The Castle Doctrine Forums

Let me list a few of the trends by publishers/developers that encourage me to wait (hint, it's not the price):

• Day one DLC, sometimes "on disk" DLC. The despicable act of stipping content that should be in the release to try to suck more money. Later on the game gets released as a "Game of the year" or "Ultimate" version, which really should have just be the release version, or as I call it, the "What it should have been", version.

• Closely related in the greed dept., single player games now charging for "cheats".  Example: selling "resource packs" in Dead Space 3.  What used to be a "cheat code" (ie. IDKFA) is now $1.99.

• No dedicated servers - so if it's a good game they can "sunset" it, release a new version, and suck up more money.

• No mods with very few exceptions (such as Fallout / Skyrim).

• Broken Games that don't get fixed as the developer has moved on since they already made their buck.  On top of that Official releases are more and more becoming paid betas.

• Almost never a demo.  When I first got to play Doom Shareware, holy crap, I couldn't wait to buy the game!  I happily spent months of allowance to get it.

• The corrupt "review" system.

• Oppressive DRM.

Lots of this has to do with gaming becoming more mainstream over the past 15 years.  Gaming used to be a small niche hobby, however as the market has shifted it's become more toxic.  In the new environment waiting isn't "screwing gamers", if anything it protects gamers from being taken advantage of.

While I understand you as a small developer aren't really driving these items, when looking at the industry as a whole it's easy to see why the consumer's buying patterns/attitudes have changed.  More and more it seems as if companies are out to screw the consumer as hard as possible.  The sad part is smaller developers without nefarious plans become a casualty to this environment.  However, you can't fault the consumer for looking our for their best interest.