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Thankfully steamdb exists
RiveR- Solo 🏴☠
I could hear this. I feel very fit now.
🏴☠
Paying full price for non indie games doesn’t support the devs. It supports the companies who hire and underpay their workers, treat them like shit and would contine to do so if you paid 200% retail.
You’re right it would be better if their games weren’t easily accessable and advertized and nobody ever bought them or even were able to learn they existed.
Take the boot outta your mouth for a second. Seriously.
I point out that non indie companies underpay and abuse their workers and your immediate go to is “But they marrkettt”
You know you can market without treating your workers like shit, right? That’s an actual thing that exists.
so we’re all clear. What is the difference between selling 100 copy’s at $5 vs selling 5 copies at $100?
Dev’s lock in prices at $100 and only discount down to 5%-10% because industry standards and publishers or some bullshit. They don’t care if I eat, I don’t care if the eat. Doesn’t matter how good the game is. This is how it’s always been in capitalism and to participate means neither of us care about the other one. If we maintained what these sales were like during the hayday, I’d go to bat for any of these devs. But I’ve seen the sales in the past few years. Minimal at best then posts like these saying “support them”. Eat shit.
You’re not a starving artist any more then we are. You want to create a world of maximized profits then don’t ask for sympathy and support when it takes away from my labor too. I will play the game like you and demand cheaper while you demand more money. Go figure games now are not great and maybe profits are up because prices don’t drop anymore, but there’s likely more starving artist types developing games now then there were during the great days because guess what got everyone into gaming then? Cheap sales and game prices we all could afford and play on our jank systems. Now they fuck us and say “support our full price game or you’re a piece of shit”
History of my preorders or full purchases:
Full price purchase:
L4D+L4D2 Diablo 3 - Probably the only culprit here. But cmon, Blizzard was good at that time. It Takes Two Binding of Isaac Rebirth PUBG Psychonauts 2
Preorders:
Portal 2
The rest is just acquiring good games for low price. Especially humble bundle (that specific one was extremely juicy IYKYK)
Been subscribed to Humble Monthly for several years now. My gaming library is… Not small…
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.
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.
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.
It still supports the devs. Sales are a chance to pick up the market segments that will only buy at that price.
Friendly reminder to never buy anything at full price, even if it’s stuff to help good devs.
You say “reminder” like you just made a factual comment. Its literally a completely subjective value appraisal by you.
There are plenty of reasons to buy at full price:
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You want to support the dev (many of these reasons can be suspect to me but its still a valid reason for a perspective buyer)
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You want to play the game right now, as opposed to waiting to where you wont want to play the game
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Many multiplayer games are most fun initially before the awful meta and hyper online people screw the fun out of it/force it all to be competitive af/necessitate you needing to look up guides
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Speaking of multiplayer, you might want to play with friends/be social
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It’s just not that much money to you
Personally, I’ve stopped trying to do any sort of trick to save money on games because I realized I actually probably ended up spending more on games that were on sale that Id just never actually bother playing than when I just bought a game the second I felt like playing it and then played it. It ended up being a bit of a fallacy for me, and I imagine its the same for many other people.
Buying at full price is evil. It means you were coerced by the devs to pay their whimsical inflated fake price.
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Why?
Getting in the habit of willing to be patient and reducing money spending are pretty good general habits.
That is true but it shouldn’t be a hard rule. For example, do you not think the launch price of Hollow Knight: Silksong was fair?
There are a few games that never go on sale, like factorio.
I have absolutely bought factorio on sale before
Uh… unless I’m reading this wrong, they are correct that it has never gone on sale before. Games like this do exist. It’s rare, but it happens. Like they said, maybe you bought on a key site or maybe a different platform or currency? But on steam in usd, yeah, doesn’t go on sale.
It used to be cheaper, yes. They increased the price for the release. Maybe you bought it on a key site at a discount. But you certainly didn’t buy on steam, gog or their site on discount. They have state the will never do discounts.
I bought a 2 hour long indie “experience” at 67% off.
No regerts. I am barely making ends meet and feeding a child and wife.
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.
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.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.
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.
Reminder that steam strong arms indie Devs into doing these big sales in order to give them visibility on the Steam store.
Basically if you don’t do sales Steam wont show your game to anyone.
Wow, it’s like people want the games that are part of the big sale going on! How are you twisting the ability to sort by what’s on discount into being evil?
Because the big sale only happens because steam presses Devs into it in order to get promoted. So Devs that don’t buy into the sale, get sent to the back of line.
Your entire argument makes no sense
You mean the game will only show up in the list of games that are available on sale if the games are actually in the sale? Because that’s just literally how that works
You say “basically” as if you are privy to how the steam store works when at the same time making up how it works
I worked for a game developer for 4 years
I never buy games at retail price anyways, so I do kind of get it past launch. I don’t care about buying a game until it is on sale and its a big part of why I wish list games to keep track of when they go on sale to see if its hit the price point I want.
