Positech Games Boss Calls For An End To Deep-Discount Sales

[gigantor21]

Yeah...I don't have any obligation as a consumer to maintain the $60 price points that publishers want us to buy at so badly. Most of their games simply aren't worth that much--a lesson I've been on the wrong side of too many times to count. I've walked away from plenty of games I've bought at or near full price because I simply didn't have enough fun with them to justify what I spent. Thankfully I was able to either trade them in or sell them to recoup--two more things that I don't care about publishers not wanting us to do either.

It's on them to convince me to do otherwise with the quality of their product. I bought the original FFX new AND pre-ordered and bought FFXHD just last week; I bought DMC3 new and bought the Special Edition later just to play as Vergil. I'll happily pay ABOVE full price or re-buy games for multiple platforms...if they're good enough.

 

[Britishfan]

Sorry, but customers decide how much something is worth to them, not manufacturers. If customers think your game is only worth $5-$10 and won't pay more then it's up to you to prove it's worth more than that. If you can't convince your customer to pay what you want them to pay then either your product isn't good enough or your pricing and business model is wrong.

 

[gorfias]

it hollows out the industry: You have major triple-A launches like Titanfall on one end, and low-budget indie stuff on the other, with no sustainable middle ground.

My own personal experience:

I have a backlog of a ton of game I would never have purchased, but for super low prices, I'm thinking, "why not".

The industry must make triple A games if they want me to pay full price, and that does happen. With my huge backlog of games, like "Commando 3, Destination Berlin", I know when something special is coming out and get it at full price. I just paid $60 for Infamous 2nd Son as it is offering me something really new: PS4 dedicated gameplay in an open world.

With my huge backlog of games like "Jason and the Argonauts", that I got for a song, I still paid full price for:

Assissin's Creed 4 for PS4
The Last of Us
Batman Arkham Origins
GTA V
Madden 25

Mostly, these sales simply get me to buy things I might otherwise have ignored, or already own for another system (Saints Row 3, Batman Arkham City), but are so inexpensive, might as well multi-platorm.

 

[PirateRose]

I think it's the games themselves devaluing their worth and making people wait for sales. Why would I want to blow $60 on new game when even my favorite long running series games have been so disappointing to me lately.

When I read this guys comments, to me all I hear is "I want to put out low quality stuff and charge $60, because I worked hard on it and deserve $60. Why should the spending power be in the hands of the consumer!"

Sorry, supply and demand doesn't work that way.

Physical copies of Mass Effect 3 dropped to $9 at Walmart in about a years time after it's release as evidence to how much of a disappointment the game was. The store I work at, at that time, still had unsealed boxes of ME3 in the back with the "Do not release until March 6, 2012" stickers. Mass Effect 2 when it first came out dropped to $29 in about a years time and didn't drop below $19 till after ME3's release. Even ME1, used at Gamestop, was still $29 until after ME3 came out and forced it to the $9 bin within a year. Meanwhile, Skyrim physical copies, a game that came out about 4-5 months before ME3, was still $59 a year later, still $49 used up until they released the pack with all the DLC.

He should be pointing fingers at the incredibly high bar games like Skyrim have put out there, that even with goofy glitches like break dancing dragons are overlooked. However, I think Bethesda does have one edge. They allow themselves enough time to think their games over and release a good product for sale.

 

[rofltehcat]

We don?t play beyond the first 10%. There is not a single game in my steam collection I?ve finished. Not ONE. And I almost always buy full price. There are many games I?ve played for under 30 minutes, some for under 10 minutes. They may have wonderful endings, who cares? I have another X games sat there I can experience the opening level of instead. And yet? gamers insist on 50 hours of gameplay. Cue 49 hours of back-tracking and filler, because game devs KNOW that 90%+ of buyers will never see the game ending anyway?

This right here is the problem. How can he possibly comment on this when he is coming from a point like that?

I think we could just skip this and say that he should just spend less money on games. That way he doesn't feel the need to complain about game pricing because he doesn't need so much money to buy them and thus has more time to actually play all the games he paid for.

But instead, I'll share my thoughts:
Sales are good. They do not actually decrease the amount of money we spend on games (note the plural) because we'll buy a much larger quantity of games. It also allows people of lower income to take part in gaming instead of spending their money elsewhere. It also spreads out the money better between developers of different sizes because people will buy reduced games in addition to the full priced games they know they will get a lot of entertainment from (e.g. CoD), thus allowing for smaller developers to exist and flourish.
Regarding sales as destructive really only works when you consider customers to have infinite amounts of money or willing to spend much larger amounts of money on games than they currently are. Because otherwise not doing sales just leads to smaller amounts of money spent on games or roughly the same amount of money spent but dispersed much worse.

