Glad I read through, because I was going to address this same issue. I mean, drive space isn't exactly "expensive" nowadays, but neither is it particularly cheap, and since most games nowadays are 20-50gb per download, even a 1tb drive is going to get filled up awfully fast, which is definitely another perk on the physical column. I don't have to go out and spend another $100 for a decent 1tb HDD just because I have to many games. And if you're like my best friend, you need MULTIPLE drives because you one is for games, one is for music, one is for anime/porm/whatever, and one is for everyday use. That adds up reaaaall fast. He told me the other day he has nearly $1k invested in his various Harddrives, and that's not counting his primary SSD, which he now needs to buy another of because he just filled up his primary and windows has been bugging him about it.

Why?

1. When buying new/day1 games, I tend to buy physical. So almost no discounts there.

2. When buying digital, it's nearly always during a sale, so I buy it from Steam. Otherwise, it's something that can only be bought digitally, in which case I'll just get it on Steam or I'll get it on the devs website (if that's the only way.)

As for other gaming sales sites.... honestly, at this point I'm getting tired of having to make a new account every time I hit a new website. So if I can just buy it on Steam? I'll do it. Especially since I'm also one of the people in the "games aren't that expensive" and "want to support the devs" camps.

(ex: back when I was buying more console games.... go to Gamestop. Can buy a new copy for $60, or a used copy for 45-50. I'd buy the new copy to give money to the devs, instead of all of it to Gamestop + the risk of a scratched disc.)

Disclaimer: I don't buy that many Release Day games in any one year. Certainly not one a month. Maybe one a quarter, at most? So it's not a huge expense.

(Steam sales, on the other hand.... oh, my aching backlog!)

I find it best [for me anyway] to uses a dedicated HD for games ~mapped as a games folder on the boot drive. When it comes that I run out of space, I just buy a new [higher capacity] drive, and swap them ~leaving Windows, and the registry data, and whatever hidden install data untouched.

I mean physical, which is why i mentioned shelves and rubbermaid containers

digital storage space is easier (well, on PC anyways), I could always throw another 3TB HDD into my rig to store more games (well, up until I ran out of slots on my mobo or HDD enclosures in the case).


however with physical objects, I can only put put so many shelves, book cases, boxes and random piles around my place before it starts to look like one of those houses off hoarders, and I don't want something to fall on my cat killing it and stinking up the place with the smell of decay because i can't find him amidst the clutter.. i love my cat

Another thing I like about digital is that if you delete it but you want to come back to it later its in your library and you can always go back to it without paying to download it again.

I'm like your friend. I have, right now, 3 physical hard disc drives. My 1TB HDD is parittion3ed into 2 drives: MY main Windows Drive (~400GB) and an "extra" drive (~400GB) I also have 2 3TB drives, I solely for videos, as I work a lot with game footage. The other partitioned into my Game drive (~1.5TB), my downloads drive (~750GB), and my music drive (~750 GB). Thanks to my gaming video footage, I am getting very low on free space right now

I have room for 4(? maybe only 2) more HDD if I want them and am looking to get at least 2 more HDDs in the near future

You know... I read the "physical storage references (rubbermaid and shelves)" and they just did not register!

Digital storage never really has been a problem since it became "the thing." Games today are 20-50GB each. What will they be in 5 years? 10 years? What will HDD storage be like?

Dark Reaper mentioned a good point: digital copies of games are stored elsewhere, on account. Get a new Rig or suffer through a natural disaster? Download the games again. Of course, physical copies do the same without the internet connection. They just happen to take up viewable physical space and can succumb to physical damage. I've lost a couple of games this way

Why do I pay full price for a game? Long story short, I waited over 9 months for Fallout 3 to be cheaper. Back then games usually dropped $20 or more after 3 months. So I waited. 3 months gone by, full price. 6 months go buy, full price. 9 months go buy, I give up and pay full price. I play, my son plays, and I realized how stupid I was to wait so long to just save a lousy $20.

So yeah, that is why I pay full price for a game because IT IS WORTH paying full price for that game. If I am not sure after doing research of a game I am going to buy, then I wait, but after doing research, if I think it will be worth it, then I pay for it. Now I am paying over $80 for a game so I make sure I do my research now.

Also for the $20 or $40 you save waiting the 6 months or so, I am sure most people we would find just waste it on other stuff, so really, are you saving anything? No we are not.

I have as well.. I used to have an Atari 2600 and a Famicom (the jap NES), but back in university a water pipe burst in the living room while I was at class. my roommate who was in the same program went home after classes finished, while I went back to another guys place as he was going to be running a Smash tourny that afternoon.. phone rang, i picked up "hey, was there anything important in the box near the radio? a pipe burst"..

sadly, i never have been able to get ahold of a new Famicom to replace it

That svcks.

Mine happened with an old Compaq PC that had a CD drive that used a slot that you put the CDs into. It then grabbed them and took them inside the machine (no tray). Cool mechanical device, but scratched the hell out of many of my discs. I had to replace my Baldur's Gate and Need 4 Speed discs.

The last 2 games I purchased at full price:

Half-Life 2 (2004) - Worth every penny.

Oblivion (2006) - Inspired me never to pay full price for a new release ever again.

