Stockpiling
November 8th, 2008A recent blog mentioned (I can’t find the link any more) how many games they had still in the shrinkwrap, and an NPD study discovered that up to 33% of gamers are behaving similarly. Yet this behavior seems - at least at first glance - to be completely irrational. You seem to derive no benefit from a game you haven’t played, and the same game that costs $60 today will be discounted, sometimes heavily, as few as three months into the future. This is true in gaming even more than other pasttimes, where the hot title of today is the bargain bin stuffer of the future. A wait of even a few months, when you finish your current backlist, would be financially and personally lucrative.
Why, then, do people buy games they can’t use?
Oddly enough, I think it’s probably due to a sense of community that exists in gaming - a sense that is stronger than in many other activities. When you have a constant pipeline of quality games coming through, there’s little benefit in waiting, because although any individual game may be unique, the pleasure we derive from playing them is to some extent substitutable. We can’t know in advance how much joy we’ll get from playing Dead Space instead of Fallout or Gears of War 2, but we can be reasonably certain it will be similar. And if I can substitute one game for another, and there’s a new game of more or less similar quality out all the time, you wouldn’t think that catching each individual game would be that important.
That said, there’s a gaming “conversation” that continues on each title: after each game comes out, people have a tendency to debate its relative merits (sometimes ad nauseum). And if you miss that game, then coming back to it after it’s been passed over for the Next Big Thing, it can seem almost anti-climactic. You have few people to play with in multiplayer, and there’s a sense that you’re “catching up” to where everyone else is rather than making new strides. After all, odds are that any great new features will find themselves in the sequel, anyways.
That conversation has been driven home now that I have to wait until my 360 is repaired to play Fallout and GoW2. By the time I get my console back in a month, people will probably have moved on, discussed the advantages and disadvantages of each, and moved on. And I’ll have two more shrink-wrapped games to add to my pile.
Posted in Geoff, Industry |
November 10th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
This describes me pretty accurately… Normally it’s because I find good deals on stuff, so I end up buying things eventually and then add it to my “backlog”. I still have Rainbow Six: Vegas, Final Fantasy XII, and others still completely unplayed. Lately, though, I’ve just been buying up new games for a variety of reasons, but often times because there are pre-order deals and, as you mention, sort of a gaming loyalty to reward creativity and polish. I have a big stack of games sitting on top of my entertainment center just from the last month, starting with Rock Band 2… and within the last few weeks, I’ve actually given some playtime to all of them, even as I try to prioritize them.
And I still have some games on their way over the next few weeks, even as I’ve skipped well-reviewed games like Fable 2 and Far Cry 2 (so far), and will also be skipping Call of Duty: WaW and the new Penny Arcade game for the time being. There’s just simply way too much good stuff coming out right now, and even though my wallet is taking a pounding, there’s still even more stuff that I have to skip.
November 11th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
“how many games they had still in the shrinkwrap, and an NPD study discovered that up to 33% of gamers are behaving similarly.”
Yeah but it doesn’t differentiate between games that have just been released or not. I have plenty of games that are in shrink wrap or opened but not played/played for the first level that i bought cheaply a long time after they were released. I don’t have any games i bought at release that are unplayed or in their wrapping. I’d like to think that this is more normal than buying many new games for full price and leaving them sitting to one side.
The main reason for me doing this is because of the scarcity for buying games. Publishers generally only have one or two print runs for a game (two if you’re lucky: e.g. Ico) which means that it becomes harder to find a new copy of the game farther from release and also with price drops. This means that i tend to buy games i’d skipped earlier on but still want to play some day in a quiet period - say, Jan-June?