News - Half of PC gamers wait for sales to buy their games says survey

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But these discount expectations may limit their spending, worries computer game industry.

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Read more.

Or "half of gamers think rrp too high"

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Originally Posted by naturbo2000

Or "half of gamers think rrp too high"

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Definitely! I couldn't afford to play PC games if they were the same price as console games. Although at least console games can be sold second-hand. Then again, I probably wouldn't have about 20 unplayed games on Steam if it weren't for the sales! :rolleyes:

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Originally Posted by naturbo2000

Or "half of gamers think rrp too high"

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^
+ I'm tight

Personally I thing that PC gamers, having been around longer, are a little more careful of paying £50 for a steaming pile of ****e! Oh how many times have we been sold on the dream only to find that the really cool game play shown in the video or the demo...oh my god demos!... was all there was to the game in total?

I think there should be a basic wage for games... like £1 per hour of game play (excluding cutsceans and quicktime events (which should be banned). I would pay 50 quid for 50 solid hours of game play...

There are two problems 'damaging' PC gaming. One is the rip-off DLC model where gamers pay £40 to £60 for a title, then another £20.00 to £30.00 for DLC add-on(s). The second is the free-to-play model with a good example being Ghost Recon Phantoms. I really like the game and would happily part with the usual £40 to £50 for the 'full game', but using this model, they expect us to fork up £463.76 in order to get 'all of the game' and that's just not acceptable!

If this really is the future for the platform, then count me out. I buy a game to play it, not be played by the developers. If it comes to it, I'll happily start warezing these games or I won't bother at all. So with this in mind, plus that fact that there are no demos any more, can they blame us for waiting for sales? ....Even then, half of the games I buy, turn out to be a disappointment anyway.

tbh, I'm more surprised that 50% of gamers will pay current asking price for any game when they know it's likely to come up in a sale or deal in the near future.

On a purely personal level, I can't remember the last time I bought a single game at full price, or within a year of release date. £10 is about my upper limit on game spending. Of course, that means I tend to end up ~ 3 years back on releases, which also means I can play most of the games I own on an entry level PC so hardware costs me less :D

Hmmm, guess we're just back to me being tight, aren't we.... ;)

For me it's not actually so much about buying at full price, I rarely do that (The Witcher 2 was the last I did IIRC), it's more that I wait for early buyers to beta test the game for me.

I didn't buy GTA IV and Rome II for a long time until enough patches had been released to at least make them playable, on the plus side this made them a hell of a lot cheaper too.

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Originally Posted by LeetyMcLeet

There are two problems 'damaging' PC gaming. One is the rip-off DLC model where gamers pay £40 to £60 for a title, then another £20.00 to £30.00 for DLC add-on(s). The second is the free-to-play model with a good example being Ghost Recon Phantoms. I really like the game and would happily part with the usual £40 to £50 for the 'full game', but using this model, they expect us to fork up £463.76 in order to get 'all of the game' and that's just not acceptable!

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+1 on this. Oh, and thanks for the heads up on GRP - more than the price of a new console package to get the whole game? They can take the proverbial one mile walk off of a half-mile long pier as far as I'm concerned.

DLC is become a real nuisance everywhere. For example, I just bought "Madness TD2" for my tablet at £1.16. A piece of "mandatory" DLC (check the reviews, you can progress without it, but it's a real soul-sapping grind) costs £1.64. To my mind, far better to bundle that DLC, charge £3 for the combo and make 20p profit.

Steam Sales have the biggest impact on my PC's disk space - e.g. I bought State Of Decay a weekend or two back for £3.74, then ponied up £3.73 for the two expansion packs. Sure the graphics aren't up to current standards, but it's just as playable as a current "kill the zombies" title at 10x the price.

Money's particularly tight this Q3/Q4 so I'm pretty sure I'll be giving this years CoD/BF/AC trio a miss until they get into the sales, unless someone gets me them for Christmas of course. And looking at the current pricing of console games - £50 upwards - has killed any desire I had to get a XBone or PS4.

Getting burned with the likes of Simcity is a good example - and then subsequently not listening to the community needs. Look at the DLC stopping/development halting as a result of the purchases drying up. The games companies would be selling more products if they work with the gamers and not against them... You'd invest a lot more cash if you knew the game was going to go FAR beyond the cash value you think you're paying.

