I'd say older games on stores with huge variety of them are sold only on sales.

It's not because of the fact people are greedy and want everything as cheap as possible (well, sorta, yes), but also, because there are so many new games to play, many of them cost $20 from a start, there's no room for 3 year-old games to be sold well for $20.

Nobody will jump on GOG.com to buy AC or HOMMV for $20, because if they waited so many years, they will wait some more, to see a better deal (most probably $5).

Some sales will be made, of course. But not so many, I suppose.

If it was Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, that's a totally different thing. Because it's a true classic.
Well, I don't know how it is in this case, but Polish law requires interview authorisation before it is printed.
The way of promoting good customer experience etc. is also a way of making the money and maximizing the profits :P

What the hell, man... Games are products like everything else. Talking about "magic" , "thrills" etc is crazy talk to me. You are selling the product, not piece of art (well, maybe some games may be treated as modern art).

This is natural that customer would want to buy everything as cheap as possible. Making a sale for a game is nothing different from making a sale on bread or coca-cola.

I hoped in XXIst century everybody's already got it, but it's crazy how many people still believe games should be EXPENSIVE.

You say "they want to make you believe games are not worth much" -> well, maybe they aren't? If some store has 3,000 games in their catalogue, they have to be cheap.

For example, I would never tell Modern Warfare is worth anything near 59,99. It's worth 5 bucks tops for me.

The only thrills I have when buying an expensive game is the thought how thin my wallet becomes afterwards.

The market is realy saturating, there are more games than anyone would be able to play through entire life.

High supply = low price.

PS. Even though people want games as cheap as $5, they still spend much more money on games than before. It's just because they buy 10 games for $5 a month, instead of one from time to time. So in the end, you earn more money.

Steam has grown so huge because of the sales. If it wasn't for sales, I wouldn't buy any single game from steam. And with them, I bought almost 200. If there weren't any sales, they wouldn't earn single penny on me. Now they earnd around 1,000 dollars.

You don't want to earn more money? That's ok, but please cut this "we're going to be the 1st alternative to steam" bullshit.

I grew up on $2 Commodore 64 games. $15 was a high priced game. You might adjust to inflation, but it still doesn't reach the high end prices today. I still played the hell out of these $2 games (and occasional $15 games) because these are the games I had and I was a teenager / young adult with time to play them. Even in later years when I bought discounted years I played the hell out of them.

I think that one reason you feel less connection is simply because you've grown up. You have other things to spend your emotions on. That's perhaps true for the gaming public in general which includes more adult gamers. It might be true for a lot of GOG customers, who buy mainly based on nostalgia, from the days they still had a big emotional connection to games. And they don't understand why people can like new games, because they no longer have that feeling towards games in general, but young gamers still feel the same towards the games they play, which is why they would pre-order the next CoD after spending hundreds of hours on the previous ones, just like they might have done when younger.

You actually did - twice; but never mind....

I agree on the loss of emotionnal connection. But, imho, pricing is not the dominant factor in this. Back in the early 90's, games were perceived as valuable luxury items. You didn't find them easily ( there were two shops in my town, but they only had a limited selection, so I had to travel to a larger city to find the US imports I wanted ) , they were tangible items ( remember the big carboard boxes and the thick manuals ? ) .

Nowadays, it's for me extremely difficult to attach any value whatsoever to steam games. the main reason is that there is no possible resale, the second is that it happened me twice that games i bought there eventually did not work properly, the third is the lack of tangibility of the product and the fourth is that I am forced to use and be dependant on a client I do not fully want or trust.

So, GOG's not at liberty to revise pricing or mudwrestle publishers into steep sales and thus they come up with an explanation.

So does German law and still the German Gamestar once printed a heavily censored version of my letter which made me appear like a complete psychopath just so my arguments got kinda crippled. And they didn't even suggest which parts were shortened. Of course I wouldn't have agreed to printing this version of the letter but what the heck... I won't sue them even if I had the money and a lawyer (btw: I criticized their Hitman: Blood Money review where one of the reviewers extremely complained about the ethical aspects while they had given the Godfather game a high rating without complaining about the fact that torturing innocent citizens is part of the basic game mechanics).

Cant say much except maybe. Take indie bundles that allow you to pay what you want. Even WITH this i still dont buy every single one because i have no interest in the bundle. Same with discounts... I only buy games that i have "some" interest in. Im not going to go out and buy "train sim" or "Random fps" and so on. (i like rpg and strat games mainly).

While there is alot of people that do buy "just to buy". Its still not a "bad" thing. In most cases games have a general pricing point and in a LARGE majority of the times they are not worth the price the publisher / devs are asking. Its very rare that i find a game worth 60$ in most cases the games are worth 30$ max. Having a discount and some sense to look the game up do help.

