Are You Price Sensitive When It Comes to Games?

Very rare do I pay full price or buy ultimate edition close to launch day. When I do is mainly to support the campany.

There are so many great games you can buy for cheap.

When it comes to a new release I'm eager to play, not really. £60-£70 isn't awful value for me, I replay games pretty often if they're good and I tend to do everything in a game before moving on.

Where I do draw the line is those titles that I'm not sure of or only casually interested in that sit at/near full price years after release. I won't buy these until the price comes down on general principle.

I really do think about the prices now much more than I used too, it comes down to length alot more now too, like I'm looking at the new Ratchet and Clank game like yeah thats gonna be awesome but man £60 is a lot to ask for that kind of game.

I'm mostly fine with paying full price if I know I will finish the game and there won't be $100 of DLC later down the line. This means rogue likes and DLC-heavy games needs a 50-80% discount before I consider them. Something like Nier R or FF7R or tlou2? Heck yeah I'm paying full price.

One exception are the Resident Evil games. I don't really want to pay full price because I know I will just finish them once and never again, while also ignoring any extra game modes. Literally the only exception so far has been Revelations 2 thanks to the fun co-op.

Reading through the posts, I'm in the same boat as most. With limited time to game these days, I tend to pick games more from my backlog than buying them new when they are released. I think I have 1500 hours or so in the backlog, so never hurting for something to play. When a new game comes out that I think I'll like, I make note of it and then wait for a sale. Single player games don't generally suffer from time (as long as you aren't a graphics snob).

With the PS3 I was because I was still in High School. PS4 was the first generation is was working during so I had some cash to throw at games I wanted. This gen I'm having to find the cheapest way to buy a game now. Here in Australia games have typically been around $90-$100. In New Zealand they cost even more. To buy Demons Souls on PS5? $125. Same with Ratchet and Clank, and basically all of Sony's first party stuff, and a handful of third party games. I preordered Ratchet through PSN on a US account because, and I'm not even kidding, it was cheaper to go on Play Asia and buy US PSN cards and use them to order the game. Prices are all over the show right now (Sackboy is $110, Spider-Man: Miles Morales is $95). I hope they can figure their shit out sooner rather than later if it's one price or another

Absolutely, and in last 5 years or so there have been so much market saturation with amazing games that I (thankfully) switched from buying things on release to actually just playing whatever it is I am interested in playing, when I beat it (or am tired of it) then I open up new releases, reviews etc, and figure out what to play next, get that and sort of unplug from releases, its actually been quite great every time I look for a new game to play there is an ocean to pick from, there are no longer drought months, as I am typically playing through something awesome during those and am completely unplugged from release schedule.

This also helps with pricing, usually by the time I look at what to play next a bunch of those games are on sale or available 2nd hand if buying physical.

So its a win-win, I just had to convince myself that it is a fact that steam, digital stores on consoles etc will all be there with all those games when I am ready to play the next one. On top of that they will be patched up if there are any launch bugs.

I have become very price sensitive recently but it has been getting worse since I built my PC about a decade ago.

Nowadays I won't buy games as they come out, they are just too expensive and I don't see the value in them when the price drops so quickly after coming out.

Take PC games for example I won't spend more than about £15 on a single game and am happy to wait for sales or use CDkeys to keep prices down. I am also taking advantage of Gamepass to play things I wouldn't pay for for.

For Switch games I will keep some 1st party games and then sell the others once complete and If you wait for sales/discounts or buy used you can get some pretty good savings. I then also sell the games on when I am done so it really only costs me about £5-£10 once its all sold and I am happy with that.

I'm fairly price sensitive with games, mostly because through Steam sales and PS+ free games/sale games I've rarely felt like I didn't always have more game I wanted to play than time. I buy maybe one full price PS game per year.

Oddly enough, because the Switch doesn't offer much in the way of discounts I've spent $50-$70 CAN on almost every Switch game purchased since last August when I first picked it up.

I've become more price sensitive to games but mostly because i don't play them for months or years after they come out, sometimes i pick things up on day one to support something i want to see more of (probably picking up Snowrunner today), but games like RE8 i just can't qualify the purchase right now, the 7+8 bundle is a neat idea but really doesn't represent much of a saving compared to buying them individually.
When it comes to price increases i haven't really noticed it, but part of that might be because i'm in the UK, it was already more expensive here and i'm not sure the prices have gone up, RE8 is £49.99 but there were always some AAA games asking that like Fifa or almost every Koei release for some reason.
One area i'm absolutely disgusted with is Nintendo, the Switch came out in 2017 at the asking price of £279.99 and you can currently get them starting from £279.99... i can't believe people support this, been keeping my eye out for a second hand one but those prices are still high, i just want to play Bayonetta 2.

Depends on the price, doesn't it? I wouldn't say I have been price sensitive in the past, but the older I get the less I feel like full price (especially when we're getting to 70+) is a reasonabl asking price. At that point the cost to my perceived value goes out of whack and I simply don't buy it until it comes down to a more reasonable price.

I just refuse to spend 70 dollars(86where I live) on a game that also has a gold edition, super edition ultimate edition, collectors edition, DLC, season pass, boosters and more. Games needing to be sold at 70 dollars is a lie.

It depends. If it’s a game I’m really looking forward to (and it reviews well) I’ll buy it at/near launch for full price. If it’s something that looks cool but I’m not dying to play I usually wait for a sale.

I will more than likely buy Ratchet for $70, but I’ll wait for Returnal to be in the $30 range.

I don’t have a lot of time to play games anymore either, so I’m more likely to pay full price for a game I really want, since it will usually last me a while. When I was younger I would buy games constantly and always try to get them for under $40.

