My sweet spot used to be $10 or less years ago in the bargain bin boxed game days. If I found any game I was interested in under that price it was instabuy for me. Then I had some less than stellar experiences with some Ubisoft and EA games and their DRM preventing me from playing the legitimate game I purchased and I stopped buying games altogether around 2007 or 2008. GOG got me back into buying games again both here and beyond though, but I'm usually very careful about what I buy now. My sweet spot started out online at $10 or less too, but I quickly discovered that endless games were $5 or less and started buying tonnes of them at that price to the point where I realized games above $5 would become under $5 within 6-12 months generally speaking except for the most popular AAA titles that have gaming longevity such as those that tend to dominate Steam's top 10 to 30 list for example (and even some of those are cheaper), so my sweet spot dropped to $5 pretty quickly simply due to the market having endless games in that range.

Then I discovered bundles and deep discount promotions such as the current GOG sale and similar sales at other sites, and of course freebie promos and various giveaways. It becomes harder to pass up such good deals on games you're interested in and so as the backlog catalogue grows, like many gamers I find myself willing to either pay less and less for individual games that I'm not jumping out of my socks ot play immediately and which will sit in my backlog queue for an indeterminate time period, or I'm comfortable waiting longer for them to hit that sweet spot. ;o) Games that are the exception to that are games I'm tripping over myself eagerly anticipating playing while foaming at the mouth, such as The Witcher 3 for example. :)

What I'm finding now though too, is that even games I'm eager to get right away to play, often are sequels to games I have not yet played at all or not completed, and I'm a bit of a completionist that wants to play all of the games in a series in-order. As such, I will sometimes hesitate to buy games that I desperately want too, simply because I want to play the entire series /first/ and then the new game and I know it's going to be a while before I get around to it especially if a game has 5 or more sequels for example. In my mind I know that by the time I finish all the previous games and get to the newest game, 6-24 months might have passed by where that "new" game would have sat there the whole time and it's price will have come down significantly in the mean time, so I end up not having that burning whimsical purchase "MUST BUY RIGHT NOW" feeling most of the time due to having game saturation. :)

Very very few games will burst my bubble as a result and make my wallet sprout cash like a garden hose. The Witcher 3 will probably be the next purchase of that sort that I make, but probably not until either just before the game is released to get in on the pre-order bonus (normally I never do pre-orders), or just after its release, but I'm feeling some strong "before" vibes going on and think this title will bypass my "finish the previous games first" general sentiment simply due to the immense awesomeness hehe. Cyberpunk 2077 certainly will too eventually.

So... it's not so much that I'm "cheap" per se, but more a matter of practicality ending up dominating emotional purchases for me. Sometimes I do kick myself for that though! There's one other title on GOG right now that I desperately want and meant to buy when it first came out but have not done so yet because I never finished the other titles in the series, and I'm actually feeling bad about that and may eventually crack and go for it. :)