Black Friday: Great or Grating?

Black Fridays definitely a thing now. No matter what you think about the American tradition coming our way, it can’t be ignored. Last year I was quite the fan. I picked up three or four games and told the wife she was buying me them for Christmas. Maximising the present budget in style, keeping romance and the joy of giving truly alive. 

My purchases last year included Tomb Raider for £10. It had been released 22 months earlier. Tearaway for £20, it had come out in September and had pretty much flopped so the price drop was expected. Until Dawn for about £20 I think, it was three months old at that point. By now you’re wondering if I’m just gloating about my haul but really this is paragraph is just verbal foreplay for the point I’ll eventually get to. 

Check the black Friday sales of 2016 and you’ll see discounts on the likes of Dishonored 2, Watch_Dogs 2, Call of Duty, etc These games have been out for weeks... Not months. All three examples released in November, one of them has been out for ten days. If I had pre-ordered and bought on release day I’d be mightily pissed. 

How many folk did just that? Not that many it seems… I almost wrote a blog on Monday after the weekly sales data came out and yet again a new release was making headlines for how poorly it performed. Watch_Dogs 2 opened with sales of around 80,000. Its predecessor had opened with around 380,000. That’s quite the drop. There could be many reasons for that (including the lukewarm reception to the first game post-release) but I don’t think I’m mad when I draw a connection to the Black Friday sales.

Was it always going to go on sale 10 days after release? Doubtful. It’s likely that the slow launch combined with the marketing blitz every retailer has for black Friday created an opportunity. If it had launched well then it wouldn’t be cheaper on this day. If it wasn’t for the approach of black Friday however, would it have launched better? It’s impossible to say. But then this is an opinion piece so I’ll say yes. Factually proven with stuff from my head. 

So yeah everyone seems to have waited, and if it’s going to save you money then why wouldn’t you? I’m waiting even longer than you, so tight-fisted have I become with my gaming purchases. My chrimbo gaming requests are Deus Ex (released in august for £45, I got for £20) and Ratchet and Clank (released in april for £30, as of yet I haven’t seen a better deal than £20). These November games I’m blogging about will wait to 2017 when they’re cheaper again and I’ve cleared a bit more of my never-ending list of stuff I’ve yet to play.

The only problem with all this saving… Are these games now considered flops? Is there less chance of a Watch_Dogs and Dishonored 3? That’s got to be a concern. The gaming market is in a weird place in which it seems to more successful than ever but yet studio closures and job layoffs seem more frequent. Budgets are escalating and publishers are playing it safe. The main retail releases all seem to stick to standard templates (everything’s either open world or an online fps) whilst if you want variety and creativity you need to embrace the indies (read my last blog!! Please). There’s no middle ground. Dishonored is an exception, and the first game was blooming brilliant. Hopefully the sequel does well enough to warrant more of its kind, or at least show publishers that not every game has to be about driving around cities and machine gunning everything in sight. 

As admitted already I am part of the problem. I’ve bought very few games this year within release week and used vouchers for most of them. More frugality. The others included two Nintendo titles. I wish I understood how they do it but there games don’t come down in price. An HD remake of a ten year old Zelda was released in March this year. Quick check online and it costs £2 more than Dishonored 2 which released on November 11^th. Amazing. They love their ‘evergreen’ titles and seem to keep their big releases in the charts for yonks. Heck one of their Christmas releases is a slightly updated version of a near three year old game. Launch week performance means squat to Nintendo because their games will be charting for months on end. It seems the most sensible approach and weirdly it encourages me to buy day one because I know waiting won’t benefit me financially. Crafty.

So that was a blog. I can’t think of a witty sentence to end it with so just go back to shopping online and buying all of the things. Just don’t be complaining when that game you love but bought for a shilling doesn’t get a sequel. It’s all your fault. And mine. Enjoy.