The Fakeness of the Cake (how to buy computer games)

http://xkcd.com/606/

XKCD has humorously pointed out that there are two fundamentally different ways to approach the purchase of computer games. You either buy them hot off the presses, or you buy them a good deal later. There are pluses and minuses to each approach. And they are mirror images of each other.

With Hot Off The Presses, multiplayer is usually red hot as everybody and his brother tries out the new game. And, as the XKCD cartoon points out, you get to participate in any immediate cultural references that leak out of the new game. There's also the plus of real time forum comradeship as players explore the in's and out's of the new game and swap game play tips.

But there are minuses to Hot Off The Presses. With hot new games , you usually get The Bug Parade. You and your impatient brethren are the guinea pigs for the final shake out that will result in patches coming out later on. Your forum comradeship will quickly turn into a daily meeting of the Royal Gripe and Moan Society (take a peek at the Empire Total War forum sometime. Its very educational.) And if a game turns out to really bad, you are the one who's discovered this before the review websites have done their jobs. Hot Off The Presses is usually the choice of the younger guys because they've still got the disposable income to pay the full release price and make any hardware upgrades that are required.

Then there's Some Time Later. STL is usually the province of the older guys who have families to support and therefore less disposable income. The older guys have older machines because they can't afford to stay on the technology treadmill. These are the guys you see in Gamestop stooping down on their knees to look over remainder racks for the four hundredth and seventh time. They're the ones who check each game against the MetaCritic and GameRankings websites. They only buy when its a game they can run on their machines, and when the price has finally dropped to $20. Hey older guys! This ones for you! http://www.gog.com

With STL you get the following benefits. Almost 50% off the initial sale price. If you buy in a physical retail store instead of on the web, you get the advantage of something called "shelf space" As games get old, they start to clutter up the physical shelf space of a store, so they need to be replaced by new games, and so markdowns take place. I've seen some games that were really popular in their time going for as little as $2.00. The ultimate price drop is when an anthology like Medal of Honor, or Delta Force comes out. There you get all the games in the series for the price of only one of them. Another benefit of STL is patches. By the time you finally buy the game, its been fully patched, or almost so. And there's mods. Sometimes the mods that come out later actually fix most of the problems the original game had. UFO Extraterrestrials came out with a lot of dumb problems that were later corrected in mods created by the player community. Another benefit is getting a complete body of game play tips, strategy guides, cheats, and walkthroughs - provided the game was popular enough to leave a lot of forums behind after its initial public splash.

But there are downsides to STL. As you're learning the game and visiting websites related to it, you get the definite feeling of a parade having gone by. Yes, you've missed The Bug Parade. But you've also missed a lot of the camaraderie that even bugs can engender. And you are still using old technology and graphics. If your game is even older than your machine, there might be emulators out there. But there is a limit to buying old games. I started playing the original Heavy Gear II at about the time I got Bioshock and found I just couldn't get involved in HGII because Bioshock was sooooooo much better to look at. Sometimes you can wait too long to buy a game. Another minus is mulitplayer. If you buy an old game, multiplayer may be dead. Or the only ones still playing are the hardcore players who have invested a lot of time in mastering the game. Are you ready to experience life in the life of a noob? And of course, as XKCD points out, you'll miss being able to say things like "the cake is a lie!" in public.

Which am I? Very early on (way before Metacritic and Gamerankings), I was a HOTP man. But I was burned so many times by buying games that turned out to be lousy, that I switched over to STL. But having taken up blogging about the games I play, I've had to start participating in HOTP again. Bioshock was a lucky find. I have mixed feeling about DOW II. And it took me a long time to decide that Empire Total War was good.

But I'm probably not much better off for going back to HOTP. I find that I get so wrapped up in a new game that I can't blog about it until it initial splash is over.