Elite Dangerous / Rust - 2 great development models and will be filling my time up for the future. One I paid 15$ and the other I can't throw enough cash at because of the respect Frontier have for the community needs (and not bowing to the trolls/over privileged kids)

I used to play FPS a lot... owned stupid amounts of games and get worn out very quickly by the poor quality / closed hoops that we get as games... But I guess we're spoilt...

After going through something like World of Warcraft where you have it all in certain amounts (open world, choose your own path, large updates) things like that set a benchmark for what you expect from a game and when it falls short we all start comparing and nothing rises up to that level of freedom and escape - something that we actually want... escape from the real world. Does a company like EA let us do that? - No - they make us feel trapped and badgered trapped in a small glass box that looked awesome from the outside.

Good luck to the creators that give us great games because i'm sure we'll pay at full price and support your projects fully with IAP if you're offering to sustain servers and solid developments. The rest can refuse to adapt and die.

it must be better to sell a game at half price than to have it pirated and receive nothing. perhaps the reason people wait until the sale is because that is the true value of the game and not the standard £40 - £50 or more they want to get from it. if the production company's want more profit then they should try and cut down on the amount it costs to develop the games, you only have to look at the staff involved in some game production to wonder what half the jobs do for their wage.And don't forget with digital downloads they make even more money as there is no physical product to make . ( but they still want to charge the same price as the boxed version ).

At the rate PC games go into sale you'd have to be extremely keen to pay full price for a PC game.

I've not paid full price for a game for a LONG time, I've got such a backlog of games already from steam sales & humble bundles that even the new games I'd like to play are usually somewhat reduced by the time I'd get to it. I'm not bothered if a game is slightly old as long as its still a good game, I'm still happily playing BF3 now and then, and there's also some great free to play games.

If they'd released GTA V for PC at the same time as the 360 & PS3 I'd probably have grabbed that but I've already played it and seen so much of it that I'd now happily wait for a sale.

Over 5 hours a week is a Heavy gamer? Seems quite low? I can imagine a lot of the 'casual' gamers they've got from Facebook games like candy crush etc.

The only time I have paid full price is when I can get them at £20 or less and I want to play it quickly.

As with many others I just buy in the sales, I then have a stock of games to keep me going until the next sale.

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Originally Posted by crossy

DLC is become a real nuisance everywhere. For example, I just bought "Madness TD2" for my tablet at £1.16. A piece of "mandatory" DLC (check the reviews, you can progress without it, but it's a real soul-sapping grind) costs £1.64. To my mind, far better to bundle that DLC, charge £3 for the combo and make MORE20p profit.

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Fixed that for you :P

On topic:

I have yet to purchase a PC title at full price. (I've only used my PC for gaming for about 3 years) I paid about £30 for Sim City (weep) which was the most expensive game I've bought for my PC to date, but I ended up getting a copy Battlefield 3 for my issues. How nice of them. Now if they would just fix Sim City so I could PLAY THE GAME I BOUGHT, without it blue screening after twenty minutes, I'd be totally stoked!

Sadly, the business model works well for companies and because of this, it will continue to be used. It's quite upsetting really.

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Originally Posted by Odeas

At the rate PC games go into sale you'd have to be extremely keen to pay full price for a PC game.

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Indeed, the new trend is to pay more than the full price before the game's even released ;)

I continue to pay the full price for games I think are great, and will pick up ones I'm not sure about on offer if I think that brings them into my expectations of value for money.

Why is stuff like this called News, when it's nothing we don't already know!! :D

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there are worries the lack of full-price sales could stifle the industry.

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Then stop making crap "AAA-Title" games that are borked out of the box and try giving us something that:

a) Works from day 1 without needing fifty patches
b) Is actually GOOD ENOUGH to justify the insane release price
c) Is not insanely expensive, with almost the same value required for annual DLC releases!!!!!

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To be a Heavy Core gamer you will be spending five or more hours per week playing what the researchers call 'core games'

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Is that all??!!
Jeez, I average 36 hours a week when I'm not working extended hours. That must make me Insane-Core or something!!