Just Because It's Costing You Nothing Doesn't mean You Can't Complain

I may not be playing many games at the moment but that's not going to stop me collecting more. 

Ooh! Sidebar! Is that a legitimate way to look at all those gaming backlogs everyone keeps complaining about? I've been in the habit of referring to mine as a Gaming Library, in an attempt to add some gravitas and alleviate some guilt (Guilt, I should clarify, that I personally do not feel but which I understand to be some kind of a general problem among the community.) by suggesting a large stack of unplayed games represents a resource rather than an obligation but how would it be if instead we re-framed our backlogs as Collections? 

Collections are cool. Everyone loves them. Every item they contain exists to be owned, treasured, curated and occasionally looked at but no-one expects you to use any of them. Collections are always growing, too. It's part of their charm and appeal. Adding to them is a hobby in itself and it gives other people something to give you as a present when they're stuck for ideas of their own.

And you can forget about the sunk cost. Sure, some collections hold their value and even increase but many don't and no-one cares. In fact, it's often considered crass to know, or certainly to talk about, how much your collection cost or how much it might make at auction if you sold it - which of course you never would.. The true value of collections lies in the pure, innocent pleasure that comes from owning and appreciating them.

There! Now don't you feel better about that backlog?

Also, congratulations to me for yet again de-railing one of my own posts. One sentence I got out before it happened! That has to be a record.

Getting back to the point, as Wilhelm thoughtfully reminded us all yesterday, the Steam Summer Sale has just started. I thought I probably at least ought to take a look at how that affected my wishlist, on the basis that if I'm still not willing to commit at two-thirds off, there's probably not much point that game staying on the list.

Definitely Maybe

As it turns out, only five games out of thirty-eight meet that criterion and I have no inclination to buy any of them. Added to that, two games on the list are currently on offer for less than a pound and I still don't feel like paying for them, which strongly  suggests I might not even take them if they were free. 

And yet I haven't de-listed any of them. The counter-argument is why bother? It's not like a Steam wishlist takes up any space. I'm not going to trip over it or have to get the ladder out to shove half of it in the attic so I can make space for more.

It's not even as though having a bunch of games on there you're never going to buy makes it any harder to see the ones you might. The list's sortable eight different ways, including by how big a discount you can get and how long a game's been on there, which seem to me to be about the only two pieces of information I'd be likely to want to know before deciding whether or what to buy.

No, I think I'm more minded to leave everything alone, just on the off-chance that something might eventually catch my eye. It seems a bit ridiculous to try and second-guess future me by taking games off now that I might feel differently about in the future.

And yet, with all that taken fully under consideration, I did take one game off the list. What's more, it was one of the games I almost certainly would have bought at some point, when the discount felt right. I had a good reason. The best.

There are quite a few games on the list I'm always quite close to buying and a lot more I'm not. I could fairly reliably sort them into four  categories:

1. Definitely going to buy on Day One at full price. Just waiting for it to release.
2. Almost certainly will buy one day. Just a question of when and for how much.
3. Probably will buy one day but only when it's a real bargain.
4. Unlikely to buy, no matter how cheap it gets.

The first three categories seem completely legit but the last is iffy. Why even put a game on the list if you're almost certain not to buy it at any price? 

Well, a couple of reasons at least. For one, it supposedly helps the developers to have as many wishlist votes as possible in the run-up to launch. I play a lot of demos in Next Fests for games I think are quite good but aren't for me and I often wishlist those just to be supportive. Costs me nothing and they seem to appreciate it.

The other reason is so I can keep an eye on certain titles I might want to blog about. Having them on the wishlist helps remind me they exist and also occasionally gets me an email from Steam if something changes.

Of course, both of those arguments cease to have much validity once the games launch. At that point, I probably should remove them. I tend not to for one very good reason: I'm too lazy. Doing nothing is always the easier option.

Not at any price.

On my current wishlist there are two games in Category 1: Nighthawks and Nivalis. Nivalis has a 2025 release date but Nighthawks, which I added to the list in 2021, still just says TBA and I suspect it may never arrive.

Category 2 has ten games, Category 3 has seven and everything else is in the last one. That means exactly half of the games on my wishlist are games I am most likely never going to buy. Worse, I'd take them on a free offer but even then I'd be highly unlikely ever to play them.