If computer models couldn't be influenced (and/or designed to depict desired states), I'd suggest that guy made a computer model of the games market. After all he is already making Democracy games so it should be easy for him.

 

[Atmos Duality]

So I ask again where's the disaster? All I see at the moment is a come one come all feeding frenzy with more successful games than ever before in the history of gaming.

There is no disaster. Last I checked, the games industry is still hovering around the 80-90 billion USD value range.
It's not the 100 billion USD cap it had before, but that was back in 2010 when people were still ignorantly calling the business "recession-proof".

That was a global market spanning event that reduced the value of the industry; not the practices of the industry itself.
If that couldn't sink the game market, I seriously doubt steam sales and hundle bundles will either.

 

[Hap2]

I'm seeing a lot of posts justifying "thriftiness" with "X game is shit, therefore it's not valuable". Alright, fair enough. I wouldn't pay $60 either for a game that's a tedious waste of what little time I have to game.

However, many of these posts reek of people being spoiled by the industry, defending a practice that may, in fact, jeopardize the ability of developers to make the high-tech games many gamers expect for their powerful consoles and PCs.

(And before anyone gets into the rant about how "gameplay is better than graphics", let me point out that making a complex game can take a lot of coding and testing to create features many gamers expect to function properly, such as advanced AI, combat mechanics, movement, etc. Hardware isn't just for visuals after all.)

Rarely has anyone tried to justify not spending $30, $40, $60, etc., for a game they consider excellent. Yet some people still refuse to buy at anything more than $10. I heard someone say, "how much I pay for a game doesn't affect how much I value it intrinsically." That's nice. Let's see, though, how far your "love" for the game pays the rent of the man/woman who spent 60-80 hours a week to code the game you paid $5 for.

I get it, funds are tight. I'm a journalist who works part-time at a vintage video game store. I'm not rolling in wads of cash either. But as a journalist, I'm interested in understanding things, as best I can, before judging.

Harris has a point: constantly buying games only when they are at the lowest value could hollow out the industry. Once people get used to something that appears to benefit them constantly, it becomes hard to reverse it. Look at the current consumption rates of goods in the U.S. - gas, electricity, water, etc. Americans (and not just them either), aren't holding themselves back when it comes to consuming things, even if it's to their detriment: gas becomes more expensive, global warming continues and threatens crops, fresh water supplies, the economy (cleaning up after more powerful destructive weather events), etc. People get angry when you raise taxes, even when it's to provide the goods and services they feel they're entitled to.

People's sense of valuing things is skewed and often outright broken. Let's look at an example:

I buy and sell vintage games as part of my living. Unless you're a collector, computer-savvy or a dealer, you won't likely know what some games are worth off-hand. You'd be surprised how many people come into my store expecting older NES and SNES titles selling for a couple of bucks, (in their minds: old = less valuable). People want official game carts of Super Mario Kart, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, etc., for less than $10 a pop, when such games come in less than half a dozen times a year (if lucky), and sell regularly for $40, $100 and $70, respectively.

Now here's the thing, I pay good money for those games, because they are so rare and desirable. Not everyone is going to buy them at that price, but someone usually does (the games often last less than a week).

I get people asking for deals all the time, both buying and selling. "Can I get $20 for all these" sports games that I just told you are broke, worth less 25 cents a piece, and will sit on my shelf for years? "Would you take $40" for this game I paid almost that much for, and sells within a month for twice that amount?

One tried justifying a game's selling price should be less because he didn't think it was that great of a game and wasn't as rare as something like Earthbound for SNES, despite the game having a list of customers looking for it a mile long. The game lasted less than a week at $100: Conker's Bad Fur Day for N64.

In the end, I don't think many people are going to understand, or care to - it's a very human thing: denying the negative, focusing only on the positive. People want and want, but don't want to be told they're going to have to pay for it. What people seem to forget is it's always a two-way street in situations like this - yes, the developers are going to have to adapt to the changing markets of gaming; however, it shouldn't be denied that the customer has a big influence on what becomes the norm in the industry. Buy games for $10 or less if you must, but don't expect the quality of the games or the price to stay that way forever.

