Nintendo is famous for never going on sale. Used can be hit or miss, game may not work at all depending on how the store vets it.
Nintendo isnt the only company that never puts their games on sale, just the biggest one. They also don’t reduce the prices of the game after xx years. In fact, when they re-released older games, they priced them the same as newer ones. I really think Nintendo is sleazy and their games are mid-to-bad but everyone loves them so. /shrug
Then, there’s mmos. If you like mmos and care about them, you can’t wait for sales if they price hike. By the time it is on sale, the expansion is nearly over and it can be extremely difficult to nigh impossible to catch up. After all, there’s like 1-2 years of content you need to do. These sales are only to bring new and returning people in. Not to be viable options for anyone that actually plays the mmo endgame.
This is going to be the new price point eventually. Because most people can’t wait and most people aren’t paitent. It does make the game pass more valuable to me, I suppose. Because I can’t really afford $70+ games. Games haven’t really inflated like everything else has but we really just need to raise wages because we are being priced out of affording anything.
This is why I wish linear/act structures games would make a comeback
They care more about putting a dumb whatever the heck on some random ass mountain with nothing else on it and boring exploration so you can claim your game is “an open world xxx% bigger than Skyrim/red dead redemption/etc”
Red dead is one of the only games I think does open world well because the story was still linear and had acts. You could have just released the prologue and the valentine area as early access and people would have tested everything out and have fun with it. Similar with bg3 and act 1.
The other one is genshin impact actually, but that game is live service and released the world in parts. So each part of the world feels like it has meaningful exploration since there’s more than just a korok on this random ass mountain. There will be at least 5 puzzles, the zones have their own stories, quests, and plot lines, and doing that let’s you explore a good majority of the zone. If you were to speed rush the msq on a lot of these open world games you would only really explore 10% of the world.
The older I get the more I hate these open world games. They feel directionless. In terms of world building the newest (open world) pokemon game was easily the worst. The gym leaders and rival gangs had no agency wnd very little personality and impact because you could “defeat them in any order*” (*not really)
When I saw the Witcher 1 remake was not going to be linear anymore I pretty much lost all interest in it.