There are plenty of examples to the contrary of this. In particular, I know that factorio has literally never gone on sale on principle, and has only ever gone up in price upon leaving early access. Despite this, it shows up with some regularity in the store.
It’s certainly the case that Steam can be a rat race for developers to get attention, but I don’t believe your framing is accurate.
I thought about mentioning factorio in the original comment, but yeah as you say there is some exception, factorio. Being wildly popular and the game that more or less birthed an entire genre helps and even if you don’t play the same game it’s still entirely possible to succeed through word of nouth. But for less popular indie games it’s still true.
UUhhhh no? Steam doesn’t automatically change games’ visibility if it’s never on sale; it makes games on sale more visible, which encourages Devs to put their games on sale, meaning people who have never seen your game have seen it and might buy it. So in the end, MORE People have bout the game than would have otherwise, and if set at the right price, the Devs still get their cash and now have a larger market. I’m so glad I took Microeconomics in High School :)
And maybe if you studied beyond highschool level you would be aware this is a well studied thing in economics. If you sell a priority service and there is a limit to the resource in some way you are shutting out the people that don’t pay. Like its the same problem as dating apps that sell priority matching, if enough people buy I to it you either have to buy into it as well just to get a fair chance, or except you will never get seem.
Yes the Devs that buy into it get more sales. The entire point is it works for those people, if it didn’t they would have no reason to buy into it. But the people who don’t buy into it are then inherently disadvantaged.
Why would consumers want the store to not prioritize giving visibility to games on discounts during sale events?
If people want to discover games they can go to steam queue and see what is recommended that they may be interested in. But, the last thing I want a company to do is hide sales for me and pushing full retail products.
That to me would be anticonsumer. Might not be what sellers want, but visibility to discounts so my money goes further is what I want as a consumer. I go as far as using isthereanydeals to check to see if other stores sell for cheaper than Steam and alert me to targetted price drops.
That works when we’re talking about big businesses and AAA games, but the problem is when we consider indie developers, who struggle to get attention so are pressured into putting their game on sale when they don’t want to just get some attention.
And why would consumers who are trying to get the most value for their money care about that financial aspect? They aren’t a business. They are consumers looking for deals. Not to be paying full price for games as an act of charity. Many look at the store because they are looking to see what is discounted for the day. And wishlist and use deal trackers like isthereanydeals.
People who get hyped and preorder are the ones willing to pay more because they value first access. After that its mostly value based consumers left with different price thresholds. If you want the full price paying demographic you have to front load your marketing budget before the game launches.
Its like you want the store to be advertising old full priced games and suppressing sales which is the opposite of what consumers want to see.
And why would consumers who are trying to get the most value for their money care about that financial aspect? They aren’t a business. They are consumers looking for deals.
Sure if you don’t give a shit about other people, and then you can use the same logic to justify sweatshop clothes and any other shitty businesses practice you like.
You consider sales to be equivalent to sweat shops?
So do you go out of your way to avoid sales and pay full price for everything?
Anyways, pretty confused why you expect the store part of a business to not prioritize promoting sales, since that’s what consumers want in that section. The discovery queue is where titles that might be of interest is shown without regard to discounts. Its like going to the mods section and being upset there’s only mods being displayed.
This post brought to you by a person who studied beyond highschool level and the phrase “buy into it”.
I mean it’s that, or pay for marketing via other means. Either way, you’re spending money for exposure.
So who would see their game if Steam didn’t allow their game on their platform?
Seems like the devs would make way less money selling 0 copies
I mean… yeah?
steam is running a business and game devs are too.
if you develop games because it’s a hobby, more power to you, but the platform you’re using (steam) requires capital to operate.
And same with consumers. We aren’t a charity throwing away money for no reason. We actively seek out discounts to get more for our money. We want discounts to be given priority.
sure, Karen.
The entitlement in these two words astounds me
are you certain it’s entitlement?
If you’re referring to how consumers were previously described, then I wholly agree. consumers should get what they paid for.
that said, if the price is too high for you don’t complain. don’t whine about it online. don’t buy it.
Sure, Ubisoft.
man I wish. that’s a game company that knows how to make money.
they treat their customers like absolute shit, year after year. yet still people keep buying their garbage.
🤔 I wonder why?
Do you have a better method?
Probably wishes there were no sales at all and everything stayed at full price. They compared sales to coercion and sweat shops. They hate discounts.
That would end my gaming hobby or send me back to piracy, and I like giving hard working devs my money
Patient gamers ftw!
Lost all my grumpy coin cause devs were a bunch of meth addicts.
Oooh which game was that?
Schedule 1
I so want to play Sonic Crossworlds but that shit’s expensive
I wanna play Sonic x Shadow Generations, but same.
And Spider-Man 2.
The only game I preorder is GW2’s yearly expansions. Everything else is c/patientgamers material, waiting a few years and paying just a small fraction of the release price to get all DLC, fixed bugs, and tons of fan resources that were created meanwhile 👌
