Why Buying Games at Launch Is a Fool's Errand

2011 has been a crazy year for big-name game releases. Recently, we've seen a new Battlefield game and Arkham City is already out. We've also got Elder Scrolls: Skyrim and Modern Warfare 3 coming out this week, and that's just scratching the surface of all the great games that have either been released or will be on retail shelves in the next week or two.

[partner id="arstechnica"]Unless you have a huge budget for games — not to mention mountains of free time and a very understanding significant other — you're going to have some hard choices to make.

We want to help. Buying games when they're released is a scam: The prices of video games drop within weeks of release, and the second editions of games released to retail often include what used to be for-pay downloadable content. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when trying to decide what games to buy now, and when to wait.

Let me put this bluntly: It is my job to understand the ins and outs of video game launches, and I take this very seriously. I study press releases, I have good relationships with the people in retail who sell video games, and I talk to the publishers and developers behind those games on a daily basis. That being said, I have no idea which shop you needed to go to preorder Arkham City in order to get the Batman outfit where he's wearing the diaper because Kevin Smith said Batman peed himself in one terrible issue of that comic that I never read.

The same thing happened with Mortal Kombat, a game that offered a ton of preorder exclusives, new characters, and classic fatalities you could get by buying it at certain retailers or paying extra.

You can buy the Gears of War 3 Season Pass right now for $30, and this will make sure you get every piece of for-pay DLC for the game the moment it comes out, even though you don't really know what you're buying yet. What we do know is that there is a good amount of DLC coming for the game, and if you buy it before you know what it is, you can save money. This isn't rare these days.

But why pay for all this content now? There will come a time, most likely during the holiday season, when the publisher releases a version of the game that will come with all this DLC included in the package, and that whole mess will be likely be sold for less than the base game cost at launch. Imagine that! All you need is a little patience and you can get a much larger game, with much more content, for much less money. The more content has been announced, the higher the chances of all that for-pay stuff being collected for one last retail release so the publisher can squeeze the last bit of money from its game.

The rule is simple: The more DLC released for a title, the better the chances you'll save money by waiting and buying the game when the entire thing is collected for retail. You can opt out of every stupid nickel-and-dime scheme just by waiting a few short months.

This is a simple one. The more complex the game, the more likely the game will ship with bugs. Do you remember the launch of the latest Fallout? The game was buggy as all heck, and no one seemed to care. It was loved by critics, it sold well, but it was a mess at launch. Everyone saw this coming, which is the likeliest reason for the lack of outcry: We all knew what we were getting into.

It's the same thing with online games. The launch of Battlefield 3 may have been a mess, but we all knew it was coming. There has never been a Battlefield game that launched with solid online play, and it has always taken weeks for the game to be whipped into a playable shape. Those of us who suffer through it do so because we love the game, while the smart money hangs back to allow us to be frustrated by the unfinished nature of the online play.

These two rules are simple: The larger the game, the more complex the play. The more important the online play, the more likely the game will have major issues at launch that will require days, if not weeks, of patches. This is another case where it is better to wait.

One thing you need to keep an eye on if you do wait to buy games you'll be playing online: the health of the online community. Be sure to check for working servers, and also make sure those servers are populated. A $2 multiplayer game won't do you any good if there is no one to play against.

Let's take a look at Skyrim, a game that's going to ship on the PC this week with a full set of modding tools coming soon after. The community is going to get to work as soon as it can, and the already-impressive graphics and mechanics are going to be made over and improved by a legion of amateur developers. Part of the fun of the PC versions of Elder Scrolls games are the multitudes of fun modifications that you can download and add to the game.

This is a simple one: By waiting a few weeks or months to buy a game that has a large and dedicated modding community, you give the Internet time to go to work on the work and improve on the game and give you a number of choices about how to play. At launch you're stuck with the developer's vision, but it won't take long until there are a number of well-known modifications that make the game even better.

PC games tend to lose their value quicker than console games, and sales happen almost monthly on Steam. You don't need much patience to find the better deals here: Duke Nukem Forever launched on June 14 on the PC at the full retail price. In September the price dropped to $20. In October the price was cut in half for a temporary sale, making the game $10. Not bad at all.

Yes, it's nice to be part of the group that buys a game at launch and you get to talk about it and explore it together, but that's not nearly as much fun when the game is utter dreck. In the four months it took Duke Nukem Forever to lose almost all its value, you had time to read not only the professional reviews, which were dismal, but also the the forums and comments by fans of the series, many of whom liked the game just fine. By waiting you gained perspective on the quality on the game, and if you chose to buy it, you saved a significant amount of money.

Big-name games are nothing compared to independent releases when it comes to price drops. The games may launch at anywhere from $5 to $30, but those prices are going to be slashed in half, or even more, in just a few weeks' time. Or the games will be bundled with other indie games at a monstrous savings.

I know we like to support those who make indie games, but consider this: Many of the companies that make these games are more than happy to take $1 from a hundred people instead of $5 from 10 people. Those are numbers I just made up, so don't take them literally, but Valve has been very open about how much money indies can make from selling their games at low prices in bulk, and we've heard from developers who have found success with this strategy.

In 2009, Valve showed off this data that linked sales with an increase in revenue:

• 10 percent sale = 35 percent increase in sales (real dollars, not units shipped)
• 25 percent sale = 245 percent increase in sales
• 50 percent sale = 320 percent increase in sales
• 75 percent sale = 1,470 percent increase in sales

So you're not shafting anyone in this situation. If anything, indie devs need to launch their games at a higher price so that 75 percent off sale looks more enticing.

All games are going to drop in price in the weeks after release these days, but you can use these questions to make some educated guesses about what games should be bought at launch. Let's take a look at two games: Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. If you can only afford one of them, we know that Skyrim is a little more complicated; it will launch with modding tools, and many of us will be buying it on PC.

Both games will drop in price, but Skyward Sword will likely be the same game in two months. Skyrim will have multiple bug fixes, a selection of modifications, and will most likely lose value on the PC faster. It makes more sense to wait on Skyrim and buy the Zelda game at launch.

This is all subjective, but the point is there are hints about which games will be better values in the future. Don't feel bad if you can't afford every game you want right now — no one can unless they're comfortably wealthy and have more free time than a Hilton sister — and by waiting you'll be rewarded with games that are better, have more features, and cost less.

See Also:- Stalking the Dragon: A Skyrim Journal

• Hands-On: Diving Deep Into Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword