I only buy games when they're 5 euros or less. That's my criteria.
 

Considering how I play WoW and add in some Hearthstone, Heroes of the Storm or Diablo once in a while, there is barely any other game that catches my interest.
I do look through the sales and get good games (to almost never play) when they are discounted, but overall I have no need for new games.
 

I will still buy a game at full price but it depends entirely on the developer behind it. These days the list is pretty much Blizzard, Valve and Bioware. Otherwise I wait.

50% or more is my rule during sales but outside of them, it comes down to whether I feel the discounted price provides value. $15 game dropped to $10 that I have been watching for a long time? I may just buy it if I have the money.

Games cost a lot of money to make and I find myself more willing to buy a game for a lesser discount if it is an indie title. Getting a game from a big publisher is just numbers in a column for them but for an indie it could well be food on the table.
 

I'm actually doing the same thing. If it's on my wishlist and it's 75% off, or under $7.99, it's an automatic buy. Had two of those this time around. Otherwise, it depends on the game and the price.
 

I buy things I want to buy, when I want to buy them, at whatever price they cost, providing that's a price I consider reasonable and can afford. The number of things of any kind that I want to buy is always very small so there it makes no sense whatever for me to wait for reduced prices.

Occasionally, if I see something at a real bargain price that I wouldn't be sufficiently interested in to buy at full price then I might succumb to a fraudulent sense of value and open my wallet, but these days I'm pretty good at resisting such impulses.


 

This is the downside to sales. Initially, they work well. I know I will buy Civ BE some day, i just plan for it to be at 75%+ off with included DLC. So at some point the incremental sales from inevitable discounts are being increasingly offset by the loss of sales at 100%

The poor, over-the-hill MMOs do have an edge here - there is a real reason to do an expac at launch. It is a different game then.
 

I skipped over a lot of my 50% discounted Wishlist this year simply because I was in the middle of playing other games. AC4: Black Flag for $20? Sounds good... but it doesn't make sense if I won't get around to playing it for another few weeks (Christmas sale).

Cheaper indie games arguably have it worse: these days even $5 seems too much given how they probably will hit a Humble Bundle eventually. Not the Robots is 75% off at $2.50? Nope. The most ridiculous example though is One Way Heriocs at $0.87. If I pick that up now, it'll just decrease the value of the Humble Bundle it comes in later.

The good news is that I'm finally getting around to playing all the games I bought 2+ years ago.
 

Well, since I've found out about cd key sites, it's changed a bit. Picked up Dragon Age Inquisition for €35 as compared to €55 in Belgian stores. That's the price I would get in a steam sale a year from now.

Still, want to pick up Beyond Earth (although I've seen it cheaper on other sites). With that, WoW and Inquisition I'm set for a few months.
 

I'm getting cheaper and cheaper. Thing is, a great game you snag for $5 feels like a steal, a reward. A crappy game you get for $5 feels like you sacrificed only a little.

That said I've got to buy more for console these days until I can upgrade my rig. Was shocked when I realized that my core i3 desktop PC and my i5 laptop both couldn't meet the minimum specs for Wolfenstein.
 

The only games I "buy" now are those for presents for others. I don't really look for deals here, but hey I take whatever I can get.

Anything for myself however must be for the grand total of $0.

So I get gifted games, get games from abandonware, play F2P or just be patient for deals on the various game dealing sites. I recently got Dragon Age: Origins (from Origin) and Witcher 2 (from GoG) for free for example.

Yes I'm years behind, but oh well. I have enough to play without spending money on it! :P
 

75% is my normal mark of consideration.

It's also got to be around $5-$10 or less, otherwise I just get all paranoid that they've marked up prices just so they can slash them for the sale and state a high discount.

Isthereanydeal.com is a reference I tend to use, to check just how low the absolute prices for the game has gone before.

I -might- get a game I'm yearning for badly at 50%, if it's something that isn't time sensitive, like singleplayer stuff that can be played two years out of date, and very rarely, super rarely, a full price game if I somehow feel it's critical to move with the launch crowd, while the hype and attention is on it.
 

Any suit wanting to convince a developer that PTW is the only viable approach would do well to point to this comment thread.
 

In 2014 I bought three games:

- The latest WoW expansion, that I haven't played yet ..

- Civ BE that I played for a week and found to be very good but only for a short time

- Dragon Age Inquisition that, in my opinion, has terrible combat. I've stopped playing it after a few hours.

I bought all of them at full price. I don't even have a wishlist.

The games I played most in 2014 were Civ V, UFO and some WoW BGs.