Gaming

I don't buy a game solely because it's the zeitgeist or whatever. A friend of mine routinely buys games that are "the new shiny" and then doesn't finish them, or loses interest quickly. I usually wait for a sale, some patches, and/or the dlc to be bundled into a goty edition.

Some exceptions:

I bought elden ring near launch because I'm a big enjoyer of the genre, and my friend confirmed it was good. No regrets.

I bought bg3 shortly before it's full access. I'd liked the other games larian did, and a friend told me it was good. No regrets.

Both of those were pretty light on DLC. No season pass or "goty" editions were likely.

I'm going to wait for the dragon age game to go on sale. I don't really trust Bioware, and I don't know if they plan to do a bunch of dlc that will get bundled up later.

I've been waiting for Lies of P to get cheap. The demo was just ok when I played it, but a friend tells me it's phenomenal.

Right now I'm playing a MUD (aardwolf). It really distills some online RPG into the essence of "go kill some stuff to level up, get new skills, and kill bigger stuff". It's strangely satisfying.

I used to be very patientgamer, but my patience model changed after finding again and again that buying late meant devs had wholly moved on from a game by the time I got it, and would hardly ever do basic needed fixes, things that needed to have been talked about earlier in the project. I also noticed how some early access sales would take years for the price to go up and then back down again for what amounted to only a few dollars of savings. Savings that, as I watch games I'm interested in fail in obscurity over and over, I don't feel quite right about strictly withholding from the few devs taking chances on such projects for me, on top of not being around to try and help the project deliver a better game to players.

So, now I do buy some games in early access or even newly released, where I can poke the dev while they are still around, and my patience includes waiting for games to get through those after-buying growing pains instead of just waiting for them to drop into the discount bins, mostly forgotten by their devs and players both.

I'm still generally more strictly price-patient on most anything larger scale, both by devs and by audience.

Some games I'm excited enough for to want to spend full price on release. Some games I'll wait for a sale on. Just depends on the game.

I am just so underwhelmed by most games these days that I’ve stopped buying them. I didn’t play BG3 until someone bought it for me as a gift, and then I really enjoyed the shit out of it. It probably made it even more fun that I didn’t plan to play it and had very low expectations. So I guess that’s part of the fun for me now - waiting for a sale or free game and hoping that it’s better than I imagine it to be.

for games that are single player , or games that i dont intend to play online, verry much yes.

with multi player games i struggle a bit more but i try.

In terms of pve, I am not patient at all. I would have not made it through elden ring without bleed. If I have to go through a 15 hour long quest to increase my efficiency in something by 1.5%, sign me up.

I have been enjoying the original console I designed and built myself running a raspberry pi 5 and a fully built and compiled retropie that can crank out some dolphin and redream with full 60fps. I have plenty 90s gaming I need to catch up on.

For everything moderately modern, I have a steam deck. If it doesn't or cannot run on my retropie or my deck then I'll wait till the next hardware refresh. If it takes half a decade, all the better.

Excessively patient. I've noticed there's basically a 50/50 chance of any game I find interesting showing up for free on Epic eventually, so I mean, fine, I'll wait a couple of years to save $60. Why pay for something that'll eventually be given to you, paid for by some vulture capitalist's dragon horde?

I take some of their money, get a free game: win/win.

...at this point, I'm pretty sure my Epic games library is way bigger than my Steam library, simply from the 3-5 free games a month that Epic tosses at you, of which like 1/3rd are actually pretty good.

Most of the time yes. I've been playing the shit out of Dragons Dogma 1 lately and loving it.

That being said, some games are definitely on-release buys, like the upcoming Monster Hunter Wilds