more to devalue games than anything else.
People complain that nintendo rarely drop their prices much, but I and many others will pay top dollar for a quality nintendo game.
@MischiefMaker I wait for sales not because I don't value games, but because too many $60 games are not worth the asking price in my humble opinion.
Reviews are not reliable from my perspective as there are a lot of intangible factors in a game, and too often something becomes a "Media Darling" that resonates with their closed community for one reason or another. Is the reviewer of Xenoblade Chronicles a hard-core jRPG fan, someone that just really likes Final Fantasy games, or a guy that typically only plays shooters/sports games? There is no way to quantify personal bias on reviews, just like we cannot know if financial incentives play into them. Too often I have hated games praised and loved games loathed by media. Throw in that a lot of games ship unfinished (day one patched if you prefer) and/or buggy, and you have a strong incentive to not make a day one purchase.
Days long ago, I would have rented a game like that. Later, I would have purchased a demo disc. Now... There might be a demo, but most likely it is just a game on a shelf with a $60 price tag. So I choose to wait and risk fewer dollars on a game because it isn't like I can return a bad product in this industry.
Nintendo isn't immune from this problem, and there are a lot of Nintendo games I have skipped in the Wii U/Switch era because I cannot stomach $60 for a game that I know I won't love. Had those games eventually dropped to $30-40, it might have been a purchase. Instead, I wait until Gamestop has a fire sale and take my risks then. An example would be Bayonetta 2 which is a good game, but not worth $60 from my perspective. So I picked up for $20 at a Gamestop with Bayonetta 1 on the Wii U used and still have yet to even finish it (in fact, I am not sure I even played past the level that was in the demo for Bayonetta 2). There was a time when I would have purchased that new the day it had a Player's Choice price reduction regardless of my feelings about it.
@Darknyht Yeah that's fair enough. Something's only worth what the buyer is willing to pay. My perspective comes from buying nes and snes games that costed the equivalent of probably 100 dollars or pounds in today's money, allowing for inflation. So when you can get something as expansive, entertaining and time-consuming (ina a good way) as BOTW for half of that my stuck-in-the-nineties mind boggles! Today if a software company wants to get that sort of money for a game it has to be through dlc, microtransactions, season passes etc.
It's hard to be scientific about it. A game might last me 5 hours and be fully worth 15 pounds for the experience. Another could last me 30 hours and feel overpriced at that same price.
My main issue nowadays is more time than money. I try and limit my game buying because i only get a few hours a week to play games, and i think that has a bigger impact on how I value a game. I do like a good sale though
@MischiefMaker I always find the inflation arguments interesting because there is so much in play with inflation. An example is the median American house cost roughly $82.5k in 1985 (~200k if you adjusted to todays dollars). In certain areas now that isn't a parking spot and the median price is now $330k. Certain electronics were eventually simplified (which in a lot of cases reduced price and quality) or made cheaper by economy of scale, same with food. But those savings are offset by health care costs, housing costs, entertainment costs (Concerts were an average of $37 in inflation adjusted dollars vs. $92 average cost in reality). Vinyl Records is an example of scale working in reverse, it cost ~$15 then and $27 now.
All that to say, it is hard to peg a lot of moving parts to a single inflation number. I do know that I have access to more but own less than my parents did while I make more (even in inflated dollars) than my dad ever imagined making. I either "purchase" digital games, movies, music and books that are licensed to me, or I rent them through a service. In both cases, I actually own very little while my parents have a library of all of those things. They purchased goods that were expected to last a decade or more, while I am feeling lucky if I manage to get 3-5 years out of my applications/electronics.
So yeah, games are cheaper because more games are sold. Not sure if the quality/value is the same. I can still go to my parents house and play their Intellivision/Odyssey II collection (if I can find them in the attic/basement where they are stored), while I have a giant library of purchases locked on a system that no longer has servers running to provide them to me (Wii).
I try to buy indies at full price unless I'm really on the fence about the game. Like if I'm honestly not sure if I'll enjoy it and I hesitate to waste $10-$20. If I spend $5 or less and it turns out the game isn't for me, I feel better about it.
Triple A's however... Unless it's a first-party Nintendo game or a personal must-have, I try to wait until the $20 GOTY comes out or some massive sale that drops the price to next to nothing.
I mostly don't know many of the lesser known indie titles and just check out the sales, then if something strikes my interest i check for it online and if i like it i buy it. Its very rarely that i actually wait for a game to go on sale.
I still maintain that the Switch eshop store just plain stinks! If only Nintendo can at least mirror the layout of the Wii U eshop - just that move alone would be a tremendous improvement!! I just don’t get why they don’t improve the Switch eshop 🤷♂️ And Navigating 1300 games on sale is a big huge pain in the butt and takes too long!
Most games on the games on eshop are crap. Instead of studying how to sell crap, study how to make good games.
i am an old fashioned guy.
Before i buy, i dive into 2 sources.
youtube and consumer oppinion on internet.
Not only for games but for everything i have interest in.
there is actualy one product this year with an exception, in wich i took a risk.
stadia. wich is awesome
@N64-ROX They have now, and I'm still not buying it.
Tits in the thumbnail works on YouTube
So, I have a massive backlog and gradually phased out even looking at the weekly eShop releases because I know I won't buy anything on impulse if I haven't already researched it (and thus, know when it's coming out). But when I did still window shop and actually buy stuff, my consideration was this (which, according to the graph, is not how most people think):
- If it has, don't buy it, period.
I'm of the seemingly minority opinion that if a game goes to 90% or so off, then that tells me the game is not good enough to drive sales unless it is practically given away. I don't mind at all spending $5 on a game; that won't break my bank and won't come anywhere close to it. How cheap does one have to be to think $5 is too much for a game that's originally $20, but $2 is the right price? At $2, I'm not even supporting the dev with a meal, so is this type of sale even helping in the long run?
The graph is very interesting because it shows 90% actually does seem to help, but it's also on a degrading slope with each subsequent sale. Wonder if that means everyone who was going to buy the game had already bought it, since the final 74% off sale showed to help very little by comparison.... or those people were waiting for another 90%.
Another issue I feel is that since games resort to 90% off in the first place, people will just wait for that inevitable sale, effectively screwing the dev out of extra revenue they would've gotten otherwise. Games are expensive and stressful to make, that's why I don't mind paying retail if the game looks like it matches the price.
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