 

[mhb77]

While I disagree with Harris about sales I think it's worth pointing out that Positech's most expensive game is $25. It seems like they are trying to move to a system where their games are priced reasonably from launch and then more or less hold that price, instead of the current system where you need to decide between paying way too much at launch, waiting a couple of months for a reasonable price or waiting a year to get it dirt cheap.

Positech's model is actually sorta customer friendly. It's not very good for people that are on the fence about getting the game in the first place, but it's great for the fans because they can buy the game at launch for a fair price instead of getting screwed for being an early adopter.

 

[Spearmaster]

I'm seeing a lot of posts justifying "thriftiness" with "X game is shit, therefore it's not valuable". Alright, fair enough. I wouldn't pay $60 either for a game that's a tedious waste of what little time I have to game.

However, many of these posts reek of people being spoiled by the industry, defending a practice that may, in fact, jeopardize the ability of developers to make the high-tech games many gamers expect for their powerful consoles and PCs.

(And before anyone gets into the rant about how "gameplay is better than graphics", let me point out that making a complex game can take a lot of coding and testing to create features many gamers expect to function properly, such as advanced AI, combat mechanics, movement, etc. Hardware isn't just for visuals after all.)

Rarely has anyone tried to justify not spending $30, $40, $60, etc., for a game they consider excellent. Yet some people still refuse to buy at anything more than $10. I heard someone say, "how much I pay for a game doesn't affect how much I value it intrinsically." That's nice. Let's see, though, how far your "love" for the game pays the rent of the man/woman who spent 60-80 hours a week to code the game you paid $5 for.

Well its to bad that someone buying games is not a charity for game developers. If someone created a product that is not worth the asking price it is not the duty of the consumer to pay asking price just to keep the company above water, its the duty of the developer to go out of business and make way for one of the up and coming developers who may actually be able to make a game worth $60...economics.

I get it, funds are tight. I'm a journalist who works part-time at a vintage video game store. I'm not rolling in wads of cash either. But as a journalist, I'm interested in understanding things, as best I can, before judging.

Harris has a point: constantly buying games only when they are at the lowest value could hollow out the industry. Once people get used to something that appears to benefit them constantly, it becomes hard to reverse it. Look at the current consumption rates of goods in the U.S. - gas, electricity, water, etc. Americans (and not just them either), aren't holding themselves back when it comes to consuming things, even if it's to their detriment: gas becomes more expensive, global warming continues and threatens crops, fresh water supplies, the economy (cleaning up after more powerful destructive weather events), etc. People get angry when you raise taxes, even when it's to provide the goods and services they feel they're entitled to.

People's sense of valuing things is skewed and often outright broken. Let's look at an example:

I buy and sell vintage games as part of my living. Unless you're a collector, computer-savvy or a dealer, you won't likely know what some games are worth off-hand. You'd be surprised how many people come into my store expecting older NES and SNES titles selling for a couple of bucks, (in their minds: old = less valuable). People want official game carts of Super Mario Kart, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, etc., for less than $10 a pop, when such games come in less than half a dozen times a year (if lucky), and sell regularly for $40, $100 and $70, respectively.

Now here's the thing, I pay good money for those games, because they are so rare and desirable. Not everyone is going to buy them at that price, but someone usually does (the games often last less than a week).

I get people asking for deals all the time, both buying and selling. "Can I get $20 for all these" sports games that I just told you are broke, worth less 25 cents a piece, and will sit on my shelf for years? "Would you take $40" for this game I paid almost that much for, and sells within a month for twice that amount?

One tried justifying a game's selling price should be less because he didn't think it was that great of a game and wasn't as rare as something like Earthbound for SNES, despite the game having a list of customers looking for it a mile long. The game lasted less than a week at $100: Conker's Bad Fur Day for N64.

In the end, I don't think many people are going to understand, or care to - it's a very human thing: denying the negative, focusing only on the positive. People want and want, but don't want to be told they're going to have to pay for it. What people seem to forget is it's always a two-way street in situations like this - yes, the developers are going to have to adapt to the changing markets of gaming; however, it shouldn't be denied that the customer has a big influence on what becomes the norm in the industry. Buy games for $10 or less if you must, but don't expect the quality of the games or the price to stay that way forever.

Limited existence cartridges can be priced under supply and demand, low supply, high demand = higher price.