I mean, the difference between $60 and $70 is pretty negligible for me. I'll skip fast food once that week and make up the difference, you know? But it's also pretty rare for me to buy a new game outright. Outside of them being debatably expensive, it's pretty common for them to go on sale or show up on Game Pass within a few weeks. The only games I buy at full price are the games I really want to play the day they release. In which case, I'm totally fine paying $70 now.

So, I guess it's a case by case basis for me. Less measured by the quality of the game and more measured by my desire to play it, though there is probably some correlation between those two things.

I think my main issue with it is I don't buy the necessity for AAA to sell at $70, so while 10 dollars isn't a huge increase, it makes me wary and I'll probably wait for price drops for the most part.

I know the exact moment when I became price sensitive about games. I had just bought dark souls 2 and a week later they announced a complete edition with all the dlc. I was so fucking pissed. You mean if I just wait I can get it cheap with all the DLC for 20$ or less?

So yea, the industry trained me to be price sensitive.

This somehow turns into a positive thing for Nintendo in that they always keep the price of their games high. So I never feel bad buying a new Nintendo game early. Buy it day 1 and didn't play it for 2 years? No problem because it's still 60$ new ;-)

I've only paid full price for a game twice in the past four years of buying probably around 100 games.

I don't believe in wasting money on a new game when I could buy three games for the same price.

That said, if there are games I am incredibly excited for, I will buy them early regardless of price. But this is extremely rare.

If it was just a $10 increase (60 to 70) I wouldn't care. I have a decent-paying job and no kids. I barely spend money on anything outside of my personal entertainment.

But here in Canada, games were $60 when the PS4 released (Digital is tax-free as well), and then our dollar shit the bed so the price went up to $80 a couple of years later. Now they want $90 for a game. That is a 50% increase. Couple that with the government mandating sales taxes on digital products beginning in July this year. I'll have to pay $102 for a game. I'm gonna be waiting for sales even more than I did before... (although I am reeeeally tempted to throw my wallet at Ratchet & Clank)

I have always thought that games are a relatively cheap form of entertainment. Obviously, this differs on an individual basis, and on a game-to-game basis. Even at $70 USD, I think most games are still cheap, given the number of hours of entertainment that can be had.

Yes. i'm not currently working and even when i was i was always living paycheck to paycheck so these $70 tags are too steep for me. do i think Some games could be worth the price sure but i don't think most are/ will be even moreso when you factor in things like microtransactions and the excessive need for patches post-launch these days. more and more i feel like indie devs are doing it right, they generally have a wider variety of prices and frankly alot of times imo these days tend to be a better product than the stale AAA stuff we've been getting in more recent yrs from alot of big-name publishers. i can see myself justifying a $70 tag on some extra polished single player games in a series i might love previously but yeah overall i'll be waiting on price drops from here on out for the vast majority of releases. 60 was already too much alot of times so with the price hike at least from me these companies are going to be loosing more money than if they'd left it at 60. remembe when you could buy 2 newly released games instead of 1 with $100 birthday money? those were a thing and its a shame we don't have that anymore.

Games are way overpriced. Here in Canada they started going up a bit at the end of the 360 era. Than went up again with new consoles and now we at at the point where games are 90+Tax. Unreal.

Only games I even consider a bit worth it are Fighting games I know i'll play for hundreds of hours. Still overpriced.

Not price sensitive, no. Would gladly pay more for a "pure" and complete game without add-on BS.

Sony is having their first sale on their PS5 games after 6 months. Demon's Souls is a whopping 14% off, bringing it to still just 19 cents above the old $60 price tag. Spiderman and Little Big Planet are both similarly priced at about $10 off during this sale, while Ubisoft, which didn't raise their prices to $70, has had multiple sales over the past 6 months and is currently selling Watch Dogs for $20.

So far, the only game I've actually purchased this year was Persona 5 Strikers on Switch. With the exception of Marquette and Destruction All-Stars, which were free with PS Plus, every other game I've played this year was on Game Pass. It's confusing to me that Sony would charge these kinds of prices for their games, which pushes me to check their store for sales and new releases less, and more towards checking out what's on Game Pass.

I don't really care anymore as I find it rare for me to buy a game in day one since most developers rely on patches to fix their games later on.

However, if the game is too good it doesn't matter if I pay 90$ or more.

I don't have much spending money recently, but when I can afford to buy games, I usually don't care what they cost if I want them.

I find myself price sensitive knowing that sales are so regular, and that Gold/Definitive/GOTY versions of games are so commonplace. Paying full price made sense to me at one time when sales were uncommon, and often came so much later that the likelihood that I would even buy that game was low. NES/SNES era is key, here; and those games had a tendency to be $70-$90 at release, especially for something popular. That's less the case now.

I am interested in Immortals Fenyx Rising. I have not yet purchased Immortals Fenyx Rising. I was waiting first on a sale, and second to buy at a time where it would not languish in a backlog. Immortals Fenyx Rising is very often on sale. While the price tag may be $60 for the basic version, and $100 for the game + season pass bundle (Gold edition, I think it's called), it's on sale so often that I just think of that game as a $30/$50 package, not $60/$100. When the time comes and I am ready to make a purchase I will know that either the game is on sale, or I just need to wait a week or two to see it on sale again.

The same holds true for other games, more notably single player games. I don't play much in the way of multiplayer, which would obviously have different criteria (ie: getting in while there's still a sizeable population), so I cannot comment on that; but for my buying dollar it makes little sense to pay full price anymore.

This has served me well since I was about 8