Every damn day there's a sale (GOG aren't the only ones, and Greenmangaming is even worse).

Cool! You'd think,... but it just gets tiring. Why should I ever buy something at a certain price if I can just wait for a sale?
Not only does it take away agency and feels incredibly disingenuous, it means the real "price" of the games are showing. If you devalue your products that often, then they weren't really worth that much in the first place, were they?

I mean sales are cool and all, but just chill it down...

Tell it to Emil.

There is a flip side to that too though. Once you get most of the games you want, there are always a handful or two more of games you want that seemingly never go on Sale, or if they do, it seems rare.

Every day's a Sale! Every Sale's a win!!!

Oops. Someone already posted this... :)

First thing that came to mind really. ;-)

It's a bit double-edged. While there's merit in the view that it devalues games, there's another side wherein someone may end up buying a game that they'd never consider at full price because it's on sale. I've done this with quite a few games in genres that I don't tend to have much interest in. I've found a number of really fun, good games that way and ended up buying others from the same devs due to that. Without sales, I'd have never even considered some of these games.

Well you just answered your own question there. Many old games sold new digitally have had their base pricing deliberately inflated vs what they were sold at years ago on disc precisely because everyone has figured out the sale prices pretty much are what the normal prices would be if we still had competition from the 2nd-hand disc resale market that actually drove down the base price of older games. Eg, I picked up both Morrowind & Oblivion GOTY's on disc for around £7-8 for both several years back. Today, GOG & Steam's base prices for both are £28 (£15 + £13) or almost quadruple (and they lack those nice A3 sized fold-out glossy maps).

Of course some discs are more expensive when they go "out of print" everywhere like No One Lives Forever, but there's also a load of popular £7.89 ($10) ones in large supply that are consistently -75% less on any day. More examples - take Deus Ex 1 & 2. Right now on GOG, they're £7.89 each (or £15.78 for both), on Steam they're £4.99 each (or £10 for both) whilst on Ebay, both are selling for £3.30 brand new & sealed, free delivery (£1.65 each). Likewise, Thief 1-2 are being sold for under £2 inc delivery. Bioshock 1 + Oblivion double-pack is £4.49 (£2.25 each) vs £25 on GOG. So -75-80% discounts for "$10" digital games during sales often reflect the normal everyday non-sale Ebay prices for a lot of physical games, hence the large number of sales.

Which is exactly what I do. But I don't have a problem with it. It works out quite well for me. And I don't think my spending would go up if sales rarer. I usually wait for the really big sales that happen only a few times a year and ignore most of the smaller ones anyway.

Is this really the sort of thing that keeps you up at night?

There's sometimes a weekly sale, often a weekend sale, and sometimes a big sale event.

What of that? There's still games being sold for normal full price during any time, even for too much!

Same here... 500+ games on GOG, 1800+ on Steam. But I can't see the big sales through the amount of tiny stupid sales of which I have any interesting ones anyhow. It doesn't... it does irritate me that every damn day there's a "SALE! ONE TIME ONLY! GET IT NOW! IT'S ALMOST OVER!" mail... We're now trained to wait with every game. Before a game would be released and it was all excitement and yay, and everyone would talk about it. And now 3 quarters are like "I'll get it at a sale." It ends up being the death-knell of many multiplayer games (they never get a critical mass of players), coop, and... indies. Because they will never get enough sales at full price to survive. Because everyone wants it... for less! Even if they are already incredibly cheap. (because indie)

back when gog pumped the hyper sales mode (when they moved headqtrs) i thought they were just barely skirting laws regarding price fixing with false sales, it seemed that if a game is always on sale then that price is its real price. they seemed to only remove the sale periodically to keep it within legality. but using data generated by .. god, im sorry but i cant recall the name of the gog user now who keeps all sales data for gog on a spreadsheet, i saw that the sales were not more constant for each title, it just seemed that way.


but yes. the constant sales mode is overly done. i barely look anymore, add in the craptastic sorting failure of the new look i cant be arsed. its more geared to sporadic customers who come in and see all the sales and go nuts. not realizing that the sale will prob return for a game many times a yr.

I don't think sales are the problem, or at least not the only one. It's the sheer number of games. There's so many being released every year, if we were to buy them all, or even just most of them, for full price, we'd just buy and play much less titles. At least I would. I'm not sure if it would be better for indie games to get much fewer sales but at full price. Maybe, but I doubt it. Many games would be left with almost no one buying them at all.

And it's not even just the amount of games being released - think of the backlog. The backlog of old games. And it keeps growing. If I wouldn't have the opportunity to buy new games cheaply, I'd probably end up buying and playing (and re-playing) more older games instead, rather than buying new games at full price.

That's the case for me with books and movies, where I was basically born with decades worth of backlog (hundreds of years with books, really). I rarely buy new books at full price, because, well, I can buy four great classic books at a used bookstore for what one new book would cost me, and quite likely every one of them will be better than the new book.

I remember when someone called Trevor out on that interview, when gog was already running sales similar to steam regularly. I think he said something along the lines of "We stand by what we said before, but we aren't stupid."

Here's a funny anecdote: I got Witcher 2 gifted to me around the time of its pre-order*. I never got around to properly playing it. Only went as far as the first hour into chapter 1 (though I did play through the prologue twice). But because I knew I would play it soon enough, I got Witcher 3 on the pre-order.

I never played more than the initial half hour of Witcher 3.

Still, I kept wanting the season pass, but was rather irritated that it would always cost little less than the game of the year edition, so I kept waiting for it to lower its default sale price, feeling pretty confident that as soon as I bought it, its next sale would feature a lower price finally.

Last year, near Christmas time, I got the game of the year edition as a gift from a charitable soul here in the forum. The very next sale of the game, early this month, finally featured the game and it's season pass cheaper than usual.

Other than that, the thing with continuous sales is that we end up amassing gigantic backlogs and it reaches a point where we more or less stop buying games on impulse, because there's always the next sale and you still have so much pending play. And, as someone else said, the market also adapted to this, normal prices never drop, so that sales seem bigger and more relevant than they actually are when they happen and many games end up settling on a sale pattern that is rather blah.



*: In actuality, someone else found code pieces for the game lying around the forum, courtesy of WishingWell, assembled the code and posted it to bansama's forum, where I got it.

Phew, if there's no constant sale it would be a double whammy for me. No regional pricing for SEA is terrible enough and now people are saying that the sale is too often and too much :/

PS: I only buy games whenever they hit historical low.