Have I landed at cheapassgamer.com?

More like poorassgamer.com.

Actually I spend more money on games than ever, I just happen to get a whole lot more games for my money now - which is the reason for my colossal backlog.

My friend bought all full price Call of Duty.

I understand not paying full price for games nowadays, what with the sales always happening or people just thinking most modern games aren't worth full price because of drm/too many shooters etc

My comment was more because people weren't even listing a lot of games from the earlier eras of gaming.

Ah, I was under the impression that this topic was about recent years. Truth be told, I never really bought many full priced games anyway - these are the ones I remember getting soon after release though (so not including various GOTY and bargain bin "classic" editions and compilations which came out years later.)

Duke Nukem 3D
Diablo
Dark Forces: Jedi Knight
The Orange Box
Sam & Max Season 1
Torchlight

Let me think...
Half-life², Call of Duty 4, Portal 2 (2-pack pre-order), Deus Ex: Human Revolution (pre-order), Diablo III (pre-order), Worms Revolution (pre-order, primarily in order to get the Steam code for Worms Armageddon that came with it lol) maybe GTA: Vice City too but I'm not sure if it was full price or not.
Oh, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl too.
I'm probably forgetting one or two games, but I very rarely buy any game at full price anyway, especially because I now have a frighteningly big backlog...

At least I decided to list games only from the PC era, and even in that from the Windows era. But even back then, there were bargain bins. And I am probably just not remembering many that I may have bought for (near) a full price.

I think I paid close to full price for e.g. Wing Commander 2 and 3 when they originally came out. Probably also Falcon 3.0. Oh yeah and most probably Ultima Underworld 1-2, Ultima 7, Descent 2 and System Shock (because I do recall anxiously looking forward to those games). Tomb Raider 1 also I think, as it was one of the earliest commercial games to add support for 3Dfx graphics cards.

But after them, I don't remember when was the last time I was really awaiting some forthcoming game so much that I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. Buying e.g. Final Fantasy 7&8 new for a full price was more to show support for Square to bring such known console RPGs to PC, not so much that "I have to play these games NOW!".

If I nowadays want to pay extra for supporting something or someone, DRM-free can quite often get my vote. Steam and other DRM games, I try to get as cheap as possible.

Mass Effect 3 collector's edition, because I loved the series and wanted to support it. It was a preorder, even. It kind of backfired though...

Why not?

I bought many indies from many places for full asking price. Full price is full price?

I haven't bought a game at full price in over ten years, unless you count XBLA and PSN games.

It doesn't carry quite the same connotations. "Bought an AAA title for full price" is practically "camped the store for a week prior to release" of the digital age, while "bought an indie game for full price" means "saw something interesting and decided to try it".

Well, I don't know how old you are and what background you come from, but as for me, in the earlier eras of gaming I was a schoolboy with hardly any money to spend on games and didn't even own a PC, plus my parents frowned upon spending money on videogames; later I was a student with my own PC but still had hardly any money to spend on games. Add to that that my computers were never high end gaming PCs, so I wouldn't have been able to play the freshly released games offered at full price.

For a schoolboy most full price games were out of reach and some not even sold in stores over here, but it was common and easy for classmates to share pirated copies. I also learned to appreciate freeware, which might be one of the reasons I'm more interested in small indie games than most AAA titles nowadays. As a student I downloaded so called abandonware, rented older games from the library, bought budget titles that my PC could run, either from the bargain bin or second hand.

Cheap ass gaming, even piracy, kind of made me a gamer in the first place, even though I've eventually turned to renouncing abandonware and second hand purchases. And that's only due to the era of digital downloads, indies and GOG. Nowadays I still don't earn much money but despite or even because of all the sales and low prices and because of the trusting, customer friendly attitude of some developers and distributors who made me sympathetic to their cause, I'm spending more than ever on games, just not on individual titles but splitting the money among lots of different developers instead, similar to kalirion.

Anyway, I wouldn't find it that surprising to learn that a large part of GOG's customers also are or were cheap ass gamers, seeing how low GOG's prices are and how they probably managed to turn quite a few pirates or abandonware users into honest customers and how their games appeal to nostalgic folks remembering their childhood and youth, when they couldn't afford to buy these games with their own money.


My personal take on this is rather: Too many sales make people buy more than they would have otherwise.

(And also: Trying to appeal to grown up gamers' sympathy, offering attractive prices and rewarding paying customers might work better than antagonizing all gamers and punishing pupils and students for pirating games when they probably couldn't afford to buy much games anyway. Might be a tad naive, but it did work on me.)

Last games I bought full priced were BF3 and WCIV when GOG released it. I dunno if BL2 counts since GMG had that initial discount at preorder plus one of their 30 off promo codes.