How current are you in terms of playing newly released games?

The Pros and Cons of playing games on release vs waiting a year or so has been talked about a few times on GR. I've been looking through the games I have been playing the last few years and an overwhelming majority of them were games that were a year or more old by the time I played. This year alone I have been playing Batman: Arkham Origins and Tomb Raider which I paid a couple of quid for each but with all the DLC and extra bits but they were 10 years or more old.

In terms of release day games, for me these only tend to be the big Nintendo games (TOTK and Super Mario Bros Wonder were 2 last year) mostly every other game are at least 8-12 months old by the time I get round to them.

This obviously varies nowadays with the subscription services like GamePass as you can give a lot of games a try on release but often times you will contend with bugs/issues that eventually get patched out (Hopefully)

Where do you stand, think back across the last few years and the games you have played. How often do you buy games on release and play them as they are fresh vs pick up games cheaper/complete editions a while after they come out?

I have a full time job and a 1 year old, its is objectively a waste of money to buy new videogames vs waiting for them to be way cheaper and fixed, or get whatever's free on prime gaming/gog/epic to add to an ever-growing backlog of things i already have and retro stuff. For similar reasons multiplayer games are a non-factor anymore so thats not important either. I allow myself once a year at black friday or whatever to get a few things cheap which will last at least the rest of the next year, or maybe the odd extra bit of good DLC for things i'm enjoying, but thats it.

Not current at all. I'm just making a start on the PS4 era, so I'm about a decade or so behind. Partly this is intention (see reasons below), but also just because I don't have much time to play games (1-2 hours a week), so I fall behind really easily.

I can probably count on one hand the number of games I've bought on release, and I don't think I've ever pre-ordered anything.

To me the benefits of being so behind are:

> games are much cheaper
> games are in a better state (fewer bugs or issues)
> you can sometimes get 'game of the year' editions or equivalents with all updates/DLC/etc included all at once

For me, buying games on release generally means you're paying the highest price for the game and getting all the bugs and issues that come with it. Better to wait a bit until everything's been ironed out. I don't think I've ever been so desperate to play anything that I couldn't wait a bit.

Only downside to my approach is that these days, certain features or bits of content get blocked/delisted/removed, so you can't necessarily play the game in its full state. But, as that mainly affects multiplayer stuff, and I have no interest in multiplayer, I can live with it.

Mostly older games that have dropped to a price point I can justify. There are exceptions (or workarounds I am happy to exploit), such as Alan Wake 2, which I am currently playing.

Also, with the exception of most Nintendo games, I find many games require a month or two minimum to get in to a good state for playing nowadays. Alan Wake 2 is a good example - it plays well, but the audio sync is a mile out on cut scenes (over 1s), which is jarring.

No doubt by the time I finish it a patch will be released sorting the issue.

Psychologically I find it hard to spend more than £40 on a game.

When I do buy and play newer games, I'm more likely to buy games that came out not recent at all as well playing them. I don't see point playing newer games all time as I feel that would be tiring as hell.

Last year and now this year I'll be busy playing games I've picked up in sales and will be working on them, to point where I am not going to buy any games until Summer. Saves money, and it feels nice.

I usually wait for games to drop on ps plus or when they are under 30 euro, but I must admit that I love playing a game on release during all the hype, I feel that helps me immerse myself more in the experience.

For a long time I was always buying new games; I was excited as new titles arrived, even if I sometimes (often) didn't play them. These past few years I've really reduced my purchases and I rarely get a game at launch now; imho they're just too expensive.

Over the past four or five years my gaming has basically been Fallout 76 (80%), a little Animal Crossing (10%) and everything else (10%). I haven't really played the other titles that I have bought. I still like to keep up with what's happening in the gaming world, though.

jawa_ wrote:For a long time I was always buying new games; I was excited as new titles arrived, even if I sometimes (often) didn't play them. These past few years I've really reduced my purchases and I rarely get a game at launch now; imho they're just too expensive.

Over the past four or five years my gaming has basically been Fallout 76 (80%), a little Animal Crossing (10%) and everything else (10%). I haven't really played the other titles that I have bought. I still like to keep up with what's happening in the gaming world, though.

Plus if you wait until the game drops in price you can purchase it 3 or 4 times for the same as the original RRP.

I'm not very current. You could probably call in constiplaytion.

Think this will be an interesting topic.

So to give you an idea where I'm at - the last two games I bought on 'Day 1' were Tears of the Kingdom and Super Mario Odyssey - It is exceedingly rare for me to get a game at release.

Generally I am a year or so behind the current releases, this often allows me to get games at a reduced price via sales or eBay. So for example, at the moment I'm keeping tabs on Advance Wars and Metroid Prime Remastered, both 2023 releases. But I probably wouldn't get around to playing Advance Wars this year (I've completed Prime numerous times so it'd be a matter of days for me to play it through) because I've got a backlog as detailed in the Bought/Played/Completed thread. The only time a game will ever leap-frog my backlog is when a TotK or Odyssey level game comes out and I am sufficiently hyped to get it on release.