Digital distribution has infinite supply so it can always fill the demand so the price is based purely on the value consumers give the product which varies from person to person from full price to nothing so gradually stepping the price down, by sales or price drops, to meet the value level of more of the people on the scale will ensure more revenue intake. If even then it cant make back its development costs then the developer has no business being in business.

 

[goothrie]

So I've read a lot of comments here, and the ones supporting the opinions es pressed in the article all seem to boil down to bemoaning how these poor developers are making so much less than they deserve, which is fair, and probably true, but... not helpful. That's not going to improve the problem where most of us are penniless vagrants who, when buying games, also need to think about eating and paying rent. We're not thrifty because for the sake of being vicious misers, we're thrifty because we need to be. Making it so sales disappear and we all buy less games in general helps nobody.

If you want more people willing to pay more money, you need some real solutions. I think this can relate to one of Jim Sterling's brilliant rants: Steam has a clear problem with quality control. When you see a new steam game, there's no guarantee that you're going to get something that works, let alone something that's fun. This is probably at least a contributing factor in why people are hesitant to buy full priced games. Am I making any sense?

 

[misg]

My desire to buy the games from this company is gone, I was looking at buying it at some point but that isn't going to happen now. I enjoy my games at discounts, also how do I know you game is even worth 2 bucks? I'm taking a risk when I buy your game. Sometimes it's worth it some times it's not. End of the day, you would sell less copies if you kept prices at 60 bucks

 

[rawrieatchu]

I just bought Dark Souls 2 for 65$, and I constantly buy discounted games on steam, If I want a game badly enough, I'll pay full price for it.

Other games that don't interest me so much won't get my money Day 1, and I may even wait until the price goes down.

Bioshock Infinite is on sale right now for $7.50, but apparently buying it at that price would just harm the creators (Ignoring the fact that they closed down I believe), Also, I bought Dragon age Ultimate edition for $5 on steam which includes all the DLC and Awakening, which would cost around $100 dollars if you bought it all separately the day it came out. Bioware already made their money and Dragon age Origins, all the money they get from the game now is basically icing on the cake.

Games are just too expensive for me to buy at full price whenever they come out, I kinda need those steam sales if I want to keep playing most of the new games that come out.

I think this guy needs to get over himself.

 

[Vigormortis]

Harris has a point:

he got a point.

He has a point

He has a point.

Mmm...no. No he does not.

What he does have is a lot of puffery, generalizations, and assumptions; none of which have any quantifiable data or proof to back them up.

However, the contrary to his assertions has a wealth of supporting evidence and data; including some dev testimonials proclaiming that timely sales saved their studios.

So, until Mr. Harris and the others like him are willing to provide some evidence; even tangential evidence; to back up their assertions, I'm going to call their claims what they are. Bullshit. And, I'm going to go with the provable stance that not only are sales[footnote]Provided the sales are done wisely and intelligently. Most Steam sales, Humble Bundles, and GoG sales are done well, but this isn't always the case with every DD service and sale.[/footnote] not detrimental to the industry but they are actually beneficial. From the smallest of the indies to the biggest of the triple-As.

 

[Ipsen]

Well, I wanted to make 'all customers' key to that point. That would be, conflating every sort of subset of gaming consumerism under blanket trends, like Steamesque off sales. So no, you wouldn't have any figure like 400% of 'normal sales', because everyone is considered; they all fall under the normal 100%, with all the pressuring factors that come with that. THIS scenario I think would be pretty disatrous.

It's also a completely a completely unreasonable fantasy hypothetical that completely ignores everything we know about human psychology, flying against every data point ever collected. It's not even worth addressing as a reasonable point because it's not. It's never going to happen.

A large subset of people are far too impatient to wait for sales. That's not even counting those who don't care about price at all and always buy the collectors edition and all DLC when it's released, like the so called "whales"(you know the ones who spend $500+ on F2P games). Or the people who buy full price to support the developer, or just feel better about themselves for paying full price, these people exist too.

It's on par with when the RIAA, MPAA, etc claim every pirated copy of everything as the loss of a full price sale. It's pure fantasy.

So given that it's an unreasonable scenario, I can't really take it seriously and why I didn't treat it as such. Because getting 'all costomers' to do anything is like herding cats, millions if not billions of them.

Ummm.....

But you can easily see how imporobable this scenario is, right? I have to make these stretches of imagination in order to see Harris' point making any sense.

