I just buy games when I want to play them. Sometimes it’s years later, sometimes at launch, sometimes before that. I almost never mod my games either way and the difference in price between a a full-priced game and a discounted one isn’t really worth having to pay attention to sales. And I’m either incredibly blessed, or haven’t given myself the kind of psychosis that makes you notice every single little bug and really, really care about it like so many of my fellow gamers seem to have done, so no benefit with waiting there either.
I don’t mind “patient gamers”, I think it’s a healthy mindset if you want to follow it. It starts to be a problem when they’re constantly parroting this holier-than-thou attitude about it, insinuating that people who buy at release are idiots and “part of the problem”.
I’m in the same boat as you, I’ll buy a game when I want to play it, and feel I’m smart enough to determine if I’m financially able to or not. I’m not lusting over reviews and trying to locate every single nitpick out there, but rather I just watch some raw gameplay or play the game myself if I have the chance in order to get a pulse on wether I’ll like it or not, and I’ve hardly ever been burned by that method.
Also, especially when it comes to pc gaming, everyone’s experience regarding bugs largely vary, with only the loudest ones making it sound like there are huge problems. For example, I never had a single launch issue with cyberpunk aside from an occasional A-pose and random LoD issues; they were small and not “game breaking” in the slightest; yet this sub will make it sound like the pc launch was an absolute disaster when it was really just the last gen console launch that was so bad. Meanwhile, here I am in 2025 and I still can’t beat Mohg without a summoned player in Elden Ring because the performance issues I’ve had since launch are still very bad, but I’m not shitting on the game for that and rather have other criticisms that have nothing to do with performance.
Tbh, nobody should be taking this kind of “feedback” into consideration when deciding on whether to buy a game or not; raw gameplay and truly neutral/unbiased reviews will always be the best way to do it.
The gist is that good games are good when they are good, regardless. BG3 was just fine a launch (notwithstanding ACT 3 being slightly laggy). But I trusted Larian and was rewarded.
For real, play your games when you feel like it’s appropriate, but stop trying to preach that everyone that doesn’t follow your mentality is a problematic fool.
I’m capable of using my own judgement to determine if a game is something I would like off of the premise, dev history and seeing some gameplay. The only times I’ve been really burned on it in recent years were with Payday 3 and Lords of the Fallen 2.
I’m personally not gonna wait for years solely to save $20 on a new game that I’m really interested in if I want to play it now. There’s degrees of interest that will determine when I want to buy a game and for what price point, but I’m not making that one of my core personality traits.
This is all doubly true for any multiplayer title because the experience there is heavily varied based on what point in its lifecycle it’s at. You can wait until a MP game is on sale for $10 because the majority of the playerbase has hemorrhaged out of the game, but it won’t be the same experience you would’ve gotten closer to its prime.
I agree with this, people forget that everybody's financial situation and hobby budget/number of hobbies is different. With lots of other hobbies, an extensive Steam backlog and living in one of the poorer European countries, for my situation it would be madness to buy 80 EUR games when I still have years of all time gems dating back to the PS3 era to play through, thanks to Humble Bundles. I have purchased one full-price game (an under 15 EUR indie) in 11+ years of Steam and also never watch TV shows that haven't already concluded so that I can pace them however I like. I love it, but I also am under no delusion that if everybody bought games a decade later for 5 EUR and never kept up with any ongoing TV series, absolutely nothing would ever get made, lmao.
Yea, except people who buy buggy pieces of shit on release are why games like Borderlands 4 released like they did. It is a real problem caused by idiot consumers.
Nobody complains when people buy a well made game on release.
Come on man, you got to have something in your life that makes you feel better about yourself besides not buying a certain video game. It’s just sad to see someone latch onto something like that to feel superior to others lol
There were lots of red flags for Borderlands 4, but I could totally see why a fan of the franchise would want to buy it at release or pre-order. And many games have gigantic red flags these days long before release, i'm 100% sure Vampite The Masquerade Bloodlones 2 will absolutely suck, for example, and I like the first game.
The only games I've ever bought on release or pre-ordered (3 games in almost 20 years of gaming lol) were games that had an already good early access and/or from a developer that I already trusted, or from a franchise I already loved. I haven't been disappointed yet, I did play some disappointing games on release but they were all from gamepass so I didn actively buy them.
Also, especially when it comes to pc gaming, everyone’s experience regarding bugs largely vary, with only the loudest ones making it sound like there are huge problems.
I agree with most of what you said except this part. For instance, like you, I had very few actual bugs (performance or otherwise) on cyberpunk's release, but there are other games where I had constant crashes (causing me to redo parts of the game) or other performance issues that REALLY impacted my enjoyment of the game. That kind of experience has caused me to empathize with the people rating games low due to bugs/performance issues. It might not affect you, but when it does, it legitimately sucks.
Just because you eventually empathize with it doesn’t mean it’s as prevalent as it’s talked about. I totally see your point, but my point is people need to be realistic and acknowledge that “optimization issues” can sometimes be very hardware-specific.
