The reason I ask this is that everything the Publishers are doing atm is encouraging me not to buy their products for full price on release. What do I mean? well...

1) The weird pricing structure/release dates etc. Why is buying a product on steam more expensive than buying the physical product (which involves manufactoring, handling, storage and shipping fees etc). From what I can gather the publishing companies set the steam prices themselves and STEAM takes a flat 30% of it. Also why do I have to wait an extra month to get it on STEAM (Only in the UK mind) especially as it makes them more money??

2) With so many regular offers on steam, gog, direct2drive, gamersgate, greenmangaming, etc etc im actually amazed that anyone would actually buy a full price game anymore.

In fact they're coming so often that i've actually held off from buying RAGE, F3AR, Dead Island, Deus EX, all at least 50% off, because I know they will be available again in the XMAS sales. They may even have bigger discounts and hopefully be GOTY versions.

3) The piss poor state of play on release. Look at Rage, Skyrim, SOTS 2 etc. all games I really want but didn't bother to pre-order because I knew they would be problems on release. Skyrim is the one I wanted the most but I know that until the modders fix all the problems then it's not worth playing as it would ruin the experience until everything is fixed.

4) DLC - I have no problem with this if it's done properly. I.e. expansion packs, but stuff like horse barding in Oblivion or the retextured 'new' map packs (old maps from previous games) on MW etc. As it stands at the moment I will wait for the GOTY versions.

5) DRM. With DRM like UBISOFTS 'always on' DRM making a lot of their games unplayable why would you buy their games with the spector of not being able to play your game if there's a problem with your network, their network or any of the network points between?

I also remember buying FM2010 and not being able to 'unlock' my game to play for 2 days after release because SEGA had decided to add an extra layer of DRM to steam by making you log onto yet another website and jump through hoops there. Their servers apparently couldn't handle all the requests and just fell over and died. This problem was made almost amusing by having all the people who had pirated, and cracked the game, posting on the support forums telling us how they were playing the game already with no problems.

6) Consoleitus - Ok this tends to be a general problem with PC games atm. Im not talking about games being optimised for 7 year old technology (it means i don't have to update my PC as often) but stuff like FPS's designed purely for gamepads e.g. with mouse acceleration, auto aim etc. Ridiculous size fonts and locked FOV's. Most of this is corrected by looking at fansites a few months after release for .ini fixes etc etc.


Due to a combination of the above I think I have only bought one full price game in the last 2 years and don't really see me buying any more in the near future. The game I bought was the Witcher 2 from GOG. Mainly due to the worldwide flat price and absence of DRM.

Am I the only one? Has anyone actually bought Skyrim on PC or are you also waiting until it's got it's problems and multitude of DLC out of the way?

Publishers are retarded, always have been. It's the natural way of things - whenever you get a bunch of people controlling X but have very little productive input into X, X gets driven into the ground because of the effort wasted in making the clueless-but-in-charge people happy.

You should buy Skyrim though, it works fine out of the box and the only complaint I've had so far is the initial menu system - see below. I've not noticed any actual game problems, in fact it's frickin' awesome and is well up there with Morrowind in the immersion and fun stakes. Seriously. I have no idea how the people who shat out Oblivion managed to follow up with this but II'm not complaining - and according to steam I've somehow managed to clock up 94 hours played so far and I've no idea how. :o

DLCs, if they were small but regular expansions (and some of them are), would be fine. However DLC to a lot of publishers has the same effect as the word "microtransaction", it short circuits their brain completely, bypassing the competence centre and tapping directly into the primary greed core. That's the only explanation for so many games trumpeting DLC that are either a) things that should have been in the game to begin with and are required for it to work or b) are junk, like a new weapon skin or whatever.

DRM is also stupid but for different reasons. As a base concept I'm ok with it as a futile gesture in a long line of futile gestures - I remember getting the x-wing manual photocopied to get around the copy protection - but in practice the choices publishers keep making on how to implement their DRM have been reliably terrible. All the DRM efforts tend to do is punish those who were stupid enough to buy the game instead of pirating it, because whatever DRM is chosen, there will be a cracked version available days after release. (And in many cases, often before the official release.)
When I'm buying games now, I first do some googling to see what sort of DRM the game has. If it's none, or an inoffensive things like a one time activation/on steam then fine, but if it's one of the silly "we're going to cripple your PCs performance with shitty drivers and rootkits" then I won't buy the game. Top tip number one is never buy a Ubisoft game.