I can see it as fun being insulting at my expense, but please at least ACT like the rest of my post exists.

 

[Cerebrawl]

Well, I wanted to make 'all customers' key to that point. That would be, conflating every sort of subset of gaming consumerism under blanket trends, like Steamesque off sales. So no, you wouldn't have any figure like 400% of 'normal sales', because everyone is considered; they all fall under the normal 100%, with all the pressuring factors that come with that. THIS scenario I think would be pretty disatrous.

It's also a completely a completely unreasonable fantasy hypothetical that completely ignores everything we know about human psychology, flying against every data point ever collected. It's not even worth addressing as a reasonable point because it's not. It's never going to happen.

A large subset of people are far too impatient to wait for sales. That's not even counting those who don't care about price at all and always buy the collectors edition and all DLC when it's released, like the so called "whales"(you know the ones who spend $500+ on F2P games). Or the people who buy full price to support the developer, or just feel better about themselves for paying full price, these people exist too.

It's on par with when the RIAA, MPAA, etc claim every pirated copy of everything as the loss of a full price sale. It's pure fantasy.

So given that it's an unreasonable scenario, I can't really take it seriously and why I didn't treat it as such. Because getting 'all costomers' to do anything is like herding cats, millions if not billions of them.

Ummm.....

But you can easily see how imporobable this scenario is, right? I have to make these stretches of imagination in order to see Harris' point making any sense.

I can see it as fun being insulting at my expense, but please at least ACT like the rest of my post exists.

You basically danged a red herring out and I ignored it, because I didn't think it merited adressing. Then you called me on not taking your impossible scenario seriously and calling it a key point, then yes I will point out how silly that is. Even if you're trying to be devil's advocate, the points made are laughable.

To call it merely improbable is like saying it's improbable for all the ants of an ant colony to arrange themselves to spell out the complete works of Shakespear. We're talking about something like 1.5 billion people all exercising perfect impulse control and being patient and frugal. You don't just get a zero deviation in that large a sample size of people. It's not going to happen.

I'm not trying to insult you, but I will gladly debunk nonsense, if anything you're insulting my intelligence.

 

[cikame]

I see it this way, there are people like me who still buy games full price because we're excited to play them or want to give devs the full amount, but there are games we weren't intending on buying but end up getting due to sales. Surely if a game isn't selling much any more, using a sale to eek out some more money from people isn't a bad thing?

I realise there are now people who refuse to get a game until it goes on sale, i just wonder if the numbers are significant.

 

[Hap2]

Well its to bad that someone buying games is not a charity for game developers. If someone created a product that is not worth the asking price it is not the duty of the consumer to pay asking price just to keep the company above water, its the duty of the developer to go out of business and make way for one of the up and coming developers who may actually be able to make a game worth $60...economics.

Was the point not clear enough? There may be consequences for the deep discounts. Yeah, it's a business, but like I said, it's a two-way street. Buying habits affect the developers, and if people are only going to pay $10 for a game, why should the developer spend countless hours developing something more complex when something simple and cheap will do? Why make something like Mass Effect and lose money when you can make something like Flappy Bird?

Limited existence cartridges can be priced under supply and demand, low supply, high demand = higher price.

Digital distribution has infinite supply so it can always fill the demand so the price is based purely on the value consumers give the product which varies from person to person from full price to nothing so gradually stepping the price down, by sales or price drops, to meet the value level of more of the people on the scale will ensure more revenue intake. If even then it cant make back its development costs then the developer has no business being in business.

The example was to show that people are terrible at valuing things, not about the differences between digital distribution and physical copies of games.

Mmm...no. No he does not.

What he does have is a lot of puffery, generalizations, and assumptions; none of which have any quantifiable data or proof to back them up.

However, the contrary to his assertions has a wealth of supporting evidence and data; including some dev testimonials proclaiming that timely sales saved their studios.

So, until Mr. Harris and the others like him are willing to provide some evidence; even tangential evidence; to back up their assertions, I'm going to call their claims what they are. Bullshit. And, I'm going to go with the provable stance that not only are sales not detrimental to the industry but they are actually beneficial. From the smallest of the indies to the biggest of the triple-As.

If he's wrong, and you have the evidence, then please show it. All I've done is entertain the possibile consequences. Anecdotes are worthless on their own. The constant 'argument' of "I don't want to pay $60 for a game" from people outraged by his statement isn't useful on any level.

