Category: Season 2

The Fear of Missing Out. It has helped companies sell stuff to compulsive shoppers for a long time, and it is currently one of the things ruining video games at large. Some of the most played games in the market today use FOMO tactics to drive sales in their cash shops. And these cash shops are not limited to just free-to-play games. Even games that require an upfront pric e have fully stocked cash shops that let players spend obscene amounts of money, mostly out of the fear that they would not be able to buy these items again. I will talk about these items themselves in another episode, but in today’s video, let us look the most common FOMO tactics used by publishers and how you can avoid them.

Do you own the games you buy, and is it important that you do? In this episode we will try to tackle the issue of game ownership, and look at why it is slowly becoming inevitable that consumers will no longer truly own video games like they once did.

Pre-ordering video games is a touchy topic in the community. In general, it is agreed that pre-ordering games these days is a bad idea, because no matter how reputable the game’s developer is, there is no guarantee that a game will launch without any performance issues or will actually be enjoyable to play. The opposing argument for this is simply, “it’s my money and I will do what I want with it”. In this episode, let’s look at why pre-orders are a thing in the first place, and what are the pros and cons of pre-ordering video games.

In this video, I’ll be trying a different approach to presenting information, but there’s also a reason why there’s an old game playing in the background. I’ll get to that later. For now, let’s go into today’s topic, which is patient gaming.

I’ve been working on this video for a few days, and co-incidentally, it is coming out at the same time when there is a fresh debate happening in the industry about the feasibility of game subscriptions. But let me not get into that right now. The purpose of this video is not to talk about whether game subscriptions are good or bad. There’s no right or wrong answer, because every consumer has their own needs, and every developer has their own results from using these subscriptions. So let’s not spend time discussing that. This video is simply to list the sheer number of choices a consumer has in early 2024. Just one note before we start, since we already have a lot of subscriptions to cover, I won’t be going deeper into each tier of each subscription; most of the time I will just talk about the highest tier available for each subscription to look at the best value it offers.