5 Reasons Not to Buy Games at Launch Anymore
If you’ve been gaming long enough, you may remember queueing for hours at a store to pick up a hotly-anticipated video game you’ve reserved. Today, buying a game at launch—or, even worse, pre-ordering it—may actually be the worst time to do it.
Pre-ordering a game made sense at a time when no one knew how many copies would sell and there was a real chance that you simply could not find a copy of a game until more copies could be pressed, shipped, and placed on shelves.
When it comes to digital games, this is a non-issue. You can be assured that even if physical copies of a game run out you can always pick up a digital copy. Even with physical games, allocations are quite ample these days, thanks to how much the gaming market has grown.
It’s better to wait until a game is in the hands of reviewers and players with less patience to make sure the title is actually worth your money.
It’s typical for games to drop in price quickly following launch day. This can happen mere weeks or a few months after the title launches. When sales start to slow down at the launch price, price cuts stimulate more sales.
Effectively, players who buy games at launch are paying for the privilege of playing them as soon as possible. Once those players have all bought their copy, it’s time for a new set of customers who want to play at a lower price.
The gaming industry has become adept at building up hype among gamers on social media and in the press. By the time a game launches players want to buy it, play it, and then immediately be part of the discussion around it. FOMO—the fear of missing out—can be a real problem when it comes to making rational decisions with your money.
Objectively, FOMO isn’t a good reason to fork over cash for a game rather than
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