So I have a philosophical gaming question for you.
Visual novels are admittedly pretty niche in the gaming market as a whole.
If they don’t sell well enough sequels don’t happen.
So, as a patient gamer, do I pay full price for these games to support further development even though that means buying less games.
Or do I wait till they go for deep discount like I have been and have therefore been able to spread my limited support around more.
If my end goal is making sure these games keep being made as much as possible, what’s my best option?
I am all for the patient gaming mentality and typically wait until games are 50%+ off before I think of purchasing.
Looking for opinions on my best course of action. Thanks!
I think that, if you have the resources to support that niche, which the savings from cheap offers hopefully allowed for, and you want to see it grow, it’s worth paying more.
It’s a dichotomy. You have to decide what’s more important. Showing support for a niche game maker, or saving money and getting a stable version of the game.
I mean, visual novel games are VERY hard to make them unstable. In the case of a visual novel, it will probably have the same stability whether you buy it at release or 20 years later (if its even still for sale). It might only get one or two updates that entire time, and probably to correct typos.
That’s a great point and I never looked at it as a dichotomy.
However, bugs aren’t something I typically run into due to the nature of the simplicity of VNs. It’s more of a question of do I give max support to my favorite developers or spread the support around in hopes of finding new projects from different developers besides my favorite.
The way you laid it out though helps me ask the question of which of those two is more important to me.
Asking the real questions!
Personally I am very willing to pay full price and even occasionally buy pointless extras I don’t care about if it helps reward their passion for a project I see as a valuable contribution. I’ll even pre-order or provide them some free advertising in some cases. Especially if its the sort of dev where it seems like their long-term survival might be in question.
I feel like you can usually tell when the dev needs money or doesn’t.
It’s quite easy, actually. I usually play everything years after release, however, if I’m really into a certain series, I’ll buy it right away. If I don’t care for the wait, I probably don’t care enough about whether or not a sequel is being made.
Of course that only works if you don’t get hyped easily. I play a lot of games, but usually only 1-2 per year are released within said year.