Anyway discounts are good overall for the consumers. But you also have a point on the "lower the price "overall" for the game". So i agree and disagree.

Agreed.. one cannot 'assume' he means something else when he hasn't actually written it.

For what IS written, it's a lot of tripe. If he wishes to amend/explain what he means I 'may' re-evaluate it, but until then I say he's talking bollocks. Low prices/big sales are nothing but GOOD for the consumer.. if the consumer cannot excerise any constraint then that is their problem, no-one elses, and it's certainly no-one else job to 'protect' the consumer from him/herself. It certainly seems as if the person who said this as an ulterior motive for saying it, he can't possibly believe what he actually written.

Personally, and I might get flamed for this, I think GOG selling mainstream games is a gigantic mistake. You can do it for some games, I didn't really have problem with the original batch of indie titles but the Assassin Creed/HOMM 5 sale sent off warning alarms.

It's fine and dandy to say "games have value" or stand by the theory that extra's deserve higher price, but in this case we're talking about two games sold in every other DD site on the internet for far, far less then what GOG is offering. By selling these games, GOG is opening a new avenue which requires from a business stand point that GOG be competitive in pricing to other stores.

Most of GOG's success has come from a loyal fan base but also by providing games not easily accessible by other means. Many of the games later went to other services but GOG usually had a head start or was competitive in their re-releases. This isn't that. Aside from the extras there's no allure to anyone to buy these games, and to many gamers DRM-free and Extras aren't a major selling point. They're like the extras on a DVD, nice to have but not essential to the experience.

I'm sure GOG knows more then I do, only having a year or so of business degree learnin', but this plan doesn't seem very sound to me.

Tell me about it. I would never buy Football Manager for 30, 20, hell, even 10 dollars. Because I thought I am not interested in football enough to enjoy it. Guess what? I bought it on amazon for 6 bucks, and I have already 60 hours on my counter, having great fun with it, and I consider it my best buy in months.

Funnily enough, I bought Football Manager 2012 when it was on sale myself. Being an ignorant American I had NO IDEA what was going on having only ever watched World Cup soccer, but I had fun with what I could get going.

I can taste the sweet simulation game inside, I just need to sit down and unlock it.

So that's another one of those "Impulse game buys that worked out due to price" stories.

\o/ But yeah... Gaaah i still have so many games that i need to buy but they are to expensive or at a price point that i think is to high for the content you get... About 50 games or so =/. I either need to wait for a discount or price drop.

I'm not so sure that I agree that low pricing necessarily has to limit the emotional link to a game. I've picked up games for 50 euros that I've played for 10 hours and then stopped, I've bought games for 2 euros that I've played for 50 hours and going. I was hacking away at Critical Mass for a good 20 hours trying to get up the leaderboards and that is a game I paid 63 eurocents for.

The problem is more various platforms (Steam being the most prominent guilty party but far from being the only one) chucking games out left, right and centre at ridiculously low prices and devaluing them. And when I say low prices, I don't mean 15 year old games at $5-10, I mean games that are barely six months old at anything between a dollar and five dollars.

It has given rise to a next-to-nothing culture that unfortunately more or less every other platform, including Gamersgate and Green Man Gaming, has seen fit to copy. As the tide gradually begins to work against Valve, we'll be seeing more intense competition that drives prices down so far that it simply won't be worth developing a game at the end of the day.

This kind of culture is what gave birth to the indie bundles. I personally think from a purely cultural standpoint the bundles are a great thing - they've given the games an astounding amount of exposure - but from a commercial standpoint they're only going to drive the market into the ground. Why? Because DD sellers can do it. They can afford to offer games at giveaway prices because there is little to lose in the short-term from it.

Sure, most of us will take advantage of a bundle or a Steam or GOG or Gamersgate sale for a game we had never heard of before or hadn't considered before and it will probably sit in the backlog for a while and not be touched until much later. I don't see anything wrong with that personally. I have games in my backlog that I've picked up from fleamarkets for a couple of euros that I didn't really touch until years later and which have since become my favourite games.

That's not the problem.

The problem is that a lot of people are now refusing to buy a game they actually want unless it is heavily marked down. They take one look at Steam or Gamersgate, see a game they want for $60, and their immediate instinctive reaction was to wait for the Steam sales. Just one look at the Steam forums shows the amount of clamouring there was during the Christmas sales for Skyrim to be included in the sales, and then a lot of whinging about how it was "only" 33%.

Were it not for Steam's predictable policy in this area, people would have accepted the fact that the game was not going to be reduced and bought it on release.

You'll see it on GOG as well, where people will frequently say that they'll just wait for the sales and argue a toss about percentages for the sake of some stupidly small savings (alliteration FTW) of 40 cents.