I'm Not Going To Take This Sitting Down, You Know...

I was planning on banging out a quick "What's free with Amazon Prime this month?" post after work tonight. It's an easy write and I find it quite useful as a reminder to myself to log in and claim what interests me. 

I also appreciate it when other people do these kinds of posts, even when they're about gmes I don't play or sevices I don't use. It's nice to know what's out there and as I've said many times, I like lists.

Of course, I was assuming that there would be something new to write about, what with it being the first of the month and all. When I logged into Amazon Games that didn't seem to be the case at all. I could only see five games on offer, four of which I'd already claimed and one of which I'd already rejected.

I didn't notice at first that the one game still available has to be claimed by May 2. There's a clue there, I think...

Anyway, suspicious as I was that I might be missing something, or even worse missing out on something, I thought I'd check my Amazon Prime account itself rather than the Amazon Games app. Just as well I did.

Not that there were any new, free games there, either. There were different games I'd already claimed, though, as well as a few I remembered turning down.

And actually I lied. There was one new game: House of 1000 Doors. Never seen that one before. I looked at it and decided I didn't want it but that's not the point. The claim window for it ends today, which means it must have been available for a while and I didn't know about it. That's the point.

It gets worse. As well as the games, Amazon Prime has a selection of in-game giveaways, several of which are for games I play. What's more, they're part of various series of giveaways that I've been collecting, for want of a better expression. 

It seems I've been under a misapprehension in thinking these are also monthly offers. I picked up all the ones available last month. I posted about it so I know it really happened. And yet, somehow, when I logged into my Prime account tonight I found more offers from Guild Wars 2, Blade and Soul, Lost Ark and New World. 

Some of them, I have to make clear, were not new new offers. They were old new offers. Offers that had somehow popped up after the last batch I took at the beginning of April and which were now about to expire. 

The Lost Ark mount expires tomorrow, the New World costume in three days. I swear they weren't there back at the start of April when I last looked. I would have claimed them then if they had been.

The Blade and Soul and GW2 offers look very recent, each with over three weeks left to run although I'm willing to believe the Roblox one might well have been therlast time. I don't remember it but it's entirely possible I saw it but wasn't interested. I don't really think of Roblox as anything I'm likely to play, more like a venue I might occasionally visit, when there's a show on I want to see.

Some of them, the boosters and mats and so on, wouldn't be much of a loss but there are other things I'd rather not lose out on. I already missed a costume I would have liked in Blade and Soul. At the time I couldn't figure out how it happened but I'm starting to get the picture.

I would have been seriously annoyed if I'd missed out on the GW2 throne. Seats are one of the more weirdly appealing fluff features ArenaNet have added over the years and there have so far been very few opportunities to grab any without ponying up Gems. All I have is the stupid anniversary rock. Who wants to sit on a rock, for crying out loud?

I did eventually figure out that the Amazon Games desktop app acts as a kind of front-end for the Amazon Prime website. There's a link in the app for the in-game offers that does nothing more than open the same Prime web page I was already looking at in my browser.

Based on nothing more than the expiry date for the one free game from last month I didn't claim, I'm guessing tomorrow will see a new set of free games for May. Assuming we're getting any free games this month, that is. Maybe we're not.

If we do, I guess I can finesse another post out of it. That's the upside. The downside is that it very much looks as though I'm going to have to check the Prime website more often than once a month. I probably ought to stop relying on the Amazon Games app. It seems inadequate to the task. It would also really help if they'd put dates on the upcoming offers rather than just slapping "Coming Soon" on the promo panels.

Ah well, the very definition of a first world problem, I guess. Or maybe that should be a virtual world problem.