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For anyone who does not know, digital devolver is releasing a game (demons throttle) in physical form and claiming they will never release it digital. There is a 6 month pre-order for the game that ends in October, at that point if you have not ordered it you are stuck paying scalper prices as the game is not getting a standard retail release.

What are everyones thoughts on this?

Artificial scarcity to hit that group of people who obsessively buy LRG releases. People complain about buggy releases of AAA titles but this feels a measure worse, as you don't even have a guarantee that the fundamental gameplay loop is going to be good because an indie studio hasn't built up the level of cred that a big studio has. You might not be blown away by Ubisoft's latest open world title but you know the gameplay loop is going to be solid because they've demonstrated it time and time again.

To me, releases like this don't even look like a good item to scalp. It's being marketed on FOMO so every Tom, Dick, and Harry is gonna think "gotta get one to keep sealed and flip on ebay!"

Another reason it's a bad buy for flipping is an open preorder if the window is six months as you say. It's only "limited" to the number they can sell. Not, say, 200 copies or so.

The real money is made on items people don't think to collect and keep sealed.

So in addition to Limited Run Games and Strictly Limited Games we now have "Special Reserve Games"??? Kill me.
https://specialreservegames.com/games/demon-throttle/

I don't care. I already own 80 million video games and there are seemingly infinite indie titles released every year that look just like this. Switch collectors can go wild, I guess.

It sounds like an easy way to sell mediocre games to collectors that pre-order and just care about the number produced.

If it's an actual good game and gets enough praise, it will find a way to a bigger audience one way or another. Otherwise it's just another gimmick.

Interestingly, LRG is now publishing digital-only titles, such as:

https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/a ... re-switch/

(It’s a NES homebrew game, but the Switch version is, right now, digital only.)

I really hate the game industry right now. Sometimes I feel like it died right around the 360/PS3 era

I'd be okay with a company opting to do a physical only release *IF* they were also aiming to make it unlimited and do additional print runs as necessary to keep it available (which I know is beyond the means of most publishers). But I'll echo the sentiment that this seems like the worst incarnation of the "limited games" concept. If nothing else, LRG titles are usually easily/cheaply available and even though they'll put out some trash, I feel like they're at least kind of selective about what they'll publish: either something a lot of people want and consider a classic (eg Scott Pilgrim or Castlevania Collection) or something made by a small studio with a lot of heart that the LRG folks appreciate. There's a lot to criticize about the LRG model and the way it encourages folks to buy games they might not actually want all that much, but limited-only physical-only release seems quite a bit worse.

Either great games won't be able to find the audience that will appreciate them or that lousy games will be sold at exorbitant prices to the crazy-collector-crowd. It seems impossible for great games to be played by a wide audience because only the people who preorder it will be able to play it at all, and that's some BS right there.

Stuff like this makes me feel a lot better in regards to randomly going through abandonware archives lol

PretentiousHipster wrote:Stuff like this makes me feel a lot better in regards to randomly going through abandonware archives lol

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