The older I got, the more pre-release hype became meaningless noise as far as my purchase decisions are concerned.
Say a game is released and the Auteur dev pulls a Molyneux. "This game is awesome, it'll revolutionize its entire genre! Look, you guys, I can't possibly contain this much enthusiasm! I am a fucking genius and this is The Count of Monte Cristo in Video Game form!"
What I hear is "I'm filled with ambitions which may or may not fall by the wayside by the time the final product comes out! Share in my enthusiasm if you please, but take everything I'm saying with a big freaking boulder of compressed salt!"
I tend to wait several months after a game has been released to consider purchasing it. I read several reviews, watch friends play it and maybe try renting it if I can. If it's on PC, I'll admit to occasionally cracking a game before making a final purchase - it saves me on making hazardous gambits in relation to my hardware and has spared me quite a few bucks, once I found out the game I tried doesn't strike my fancy.
Nowadays, most forms of pre-release hype seem so hilariously desperate (Hello there, Mankind Divided!) that I'm inclined to ignore them entirely. I haven't bought into the pre-order culture in years, with the last Collector's Edition I bought dating back to 2009. All I really need is the game - "exclusive" plastic whatsits are just that, useless cruft used to inflate the base price - and the hardware needed to run it.
That approach has weeded out my library to those games I really do want to play, and that leaves me with a few outliers that don't follow the common opinion. The Sims franchise, Spore, Destiny... I do have games that garnered critical appeal, but I also have games I enjoy no matter how imperfect they might be or how slammed their franchises might be in the court of public opinion.
The problem is that there's always one or two games that you can't bring up in a conversation unless you're fine with being labelled as an instant sheeple or sellout. Unless you're with open-minded types that can understand how the above titles can actually pack some entertainment value.
Say a game is released and the Auteur dev pulls a Molyneux. "This game is awesome, it'll revolutionize its entire genre! Look, you guys, I can't possibly contain this much enthusiasm! I am a fucking genius and this is The Count of Monte Cristo in Video Game form!"
What I hear is "I'm filled with ambitions which may or may not fall by the wayside by the time the final product comes out! Share in my enthusiasm if you please, but take everything I'm saying with a big freaking boulder of compressed salt!"
I tend to wait several months after a game has been released to consider purchasing it. I read several reviews, watch friends play it and maybe try renting it if I can. If it's on PC, I'll admit to occasionally cracking a game before making a final purchase - it saves me on making hazardous gambits in relation to my hardware and has spared me quite a few bucks, once I found out the game I tried doesn't strike my fancy.
Nowadays, most forms of pre-release hype seem so hilariously desperate (Hello there, Mankind Divided!) that I'm inclined to ignore them entirely. I haven't bought into the pre-order culture in years, with the last Collector's Edition I bought dating back to 2009. All I really need is the game - "exclusive" plastic whatsits are just that, useless cruft used to inflate the base price - and the hardware needed to run it.
That approach has weeded out my library to those games I really do want to play, and that leaves me with a few outliers that don't follow the common opinion. The Sims franchise, Spore, Destiny... I do have games that garnered critical appeal, but I also have games I enjoy no matter how imperfect they might be or how slammed their franchises might be in the court of public opinion.
The problem is that there's always one or two games that you can't bring up in a conversation unless you're fine with being labelled as an instant sheeple or sellout. Unless you're with open-minded types that can understand how the above titles can actually pack some entertainment value.