Since Oblivion there have been many new games that I've been eager to buy, but waited on. These include most notably the new Thief. (Thief I and Thief II are the two greatest games ever made IMO, and I remember vividly the day that that they announced the sequel. But Oblivion taught me the lesson not to jump early and waste the money - and I was right).

I am curious about why you were right about Oblivion? Why was it wasted money? For me, it wasn't Morrowind 2.0 as was promised, but it looks like Todd and Bethesda have lernt there lesson and don't do that at least no more.

It wasn't all wasted money, but I felt betrayed by the hype- and being as young as I was at the time the extra $10 or $20 bucks mattered. Oblivion was a good game, and I spent hundreds of hours enjoying it but right after I bought it I ended up playing just as much Morrowind, and in the months following Oblivion's release, I felt that I could have waited for a better deal.

Just like me. I even stopped playing Oblivion for a month because I was so pissed that I was lied to by Todd since it wasn't Morrowind 2.0. I know exactly what you are saying.

This is the part of it that I don't understand. It's a Bethesda game, meaning that it's going to be full of bugs on release, but when patched and fixed will eventually be great (especially after the modders have their way with it.)

So if you buy it at full price on release, aren't you actually paying extra to serve as a beta-tester?

At this point, I have tons of games in my Steam library that I still haven't even installed yet, so I don't feel any particular need to rush and buy anything at launch. Absolutely no problem for me to wait about 1 - 2 years after launch and then buy them during a Steam sale or Humble Bundle for around $5 - 10 including all DLC.

Only exceptions are Kickstarter / Steam Early Access titles I want to help or games published by Bethesda, which I usually pre-order so I can begin playing right when the game unlocks on Steam.

For the most part, this is how it is for me as well... aside from not having tons of games in my Steam account (which I had to register for when I installed New Vegas).

I don't buy from Steam direct if it can be at all avoided; if I pay for a Steam game, it's because the company I paid provided a Steam key (sometimes as a bonus additional to the non-Steam version of the game). But as for discount sales, I generally don't even notice the Steam sales as I only run Steam while the game is active.

I've never bought anything from Steam. I run it "offline" so as to be able to run Skyrim.

Same here, with the exception of board games for PC. Steam seems to be the only place where developers of board game iterations for PCs sell their products. A lot of my Steam games are board games for PC.

I just thought of something. Unless it has the Bethesda name on it, I don't buy games on day one let alone full price. It's like me going to the movies now. I rarely go unless it is a must see on the big screen. I guess my next movie is Star Wars. My last movie was the last Hobbit movie.

Too much garbage, too much junk put out in the movies and video games, I rarely go to the cinema now, and just wait for blue ray if I can bother. Love the Terminator franchise but never saw it at the movies, and still haven't bought the blu ray yet.

Not just games but for movies as well.

Honestly, I haven't had any big issues with the Beth games I've gotten on release.

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Hmm, thinking about the games I've bought "recently" for full price (I only get 2-4 "big" games a year, usually).... FO4, Bioshock Infinite, Dragon Age:Inquisition, Borderlands:TPS. All were worth it.

(There are other games I've gotten on release as well, but they're digital/indie/kickstarter type things, so their day 1 price isn't generally $60. Things like Wasteland 2 or Divinity:OS.)

...the main thing having a big Steam backlog has done is make it easier for me to resist getting more cheap games during a Steam sale. Big games, that I see the ads/trailers and think "ooh, gotta play that!" - those I'll get day 1 regardless, they're more important/interesting than playing some random stuff from sales. I put a couple games on hold to play FO4, for instance.

There are some pretty amazing sales, and you can even sell the cards that generate from playing the games in your library in "online" mode for a few hours.

I've purchased a number of games below $1 - as low as $0.19 - that generated Steam trading cards, which I was able to sell on the community market for significantly more than what I paid for the game.

After doing that a few times, I had collected enough in my Steam wallet to buy a few games on sale that I really wanted.

On another occasion the free summer sale or winter sale cards generated some rare virtual item in my inventory that I sold for $18.

Is this an example of your famously hard-to-interpret sense of humor, glarrg? I certainly hope so. Let me rewrite that sentence so that it makes sense. "It's a Bethesda game, meaning that no matter how many years after release we wait before we buy it it's still going to be riddled with bugs."

Considering that Bethesda typically fixes a handful of bugs and then calls it a day, late purchasers are liable to deal with almost as many bugs as first-day purchasers. And some bugs, such as the infamous lip-synch bug, are introduced by patches. That is a bug that you, as a person who waited to purchase, are hit with that early purchasers were not.

You and I and everyone who is still playing Skyrim are beta-testers. Even now. You have not escaped beta testing by waiting to purchase. One has only to look at the many quest pages at UESP and see that too-familiar sentence down at the bottom of so many: "This bug is fixed by version x.x.x of the Official Skyrim Patch."

And please, glargg, I beg of you, don't be one of "those people." Don't be one of those hideous "There's a mod for that!" people. You're better than that. You know very well that not every Morrowind or Oblivion or Fallout 3 or Skyrim player has access to the Unofficial Patches. That is not a valid reason for most players to put off buying a Bethesda game.

Be fair, they do fix most of the gamebreaking bugs. Just the thousands of other bugs they leave.