This seems to be buying season. Or acquiring season, at least. Since I last posted about adding seven more games to my collection, just a few days ago, I've added a couple more.
The first was a freebie from Amazon in celebration of Prime Day, a spurious self-generated "event" the megacorp has been trying to hype into something worth caring about for weeks now. All it is, of course, is a generally disappointing sale in which anything I'm vaguely interested in is never discounted enough to make me feel it's worth buying and anything I'm really interested in has barely any money off at all.
I wonder a lot about both the psychology and the commercial effectiveness of big sales like this. Everyone does them but I never see any feedback about how successful they are in terms of raising revenue. Do they really generate enough additional sales - purchases that otherwise would not have happened at all - to offset the money lost on purchases people were always going to make anyway and most likely would have made at a higher price?
Sales are only ever really satisfying if you were already dead set on buying something pretty much right now and suddenly there it is at half price. That counts as a genuine saving in my book. It's less exciting but still quite nice when purchases you were definitely going to have to make at some point, just not necessarily right now, turn up at a discount. That also counts as a real saving, I 'd say.
Anything you otherwise might or might not have bought doesn't count as any kind of "saving", regardless of how much less you had to spend to get your hands on it compared to if you'd bought it at another time. That's extra money you've now spent that would otherwise still be in your pocket.
From the seller's perspective, it's the reverse, of course, although making you buy something now, even for less than you might have paid later, may be what they're after. In my limited experience, businesses are constantly trying to finesse when the money comes in as well as how much of it there is.
So far, Amazon has yet to persuade me to buy anything purely because of Prime Day. I may or may not have bought something during the event in previous years - I have no idea whether I have or not - but if I did it was entirely co-incidental. I buy stuff from Amazon all the time but only ever things I need or at least believe I need when I buy them, which admittedly isn't quite the same thing.
I don't go trawling through the warehouse deals looking for bargains or anything like that but purely because they make such a huge deal of it, I do fall into the trap of browsing the Prime Day offer every year (Or however often it happens. I have no idea if it's more than once a year. It might well be because it sure isn't really a "Day".) It never takes long. It's always so dispiriting. I must remember not to bother next time.
I wouldn't be here, posting about the dumb sale at all if it wasn't for one thing: Prime Gaming also likes to get in on the action. I'm fairly sure they already gave away some extra games as some kind of pre-event but today they're handing out four more to celebrate the thing finally happening and for a miracle one of them is something I actually want!
The four games are Football Manager 2024 (No thanks.) Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II (Bleh.) Amnesia (Much too scary.) and...
Marvel's Midnight Suns
That's the one! I remember it from when it came out and tanked. According to GameRant, the complaints at the time revolved around the "narrative elements that had players navigate an all-star lineup of Marvel heroes through some fairly mundane slice-of-life interactions."
I've been droning on since at least the 1980s about how super-hero comics are primarily soap-operas and how the fights are largely incidental to the mundane slice-of-life interactions between the huge, sprawling casts, so that sounds much more like a recommendation than a caveat to me. I hope it turns out to be true.
As for the combat, the game was developed by Firaxis Games, the people who made the X-Com series among other well-known titles. I didn't get on with X-Com at all but that was because of the setting and the graphics, not the gameplay, which I otherwise liked well enough. I'm far more interested in a tactical RPG based on super-heroes than one centered on a bunch of far-right military types battling faceless aliens with xenophobic and genocidal tendencies to the fore on both sides, a scenario in which I'd just as soon leave them both to it and hope they wipe each other out.
Of course, Midnight Suns isn't a particularly generous gift from Prime. It's been on deep discount almost since it crashed and burned on launch back in December 2022. Currently you can pick it up in the Steam Sale for 85% off, which is a very good discount indeed. The only problem there is that it was a full-price game to begin with so even at that price it'll still cost you $10.
I'd like to play Midnight Suns but based on my logic as outlined in the intro to the post, I wouldn't consider it a "bargain" at 85% off. For that to be true, I'd have had to have had a definite intent to buy and I certainly did not. At a cost of absolutely nothing at all, though, a bargain it sure is!
Whether it's any good or not is another question. I'm optimistic but it's going to have to join the ever-growing line of games waiting to be played. As soon as I get around to playing it, I'll be sure to let everyone know.
The other fresh addition to my stable of games did cost me something. And I very much wasn't about to buy it anyway for the simple reason that until this morning I'd never heard of it.
I was wondering when the Steam Sale was going to end, in case I decided to buy one of the titles on my wishlist (Most likely Sovereign Syndicate at 60% off...). While I was looking at that I thought I might as well check the Deep Discount section, in case they'd added anything interesting late in the day (The sale has two days left to run.) As it turned out, they had. Or quite possibly they hadn't but I'd missed it the last time I checked.
The game I didn't recall being on the list before and which I ended up buying was
Beyond: Two Souls
This one's "a unique psychological action thriller" originally produced for the Playstation 3 all the way back in 2013, although it didn't make it to PC until six years later. It was developer Quantic Dream's follow-up to the much-publicized Heavy Rain, a game even I remember.
That was all back when the idea of video games turning into something that played like movies you could control was all over the mainstream media. There was a lot of talk about new forms of storytelling and immersion and of course VR got in on the act and in the end... what happened?
Nothing much, other than that games continued to become more filmic and everyone got used to it, so they stopped banging on about it like it was the beginning of a new age, I guess. Now we all just expect games to be like that at least some of the time and we only get excited when they do it particularly well. We're long past the dog-walking-on-its-hind-legs stage or I hope we are.
This particular, probably transitional, example features two big Hollywood names - Elliot Page (Viktor from Umbrella Academy) and Willem Defoe (Everything from Platoon to a whole bunch of arthouse films I really like.), which was the main thing that drew me to it. I like both of those actors so if they're in it all the time it's probably going to be worth a look.
Especially at a very attractive 90% off. And the game was only £16.99 to begin with, so that means I had to stump up just £1.69. (That's $2.29 to save you the trouble.) I had an ice-cream yesterday that cost more than that and it lasted me about two minutes. I'm pretty sure I'll get more for my money out of Beyond: Two Souls than that.
It's all relative, isn't it? At least, that's the rationalization.
Anyway, if nothing else, all these new games give me something to write about without having to... y'know... play any of them Following on from yesterday's post, the forecast is for a lengthy spell of very hot, very sunny weather starting today so it might be a while before I get to any of them. Still, nice to know they're there, isn't it?
Well, "there" for a given value of "thereness" that is. I'm sure everyone's been following the progress of the Stop Killing Games campaign in Europe? I haven't. First I heard of it was when Tobold posted about it although Wilhelm might have mentioned it when he was talking about game preservation. Other than that I'd managed to avoid it until now.
My uninformed take on it is that it's entitled twaddle but I'm not going to elaborate because I don't care to give it even the one or two molecules of oxygen a personal blog can muster. I mention it only because, when I bought Beyond: Two Souls on Steam, I had to acknowledge my acceptance of the EULA, the very first line of which read, all in capitals,
THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED. IT IS NOT SOLD.
That seems clear enough. I guess the courts would need to confirm the validity of EULAs with that provision at some point but once that's done, the entire problem - if we're going to call it a problem - goes away.
Doesn't it?
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