Consolitus is depressing but most of the problem is actually down to piss poor porting. Skyrim is a good example of this actually, as once you're in the game it works nicely but the UI up to that point was apparently designed either by an alien or as part of a concious effort to make a good example of how not to make a menu system. A good chunk of this is because it's designed for an xbox controller but even with one, it's rather arse about face - so it's shit design compounded by shoddy porting work. In Skyrim's case though thats the only real problem with the port though, mainly because Bethesda are now practiced at making intelligible ini files.


Actually I think the main problem is at some point the games industry got too big. There is too much money involved, much of it without good reason. Case in point being Bioware's new starwars MMO, hundreds of millions somehow spent on that though having played the beta (albeit for 30mins) I've no idea what exactly it bought because the game is just a wow clone with a lightsaber - a pleasant clone and I suspect it'll be fun for a month or so but theres no sign of hundreds of millions of dollars there. That sort of insane spending results in far too many people being involved, so things get done both by comittee and by people who really have no idea what is going on, all resulting in worthless DLCs, microtransactions that make no sense or are actively detrimental to the long term interests of the game (for MMOs), thoughtless code porting and self-defeating DRM implementations.

For me there are very few games I'll buy at release and they're all ones that I'm both interested in and are made by people who have yet to fuck it up completely. That makes it a short list indeed - in fact release date buys I can think of in the last few years have pretty much been limited to the Witcher (1&2), Mass Effect 2 (got 1 in a sale, thought it was awesome) and Skyrim. (Liked FO:NV and the fluff for Skyrim made it seem much more a Morrowind than an Oblivion - and it is!)

Oh in my massive whine I forgot one of the main reasons for it!!

7) ORIGIN (spyware) - I see im going to miss a fair few games due to this little baby. My problems with this are many. Im not sure if im more pissed about the fact that they constantly scan my PC for information (another process to slow things down), or that they sell this information to anyone willing to pay, or that they're so smug about it. "Don't like it then don't install our games!!" "It's not spyware because we actually tell you what were doing somewhere within all that text you all scroll past in the EULA/TOCA!!""

Ah fuk off! I got into the SWTOR beta, read the ORIGIN EULA and instantly cancelled.

Oh, on Skyrim still...in case you're tempted by madness, don't get the PS3/xbox versions unless you don't have a functioning gaming PC any more. It'll run fine on both consoles but this means it also doesn't need a ninja PC whilst the mods etc will only be available on the PC. And TES games especially tend to have some great mods down the line!

I will def get it on PC. Won't be until next year after all the mods to take all the rubbish out make an appearance (the auto loot plants made alchemy in Oblivion almost fun).

This is ofc assuming it doesn't get a massive discount in the xmas/new years sales.

Probably will do, you know what Steam are like with their sales. I tend to just ignore alchemy, the core system itself is just rubbish as you end up looking in your inventory, quaffing potions all the time. Having to chug healing potions constantly and apply poison every swing is stupid, so I just said no.

It would be nice if they had just stolen the alchemy system from the Witcher, so a variety of long term buffs and weapon oils etc but very little instant-one-shot potions, but oh well.

I've been playing it like Thief, albiet with less pickpocketing (can't be bothered) and more murder (no blackjack). It's fun stealthing around, shooting and knifing people.

/e Seems you can't link youtube without it embedding the video...

Mass Effect 3 - Only on Origin!

I thought it was the digital deluxe executive luxury collectors edition (whatever they're calling it now) that was exclusive, not the standard game?

Not sure, but I've read you won't be able to get the game at all from Steam.

Me and Ste just got Shogun TW 2. I'm asking for a refund. Talk about bugged to fuck - I only got it to play the co-op campaign (been waiting for 10 years for this option) and it just crashes out every other turn. Game goes out of sync, and the save game files get corrupt. It takes so long to reload the game we managed about four turns in two hours at best!

Why release a game that's bugged - then release loads of DLC instead of fixing it!