Tobold's Blog
Friday, November 22, 2024
 
Avowing my price sensitivity

I was watching a preview video of Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment's next big role-playing game, to be released in February 2025. Now I am not the biggest fan of Obsidian; I own both Pillars of Eternity games on Steam, but only played the first one for 16 hours, and the second one not at all. Pillars of Eternity II : Deadfire is on my list of games I want to play only since patch 5.0 added a turn-based mode. I simply never was a fan of the previous real-time combat of the series, and seeing Avowed being even more action-combat centric made it look not very interesting to me. Saw the first half of the video, and thought that this was a game that I would skip.

And then the content creator said a single phrase that changed my mind: Avowed will be on Game Pass on day one. Suddenly I was thinking, "Oh, I am going to play this!". While Game Pass isn't free, and has increased in price this year, I still consider it very good value for money in general, and have an ongoing subscription to it; so it kind of feels like playing Avowed for free, "no added cost", as opposed to buying the game for $70 on Steam.

I am not poor, and can afford buying $70 games. But this event still shows that I am somewhat price sensitive. Paying $70 for a game and then not liking it just feels bad, even if that $70 is not missing for rent money. On Game Pass, I can try out a game for free, and if I don't like it, it doesn't feel as bad as if I had bought it. It just feels a lot safer. That makes games that I am only borderline interested in a lot more attractive. I felt the same thing about Ara: History Untold, nice enough to play for free, but would have hated to have paid $60 for it.

Of course there is something like circular logic operating here. It feels as if I am playing the Game Pass games for free, while simultaneously me playing a lot of games that would cost $60-$70 on Game Pass justifies me paying €144 per year for the subscription. In the end, I am still paying $10 to $20 per game, depending on how many I try in a year. But the one thing it does for certain is removing that "should I buy this game?" decision process, and the possible regret connected to it.

- posted by Tobold @ 10:01 AM Permanent Link
Comments:
I get a lot of seemingly interesting games from Humble Choice, or pick them up very cheap when Gog has a sale. I get good value out of those. But I have to say I commit more to the ones I buy separately or sometimes in a targeted Humble bundle.

However my situation is different because I rarely care about the expensive blockbusters and buy a lot of indie games. (Currently I am playing Inscryption which I picked up for about $15.)
# posted by Blogger Gerry Quinn : 22/11/24 11:25
 
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