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From the Forums: Do You Buy Games When They’re New and Hot, or Wait for Sales, Updates, Etc?

TouchArcade forum member Klink posted a thread yesterday morning which has been gaining a bit of traction in our community discussing whether or not people prefer to buy games when they’re brand new and red hot, or wait it out a bit and see what happens with updates, whether or not it lives up to the hype, etc.

Here’s his original post:

When a hot new game is released I’m always conflicted if I should buy it right away or wait for the dust to settle. It’s fun to get caught up in the hype and participate in the lively discussions in the forums. However it can be frustrating because more often then not new releases require several updates to clean up the bugs. Also sometimes games just don’t live up to there own hype.

indexI’ve got a skewed perspective on this, as here at TouchArcade we buy basically every game that gets released on the App Store that looks vaguely interesting for coverage purposes, but as a general consumer, I can definitely see the struggle. iOS games that launch with total game-breaking bugs seem reasonably rare these days, particularly from well known developers, but there’s definitely been a bunch of games that have been hyped up hard in our upcoming games forum to be released and end up being just alright.

Buy Button - BlueThe thread goes on with people responding saying you should buy things you’re interested in early to help out the developer, as obviously if you’re paying the (for example) $4.99 initial asking price, that’s 5x the financial support you’re giving them than buying it when it’s 99¢… Buuuuut, at the same time, it’s tricky because at this point in the game I’d guess most people reading TouchArcade have entire pages of games on their device they either haven’t launched at all, or barely completed the tutorial. That’s how my Steam library is, anyway. Hundreds of games, most bought on sale, and the vast majority I haven’t even downloaded.

So, dear readers, where do your iOS game purchasing habits lie? Do you race to buy games when they hit the App Store on Wednesday night so you can hop in to the forum discussions and be the first to experience them, or do you wait it out and buy games later? Let us know in the forums!