I visited Steam this weekend to look whether I might want to buy Heroes of Might & Magic 7. The game would have cost 50 bucks, so I checked reviews on Steam and Metacritic to see whether it was worth that amount of money. It turned out that the reviews were mixed. While some people liked the "old style" feel of HOMM3, a lot of others complained about the game being ugly and unfinished (e.g. the heroes talking with no animation), or encountered bugs. The game appears to be not very polished. Why would I spend 50 bucks on a not very polished game? If I want the HOMM3 experience, I can buy HOMM3 HD on the iPad for $9.99, or Royal Bounty HD for $4.99.

I do think there is a market for $50+ games. But I would expect such a game to be highly polished and very pretty, as well as being very good. If I don't mind shabby graphics and lack of polish, there are plenty of indie and mobile games out there which are significantly cheaper. Just because the company is big doesn't make their limited budget, half-baked games worth 50 bucks.

While checking out HOMM7 reviews I saw lots of other games. So in the end I spent my 50 bucks on a collection of 3 Steam games: Undertale, which has an unheard-of Metacritic score of 97, although that universal love appears to be based more on a gigantic in-joke than on gameplay; Cities Skylines (at half price), which is the Sim City that the last Sim City failed to be; and Heroes of Normandie, a computer adaptation of a board game I had seen and liked at the Brussels Games Festival. I'm pretty certain that those 3 games together will provide me with more hours of quality entertainment and fun than HOMM7 would have.

HOMM7 meanwhile is on my Steam wishlist. I might still buy it at a sale if I can get it for half the current price or less. Plus the bugs will be fixed by then, and there will be plenty of player-created maps available. I can only win by waiting this out.