 

[KazeAizen]

Perhaps when developers return to making games worth my $60 without an additional $30 for DLC, I'll be more inclined to pay full price. This is especially true for digital distribution, where the overhead is so much lower and as such the cost should be lower as well. That being said, there are games I do pay full price for. As a point of fact, I usually get the collector's edition which throws off the developers assertion that sales devalue games. Getting games I'm not thrilled about (but still interested in) on sale allow me to get games I am excited about at full prices or greater. If I had to shell out 60 clams for each game I wanted to try, I'd play a lot less and be pleasantly surprised less frequently. Viva la Steam and Viva la Humble Bundle!

You know what's funny? A lot of games out there have that 60 + 15 thing going for them to make them actually worth the price of admission. However I find my library chock full of games that are worth the 60 right off the bat. Naruto Ultimate Ninja Storm series. The two Batman games. All three Final Fantasy XIII's....any ground I had to stand on just went out the window with that one didn't it? Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that a good portion of my own personal library are AAA games and out of those only a handful have long term exposure. Most of the rest just have the spotlight for a little while, if at all, before people move on and those tend to the "big" games that give more heart to the initial $60 content you buy.

OT: I think the Steam sales are good. If they actually spur other online distributers to do similar sales. Now sometimes the price cuts may be a bit too extreme for the others to compete but if there is competition out there sales help spur that healthy competition. Now I haven't participated in any sales of those kinds whatsoever because I'm a console gamer first and I don't have the money to but a rig that would make those sales actually worth it for me. I do understand why they are a good thing and why people need and like them. My only complaint is that there is no real competition for physical stores like Gamestop so they really don't need to do big sales to try and win our money. Plus any sales they do have are on used games which is total BS to me. I mean I get the used games thing but have a freaking sale on new games and give the devs some money.

 

[Ipsen]

Well, I wanted to make 'all customers' key to that point. That would be, conflating every sort of subset of gaming consumerism under blanket trends, like Steamesque off sales. So no, you wouldn't have any figure like 400% of 'normal sales', because everyone is considered; they all fall under the normal 100%, with all the pressuring factors that come with that. THIS scenario I think would be pretty disatrous.

It's also a completely a completely unreasonable fantasy hypothetical that completely ignores everything we know about human psychology, flying against every data point ever collected. It's not even worth addressing as a reasonable point because it's not. It's never going to happen.

A large subset of people are far too impatient to wait for sales. That's not even counting those who don't care about price at all and always buy the collectors edition and all DLC when it's released, like the so called "whales"(you know the ones who spend $500+ on F2P games). Or the people who buy full price to support the developer, or just feel better about themselves for paying full price, these people exist too.

It's on par with when the RIAA, MPAA, etc claim every pirated copy of everything as the loss of a full price sale. It's pure fantasy.

So given that it's an unreasonable scenario, I can't really take it seriously and why I didn't treat it as such. Because getting 'all costomers' to do anything is like herding cats, millions if not billions of them.

Ummm.....

But you can easily see how imporobable this scenario is, right? I have to make these stretches of imagination in order to see Harris' point making any sense.

I can see it as fun being insulting at my expense, but please at least ACT like the rest of my post exists.

You basically danged a red herring out and I ignored it, because I didn't think it merited adressing. Then you called me on not taking your impossible scenario seriously and calling it a key point, then yes I will point out how silly that is. Even if you're trying to be devil's advocate, the points made are laughable.

To call it merely improbable is like saying it's improbable for all the ants of an ant colony to arrange themselves to spell out the complete works of Shakespear. We're talking about something like 1.5 billion people all exercising perfect impulse control and being patient and frugal. You don't just get a zero deviation in that large a sample size of people. It's not going to happen.

I'm not trying to insult you, but I will gladly debunk nonsense, if anything you're insulting my intelligence.

You know, it's weird how we're both on the same side of this argument, yet this turns so...hostile. But I'll concede, mainly because this just isn't a fun place to make a point anymore.

You either don't get that I conjured the extreme example to portray Harris' point as nonsense, or you're just trying to get a rise out of me. You certainly are not being respectful of the people involved, considering what's been said.

 

[Major_Tom]

Dear Cliff Harris, please get Croatia out of economic crisis, then get me a well-paying job and then I will buy your game for full price at launch day. Until then I will buy it 6 months later for 7 euros, thank you very much.