[General Discussion] Are you a day one purchaser or do you wait a week and pay half price?

With the proliferation of online games retailers making it easier and easier to find the cheapest price for a particular game forcing retailers to cut their prices by more and sooner than they once would, it's rare these days for a game to cost much more than half the launch price after only a month or so of being in shops and even after just a week, you can often save a lot buying second hand (UK pro-tip, GAME stores will sell their opened, store copy second hand within a week of launch, often the day after and there are weird people who will buy a game, get the easy achievements then trade it in after a couple of days, rather than renting it).

As such, for the frugally minded gamer, a touch of patience can allow you to save a ton of cash on your purchases. This does of course mean that you can't join your wealthier mates in multiplayer games for the first week and in terms of role play games, those of you with an inability to not read things on the internet might have the game spoiled for you. On top of that, companies are increasingly offering some form of plastic tat or in-game content as an incentive for pre-ordering your game and therefore paying the full asking price so waiting might mean you miss out on that, although I've noticed that on Amazon at least, a few months down the line the limited edition version of games is often cheaper than the normal one due to the way they set prices in part due to sales figures.

So are you willing to pay top dollar for the joy of playing right off the bat, or do you save your cash and wait for the price to drop?

Personally, it's rare for me to buy games at release these days. In terms of pre-order bonuses, there's little enough spare space in our house without pointless figurines and shit cluttering the place up and in game stuff is rarely anything other than cosmetic so I'm not upset about missing it. I have a fucking huge backlog of games so it makes little sense to me to buy something the day it's released only to not play it for months. I'll probably buy Halo Reach on day one so I can play it online with people here, knowing full well how short most of your attention spans are when it comes to online gaming and that after two weeks you'll have moved on to playing something else.

I have no problem buying second hand games so I'll always take the cheapest option available.

And before anyone gets pedantic in here, yes, I'm aware games don't actually cost half price after a week, the thread title is artistic license.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Tails

I'm not really as big on gaming as I used to be, I'm far more picky about my choices and usually only get games I really, really know I'm going to like/and or play a lot...

...I don't really get more than two or three games a month at most.

Shit man, I buy like one every couple of months these days. How many were you buying before you cut back?

There's nowhere I can't reach.