Thanks to Pedz creating a GRplayde for Disco Elysium, I'm planning on starting that over the weekend, but I've had that sitting on my shelf for close to 2 years. Maybe after that it'll be the second Ori game, or the Mario + Rabbids sequel. And eventually I'll get to Advance Wars.

Last edited by Barnsy! on Fri Feb 02, 2024 1:08 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Non-Nintendo [Non-tend[not to]No.]
Not at all going forward I'll probably play one or two PS5 games a year not close to release and will probably take me a bit of time to play.

Nintendo
Generally very close to release but....
Now the Switch lifecycle is presumably coming to an end, I lament that maybe apart from Kirby Forgotten Land and Metroid Prime there's very few big games that I was super enthusiastic for that I got right at launch and got to experience together in the Switch thread etc.

I generally get them very close to launch but hold off on summer releases as I game way more in winter than summer and the winter releases I really look forward to I like to play at Christmas. For example I'm in love with Mario Wonder which released in October and I would have really enjoyed discussing here if we experienced together but it's kind of old news at this point- there's a bunch of other games like this.

As I like being part of the discourse (and Nintendo games hold there value annoyingly well) think the remaining games I'm interested in I'll get closer to release.....

I think as well is that time/age comes into it, when I was younger, even in my teens/early 20’s, I’d buy games on release all the time. I had lots of time in the evenings and weekends (Was able to stay up late on a Friday/Saturday without the risk of nodding off on the sofa at 9pm like I do now :lol:

)

These days I don’t have the time anymore, not only that but a lot of brand new games don’t really interest me to the point I must run out and play it straight away. I’m happy buying a game a year or 2 later for a cheaper price and get all the DLC bundled in with it.

I rarely buy new games. That's not changing anytime soon. I'm getting married this year and we are moving house.

I would like to get Tears of the Kingdom and that Xenoblade 3 DLC.

I put a mix as I do keep reasonably up to date with certain genres and series, but old games or ones that get regular updates / DLC are probably more my thing. The number of games that I am genuinely interested in is so low that I end up not buying that many which shows from my Switch collection and purchase history on Steam.

Fire Emblem, Xenoblade Chronicles, Tactics Ogre, Triangle Strategy, Plate Up!, Potionomics, Against the Storm, Dredge, The Riftbreaker, HUMANKIND....I think that probably covers games from the past couple of years that I knew about before their release and bought almost straight away.

There have been a few new games that I've bought a few months late because I completely missed them, but my wishlist is otherwise filled with games that I have mulled over for years and am now not sure I'd enjoy them (Victoria 2 / NieR:Automata), are new but are just not worth spending money until a sale on because I'm not sure I'd put the time in to make the most of them (Baldur's Gate 3), or are in early access / or had a rocky release and I'm waiting to see what happens (Farthest Frontier / Cities: Skylines II). Even when these get good discounts, I still avoid buying them.

The truth is that I don't play games that much anymore. Plate Up! was apparently my most played game last year, but I'm sure that me and my partner didn't play it at all between March and October so I can't have spent much time on other games.

After finishing AC Mirage I couldn't afford to get any more games so am playing though the story mode of GTA5.

Funnily enough, in all the years since it came out, this is only my third ever playthrough so a lot of it is surprisingly fresh.

Bluesky

There aren't too many games I want that much that I'll stomach paying the full price to get them on day 1, and thanks to gamepass I don't have to pay anything extra to play quite few big games straight away.

I am more likely to buy Switch games, physically, at full price, because they generally retain their value quite well, so if I want to I can sell them later to get most of my money back so I can buy something else.

Otherwise I'm reluctant to pay more than £15-20.

Mostly buy games at launch and have 1 or two to look forward to each month. Depending on quality and length I then just drift back to older games.

I'm so far behind that I don't think I've ever paid as much as £50 for a game. I'm not even confident that I've spent £40.

PlayStation Plus + my own back catalogue absolutely covers my needs. There's the odd game which I'd like to pick up outside of that, but it's hard to justify spending £70 on a game which I may end up putting very few hours in to!

Not very current outside the odd release. I'm happy to wait for most things now, cos it usually takes a while to get round to them. No point buying unless I'm getting to them soon or they're already in a deep sale.

I still have a lot of free time to play games, at least more than most people my age I would think. I’ve never had a problem with backlogs as despite loving the medium there’s just not that many games I really want to play and I’m probably pretty easily described as a AAA whore. It’s only really this gen that I’ve had issues buying games on release, not because I can’t afford it but because the prices are a joke. There’s probably 2 or 3 games I’ve not bought on release this gen purely for release price reasons.

The sheer number of releases last year put me behind for pretty much the first time I can remember and I still haven’t finished Lies of P or even started Spider-Man 2 which for my normal behaviour is quite unusual. I do find myself replaying more these days and to be honest since I became a Resident Evil super fan I with RE2 I really feel like they’re pretty much always what I want to be playing.

How current are you in terms of playing newly released games?

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