Yes, I use those options to decide to whom my money has to go and I understand that the unwanted games might be considered gifts, but I still perceive some kind of devaluing process.
For example, those games that I’m not interested in could have been appreciated by fans of those game genres, so a first problem seems to me that these games reach people who don’t care for them.
Furthermore, even when the “right” people would receive those games, they would receive them for free, reinforcing my image of a super-productions of games, so high that they are even given for free and people accumulate duplicate copies of them. It’s like deflation.
In my opinion it’s fair to compare how games were purchased back then with how we purchase them now. For the same reason, we should compare what piracy allowed us to do when we were kids with what piracy allows us to do today.
If you make this kind of comparisons, I’m sure that you’ll conclude that modern technology has removed friction and that the cost of games (either purchased of pirated) has decreased.
To acquire a pirated copy of a game I had to physically search for it among friends, ask for the game, physically go somewhere to get it, providing a blank or recycled floppy disk, etc. The entire process costed time and a few bucks, but today I can just download a copy of Thimbleweed Park from Torrent in a few minutes: the quantity of time and money required to get a pirated game has undoubtedly decreased.
In the same way, the super-production of games that we observe today and the fact that some new ways of getting games include the chance of acquiring goods that we didn’t even ask for, shows that the way we buy game today is profoundly different from how we bought them decades ago.
And even if we want to compare the games acquired today through a lawful method with the games that we acquired decades ago with piracy, I still have to conclude that in no way the result of my piracy activity in the nineties would have created a pile of multiple copies of games that I never wanted to have. This phenomenon is happening only now and it could contribute to the devaluation of games even more.
Personally, I don’t have this impression. It’s true that today there are a lot more games produced but I think that it’s also true that we have new tools to help us to find games that could be interesting to us; for example the recommendation systems in marketplaces like Steam.
It’s very rare for me to miss a new adventure game being released on Steam, because Steam tells me about new games that could match with my preferences.
It’s still sad to know that movies are not sold in large pay-what-you-want bundles just like games and ebooks are.
You mean to give a look at the movie industry?
I didn’t know that, thanks for mentioning it. This could be a game changer for me: I would immediately deselect the games that I don’t want and I wouldn’t feel sad for seeing games treated as cheap superfluous stuff.
The charity element in Humble Bundle is still a good reason to give money to them and I have also given more money than it was necessary to get the games I was interested in. I really would like to have a way to tell them which games of a bundle I don’t want.
(I played that a bit. I liked its atmosphere)
I accept sales. Maybe the current status of the market “forces” a bit the developers to put their games periodically on sale, and this is an aspect of game development that I find very grim but getting a discount is OK for me. Sometimes I pay full price, sometimes I pay more than full price, sometimes I pay less.
What is not OK for me is being aware of the fact that games that I never wanted have reached my library and will never be appreciated by me. It forces me to treat those games like unwanted garbage and I feel guilty and disrespectful for that.
Even if they are games belonging to a genre that you don’t like?