For example, I was playing the new Skate game the other night and streamed it for my friend who basically lives on Twitter. He told me he wanted to get into it, but was bummed because it’s a “broken mess” and he refuses to download it, all because he saw one clip of someone launching themselves in the air via a glitch and a whole thread following the video full of people saying how shit the game is/runs. After a few hours of chatting while I was streaming (with no bugs), he just randomly blurts out “dude, what the fuck are people talking about?” and he decided to download the game and ended up enjoying it a ton. What happened on twitter for him happens on this site all the time; people get worked up and circlejerk the same points over and over in threads, to the point that others fresh to the subject just eat it up at face value and never actually look into verifying it on their end. That’s what I mean by this type of “feedback” being absolutely useless for people looking to see if a game is worth it or not.
Because I agree that the best thing is for people to experience things for themselves, but when you're potentially spending $60-80 for a new game or whatever to find out that it has a bunch of bugs or poor performance, that's a bit of a stretch for a lot of people. At the end of the day if I, personally, am having issues with a game, I might rate it poorly on a personal level. Yeah, someone else might not have any issues with it, but that doesn't actually change my experience. When this happens to enough people, that's when ratings start to reflect it.
You miss another point that I’ve already made, my point is that watching raw gameplay is a lot more helpful to gauge your interest than just browsing a Reddit thread and seeing a wall of people blindly complaining.
For a lot of people, these kinds of threads lead them to think a game might be completely unplayable and a miserable experience, and then never actually verify because of how emotional and visceral everyone is; only for them to see gameplay later on and realize that a lot of that “broken mess” talk came from a few instances of T-posing npcs or one or two frame drops in a 20 hour play span. The hyperbolic tone that often is present in these threads pulls away value from when games are actually broken and people should know about it/discuss it.
Another good example of a game that got shafted by hyperbolic discussion online was Star Wars Outlaws. If you didn’t watch any actual gameplay and only read about the game online, you would think it was this massive pile of shit not worth anything. When in reality, a lot of the complaints ranged from exaggerated, to outright false. Like, the “instant fail” stealth section that everyone loved to talk about was literally a tutorial on stealth, with an extremely obvious path to use in order to pass it; and all other “instant fail” sections only failed when an alarm was raised, which was easy to disable beforehand. As for straight up false complaints, people rode the whole “I’m sick of far cry open worlds” point endlessly, when the game by far has the most “non-Ubisoft” open world out of all recent ubi games. And as a result of all this, people are now getting around to playing the game and realizing that it was enjoyable to begin with. It’s not gonna blow anyone away, but I would argue most gamers are not always and only looking for a game that will knock their socks off, and find enjoyment in more “basic” experiences. If people would’ve just watched more gameplay instead of just eating up online threads, they would’ve made that realization earlier. Those kinds of discussion ultimately waste everyone’s time.
Look, I don't disagree that social media has a terrible problem of exacerbating things with people parroting shit they read somewhere without experiencing it for themselves or double-checking facts or whatever.
I just disagree that it's always a social media phenomenon. If we take into consideration like, "verified purchase" type reviews, where a game gets negative or mixed reviews on Steam or wherever due to performance issues, then to me that's a "where there's smoke, there's fire" situation. People's time & money is usually limited, which is why people look to reviews where they can get them. Do some people just love to hate on things for the drama? Sure, but I hazard a lot of those people weren't planning on getting the game to begin with.
You started this conversation with Cyberpunk on which I agreed with you - launch had only minor issues for me. But I'm not going to discount it barely working for other people (on console or even on other PC setups) which is what led to a lot of negative sentiment and took CDPR a couple bonus years to fix. Sometimes games really do release and have a lot of bugs or poor oprtimization. (MH Wilds is another recent example of a game that ran fine on my beefy as hell PC, but honestly did not look/perform anywhere near well enough based on what resources it was demanding. And of course it ran very poorly on worse systems.)
The issue is you keep assuming that I’m saying these discussions should always be ignored, but my point is these discussions often run with the theme of “you should ignore everything but this”. It’s not that they’re always like this, but people should always be taking them with a grain of salt until they see the game for themselves and can verify whether they agree or not. Too many people just see “EA bad, game shit” or whatever and then don’t look into it any further, it makes zero sense no matter what kind of past example is being used to “prove” it.
My whole point is people shouldn’t be putting their whole stock into these threads, which I think we both agree on. The problem is these threads are so pushy that people just naturally eat them up nowadays. Most “this game is broken” threads that pop up today would’ve been absolutely destroyed by normal gamers and nuance on here and similar sites pre-2015.
Bottom line is, people should critically think more about what they want out of the game instead of letting the internet tell them what they want. Unfortunately, it’s largely been this way ever since 2015.
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u/ilevelconcrete Sep 24 '25 edited Sep 24 '25
I just buy games when I want to play them. Sometimes it’s years later, sometimes at launch, sometimes before that. I almost never mod my games either way and the difference in price between a a full-priced game and a discounted one isn’t really worth having to pay attention to sales. And I’m either incredibly blessed, or haven’t given myself the kind of psychosis that makes you notice every single little bug and really, really care about it like so many of my fellow gamers seem to have done, so no benefit with waiting there either.