Has the games industry turned you into a blind consumer?

No. I will only buy the game if I am sure I will have a blast. But when I was younger I would buy the a game for the sake of buying it:p

To many games out there that are mediocre.
 
Oh yes ... absolutely.

A lot of people will completely deny this (I'm not implying that you are one of them Tsar), but there are absolute hordes of blind people running around and buying games based on names, franchises, publishing houses, whatever.

How many sequels these days truly live up to the standards set by their predecessors? Why do companies like EA get away with releasing the same thing year after year, with little actual improvements being made to the game? Why are people willing to pay absolutely ridiculous prices for a game simply because they HAVE to have the latest title?

Look how many people swore they weren't going to buy MW2 - due to price, server issues, Bobby Kotick being a prick, etc etc. Browse enough forums and you'd wonder how the game actually sold any copies. But it broke records, in the end. I'm not saying it's worse than MW1 - but in my opinion, it wasn't better. It certainly did nothing in my book to justify its pricing.

Examples are endless really.

I used to be like that myself. I'm a little more picky these days - or at the very least I wait for a great special or budget box to come my way.
 
shadowfox said:
Oh yes ... absolutely.

A lot of people will completely deny this (I'm not implying that you are one of them Tsar), but there are absolute hordes of blind people running around and buying games based on names, franchises, publishing houses, whatever.

How many sequels these days truly live up to the standards set by their predecessors? Why do companies like EA get away with releasing the same thing year after year, with little actual improvements being made to the game? Why are people willing to pay absolutely ridiculous prices for a game simply because they HAVE to have the latest title?

Look how many people swore they weren't going to buy MW2 - due to price, server issues, Bobby Kotick being a prick, etc etc. Browse enough forums and you'd wonder how the game actually sold any copies. But it broke records, in the end. I'm not saying it's worse than MW1 - but in my opinion, it wasn't better. It certainly did nothing in my book to justify its pricing.

Examples are endless really.

I used to be like that myself. I'm a little more picky these days - or at the very least I wait for a great special or budget box to come my way.
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Lol I learnt my lesson the hard way:p It is a pity most games these days don't even have demos anymore.
And I am proud to say I never bought mw2 and black ops:D(and no I did not pirate them either)Played the single player at a friends for five minutes and it sucked.
 
I stopped buying regular yearly series games (hint -> COD, NFS, FIFA) loooooooong ago. I bought COD4 MW, I am one of the few people that DID NOT enjoy the multiplayer... I still prefer Battlefield Bad Company 2 over any COD game.

I cant deny (sigh shadowfox I am one ;) ) that I buy some series based on the franchise name alone, but this is games I know are / will be quality, and the gaps in between the games released justifies me spending money on them.

Long ago have I stopped buying / copying games just to HAVE the game. There simply isnt enough time these days to convince yourself to install those games.

I am happy with the fact that I wasnt a COD fanboi, or a WOW P2P player ; I would have been broke lol :D

My list of new games that I plan on getting (again the franchises lol ... it is hard!!) is :
1) Guild Wars 2 (NO DOUBT about this one) [the hype of info released got me signed up]
2) Portal 2
3) Crysis 2 (maybe)
4) and HL2 Episode 3 (whenever its out of DNF status....)

For the rest of the games? (I am definitely not getting Diablo 3) . I cant think of anything else.....I am happy with Gran Turismo 5 for the next few months thank you ! Generally games that have a regular yearly release of I despise. 95% the same game as last year, plus 5% new features / better graphics.

I have to say that NEW franchise names will have a hard time getting noticed, for me at least....
 
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I think the recent economic downturns and belt-tightening have caused a lot of consumers (not only gamers) to relook the way they spend money on luxuries.

I have cut down on my game spending quite a lot...at a time it was about 2-3 new releases a month. Now, I prefer to buy older titles that have been out for a while. Firstly, it saves me some cash. And secondly, there's nothing more depressing than buying a title on release day, getting home and being tremendously disappointed.

The last new-release title I bought was God of War III on release day.

At a point the hype worked on me too. But I got over all the trailers, videos and monthly gaming mags and actually just started gaming for the love of it, buying titles that I know I will enjoy.

