Yah.. I agree that restaurants are different animals. XD

That being said, it wasn’t impulse buy for me with GW2. I believed in Anet, and that’s why I made the purchase. I’m afraid that I no longer do. I don’t feel cheated, I just feel disappointed and betrayed. (loldrama)

I know the response has been almost overwhelmingly positive, but for me, with GW2, Anet took out or changed near every single feature I *adored* when it came to GW. So much so that it’s unrecognisable to me. And that’s where the unhappehs are coming from.

If I came to the game fresh, I’m sure I’d not mind it. Like oh look, another new toy. How kyoot. *Twiddle with it for a while*

But right now, I feel like I was dating Maggie Q and she went, ‘Imma go make myself even hawtter and moar uber!’

…and she came back as Pam Anderson.

(Also, I wonder why I see all computer games as women. I always have. O.o In fact, I uh, review them as… women. Looool. Yes yes, I know it’s not at all PC or enlightened or… Don’t hate meee!)

Local restaurants are a different sort of business. Yours sounds great. We have a little pizza place near here which is run by the owner and family and we go there almost once a week or so, and the guy knows what we like and gives us a free glass of amaretto with the bill. I don’t even like amaretto (but obv will drink it if its free )but I do like the feeling of being a regular.

Sorry you weren’t having a fun time with GW2, it could still change quite a bit before launch though.

They want the things they like to prosper.

There’s this amazing family-owned restaurant 5 minutes walk from my apartments. She has the best calamari I have ever eaten, and wonderful chilli crab, and her food is so *cheap*. So er yeah, on account of it being so ridiculously cheap – sure Auntie, you ask this price, I pay this price.

But I’d be more than happy to pay at least 50% more of her current asking price.

Make it 100% more and I’d move from ‘happy’ to ‘willing if I had a reason such as giving a friend a treat’.

Maybe nugget is naive – but somehow I feel that in the long run… happy is more money than willing.

…perhaps a better way to put it is, a good market price is the price people are *happy* to pay for something?

It’s not the same as *willingness*. In Jade Dynasty, I was *willing* to pay for a flying mount in order to progress, because you *have* to, and I wanted to see more of the world. So I was willing. But was I happy? Hell NO! I had an inordinate resentment of that $20 I perceived as being ‘forced’ to pay, even though I was ‘willing’. I mean I must have been willing, since I paid it, no? XD

If I felt anywhere as close to the OOooOoH SHINY initial feeling that Guild Wars gave me, I’d be *happy* to have pre-purchased. Instead, unlike what’s floating around the general MMOSphere and blogosphere, I’m bitterly, bitterly disappointed. If I could cancel the pre-purchase, I would – but I can’t, I bought it from ArenaNet.

So perhaps the difficulty is that people put different prices on happiness vs willingness, and neither may be enough for the creators to break even on. (Thinking of indies here.)

It’s a subtle, but important, distinction.

And you’re not interpreting the economist correctly, for this situation. For an item with effectively infinite supply, like a copy of a game distributed digitally without cost, items are priced to maximize revenue. For example, if you can sell a game to x people at $40, and to 2.5x people at $20, then you’ll price the game at $20, to make more money. If you can only sell to 1.8x people at $20, then it makes more sense to sell at $40. The value of the game itself doesn’t change.

Of course, everyone who actually does buy the game believes/hopes that the game is worth more than what they’re paying. Otherwise, they would not buy it.

Probably my favourite game in history, the Ocarina of Time, cost me £35. Of course it’s worth noting that when I say “cost me” I really mean “cost mum”.

Looking at inflation over the last 20 years, which is what I’m referencing, the price of games (and entertainment in general) really hasn’t increased. In fact, if we line it up directly with inflation, games have dropped dramatically in price. The problem isn’t electronic media which is obviously cheap to produce, nor is it the intellectual property which EA want to develop and protect.

It’s how we view one game against another and subjectively assess its comparative value.

For crying out loud, I completed Mickey Mouse’s Castle of Illusion on the first day I played it, yet it cost (again) £30. If I compare that to what I paid for Diablo 3, then I can’t possibly complain about the £45 that took. Yet, in the current genesis of games, I think Diablo 3 is hideously overpriced and gave me nowhere near my money’s worth.

I suppose it depends on what you’re comparing prices to, and why.

Of the four games I’ve bought at full price fairly recently (Skyrim, Guild Wars 2, Warlock Master of the Arcane, and Towns) I’ve been very happy with all of them, even though GW2 is still in beta, Towns is in alpha, and frankly Warlock should still be considered late beta. Same could be said of initial Skyrim release too, which was a bit buggy.

I wasn’t very pleased with having to pre-purchase GW2 in order to check out the beta, but it is actually a better game in its current state than many others are after release + patches. Towns was discounted a few dollars, but I paid more than double what it cost in some indie bundle (with other games!), that I didn’t know about until later. Having a blast with it so far, more than most AAA games and am happy to send some extra money to the devs.

I still buy most games only during 75% off sales, but most of those games I would never buy at anything close to their original prices no matter what. So I don’t think Steam/GoG/GG sales have really changed my buying habits other than I’ve bought stuff through them that would have been items I searched for in the bargain bin (stores or Amazon.com) long after release. Steam, GoG.com, and GamersGate just make it more convenient to get them long after they are gone from stores. I did buy both Witcher games (still not played yet) at mid-range discounts, partly to support CD Projekt RED/GoG.com and partly because I think I’ll really enjoy them. I would have bought Witcher 2 at full price from GoG.com, but was holding off until I actually played the first game some, but then picked it up at half price during a sale anyway.