And I don't care. That's fine. They're not in my way. They can just stay there unless they for some reason start to annoy me. That happens occasionally. I can have moods.

But even with your wishlist split up into categories, you have to be so careful! Can you imagine anything more infuriating than buying a game in Cat 2 for, oh, let's say, 30% off in the Summer Sale, meaning it's actually costing you £17.99, still in my opinion a not-inconsiderable sum for a video game you aren't desperate to play Right Now, only to find - literally five minutes later! - you could have had it FOR FREE on another gaming platform?

Boy, that would suck, wouldn't it? Lucky that never happened!

Relax! It didn't. It was close, though. 

Last night, after I read Wilhelm's post, I went straight to Steam and checked the discounts on my wishlist. The best ones were all on games in Cat 4 but there were a few 50% or even 60% offers in Cat 3 that I was highly tempted by and still am. 

Nothing in Cat 2 had more than 30% off and it wasn't quite enough to get me to pull the trigger, which turned out to be just as well when, on a whim, I also decided to check Prime Gaming this morning. 

Prime Says...

In theory, there shouldn't have been any reason for me to do that. Although the Prime offers roll over, there's supposed to be an announcement at the start of each calendar month telling you what's new. There's a blog about it and they send out an email. I even wrote about the June offer back at the beginning of the month, so I ought to know what's on it, right?

Yeah, like hell I do! Either I can't read or Prime can't keep the record straight. Maybe both.

When I opened the web page today, I saw a bunch of new games had been added that I cannot remember seeing on the blog post. And I'm pretty sure I'd have remembered if something from my fricken' Steam wishlist was on there. Which it was.

Or was it...?

There seems to be some confusion over that. Pay attention, now, because this gets complicated and I'm not going to make it any plainer with my explanation.

Claim says...

The Prime Gaming website very clearly shows Stray Gods: Orpheus Edition, the most expensive version, a compilation of the base game and the DLC but with a label underneath that says "Stray Gods: Orpheus", which is just the DLC on its own. When you click through to claim it, the display changes to the page you see at the head of this post, which only mentions the DLC. 

When you do claim it, though, the confirmation plainly says you just got the twofer. And then you go to Good Old Games to install it and what do you find? 

Yep, you guessed it! Neither! Instead, you appear to have received the original, base game - Stray Gods.

It's clear I'm not going to find out what I've actually got until I install it so talk amongst yourselves while I do just that. I'll go make myself a coffee while it's downloading...

GOG Says...

Well, that's made everything clear as mud. The game I've just acquired is definitely the original Stray Gods, not the DLC or the two-pack... but it apparently comes with a saved game in which Act 1 has already been completed. 

Wasn't me! My "Played" time on GOG shows just one minute, the time it took me to log in just now.

I guess a save might make sense if I'd just acquired Stray Gods on Steam, which is where I played the demo almost exactly two years ago. I think the demo was Act 1 so I can see how progress there might have been saved towards a future purchase of the full game on the same platform.

But I just got this version from Amazon Prime Gaming and they delivered it to me on GOG, and yet somehow it looks like it knows I already played through Act 1 on a Steam demo, so how does that work? I don't even use the same email address for Steam and Prime. Or the same user name.

As they say in the movies, something's not right...

And this post has not gone at all how I expected, either. I'm live-blogging again and it's all falling apart. The plan when I started was to write about the new games that appeared on Prime and the five that I claimed today but I think I'm just going to cut my losses and save that for a separate post. In fact, I'll probably wait until they announce the games for July, because I bet these are some of them.

Just a couple of extra details and thoughts to finish. 

To re-enforce my message about being careful not to buy stuff on one platform that you already own on another, while I was checking GoG for this post I spotted I already own Kerbal Space Program there. That's on deep discount in the Steam Sale right now and I was looking at it last night and thinking about getting it. Good thing I didn't.

Also, does any of this suggest maybe someone at Prime Gaming is using an AI assistant? In my experience they have real trouble picking up fine details like the difference between a game and its expansions or DLC. Or maybe no-one at Amazon really cares about Prime Gaming any more. that tracks.

And finally, what's up with GOG, anyway? Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not wrong.) but doesn't it stand for Good Old Games? With the emphasis on Old, I always thought. Stray Gods came out in 2023. That's two years ago. 

Is that what we're calling "old" now?  I have food in my cupboards older than that and it's still in date.