I love COD as well as GT, and even the recent, uber-hyped releases of these titles did nothing to make me want to buy it.
Instead I will wait a while...and pay half price, and still get to play them...
 
As prices for games have started steadily increasing, we have every right to expect more 'bang for our buck'. While I will always buy the next installment of a game for certain franchises i.e. DOW, CoH, PES, Total War, I am becoming a lot more 'picky' about what I buy.

I will admit that I did by COD - Black Ops (and have no issues and am loving it) because of the hype :o

As one also gets older and family comes along, your gaming time is also reduced, so to waste what precious little gaming time one has on a mediocre or rubbish title, hurts even more.
 
Odd gaming prices for consoles has remained pretty consistent in the last 10 years, yes PC games have started rising, but it was needed to happen eventually. Still odd to pay R499 for a PC game feels unclean :-D. Oh on topic I try to only follow certain game series, even if they are 10 years in the making.
 
When I was young, I would just buy games I thought would be cool just browsing around the PC store. My best purchases ever were completely blind and random picks, I hadn't read a single review and in almost all cases hadn't even heard of the game before.

Ultima series. I bought a CD with Ultima 1-7 on it, no idea what it was at the time.
Sim City
Alone in the Dark 1
Resident Evil 1
Wolfenstein
Doom
Half Life 1
Diablo 1
Warcraft 1
Baldur's Gate 1
Fallout 1
Planescape Torment
Starcraft 1
and many more awesome games I just bought because of what I read on the back of the box and they sounded kick ass =) Good times, could pick up almost any box in the shop and get a sweet game.

So I've never really needed something like Metacritic before, but apparently we've entered into some shovelware era of gaming and its become extremely useful. It has saved me from many a crap game. I swear some studios are getting better at making trailers than they are at making games.
 
We're all influenced by hype from the games industry and our game-playing peers. Anyone who says different is probably the kind of person who thinks advertising doesn't affect them.
 
tpex said:
they took a tips from the record companies
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+1

Though to be fair, there are certain series which are definitely worth the yearly purchase. Football Manager is a case in point. There is always enough changes both in game and in the rules in real life to change gameplay with each release. PES... there are always subtle changes even though the previous three iterations where bad(ish). I don't have the time or patience to buy so called AAA titles that don't give me full enjoyment.
 
smokey said:
Football Manager is a case in point. There is always enough changes both in game and in the rules in real life to change gameplay with each release. PES... there are always subtle changes even though the previous three iterations where bad(ish).
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I'd think in a case like Football Manager where there are yearly changes with rules/teams and whatnot, they could try and introduce some sort of patching system - so that whenever there are rule-changes, patchy gets downloaded, and voila ... we're up and running. It's hardly impossible, almost every company payroll runs on a similar system. Why pay a full price for a game simply because of a rule change or because some team decided blue is the new black, or something ridiculous like that?
 
I for one have never been pulled in by marketing and hype. Iv never bought any of the COD series, i think all the 1227 fanboys of it actually put me off. I bought Metal Gear Solid 1 quite a few years ago, didnt know what it was about, but totally fell in love with it. Metal Gear Is the only series that i will purchase, no matter the hype and what not.
 
Short answer - yes! I normally plan to wait to pick up a new game. Read reviews and listen to problems,etc. Then it's two weeks before and I can't resist pre-ordering. I recently got GT5 and ACB and am disappointed with the bugs and glitches for the money i paid.
 
I usually know which games are going to be cool and which are going to be flops.

I would buy any Battlefield,Bioshock,Diablo,DragonAge,DungeonSiege,Starcraft and NeedForSpeed games because i know the original was good and the new one would be even better.i still read their reviews and such before buying just to make sure the developers didn't change too much like in Fallout or NeedForSpeed which sometimes strayed too far from the original (fallout turned into a FPS and on top of that it got a crappy engine)(i would love a new fallout with DragonAge:Origins type graphics and gameplay).(as for NeedForSpeed it strayed too far one time when it limited you to racing on racing tracks instead of the nice open city's like the older ones).
 
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