I dunno about you all, but I got something of a weakness for game sales. It’s not so much that I go on sprees and just buy tons of games whenever there’s a sale, but I do find myself grabbing something on impulse whenever I think the sale is good enough. This would be fine, I think, if I was always planning on playing the game right away, but that’s not always the case. In fact, I’ve got more than a few games sitting on my PS5 that are still waiting to be played even though I was really psyched to pick them up at the time. FOMO is a heck of a thing, isn’t it?

I started thinking about this because I snapped up the Resident Evil 4 remake on sale earlier this week. It was marked down from $40 to $20, and it just seemed like it was too good to pass up. The thing is, I’m not sure when exactly I’m going to play it. Sure, I’m interested in the game; I wouldn’t have bought it otherwise. It’s just that I only had a kind of vague notion of playing it at some point rather than any burning need to jump in and start Leon Kennedy-ing everything in sight. Perhaps I’ll have to reevaluate those plans, eh?

Sales have a way of making you think that you’re somehow saving money. It’s like “oh, I can get this for half off right now! I’ll save so much money if I buy now rather than wait!” And that can be true sometimes for games or other things you were actually planning to buy and use at some point. However, is it really saving you money if you weren’t actuallythinking about buying before the sale? I was probably never going to buy Resident Evil 4 Remake at full price, so did I really save any money by rushing to grab it at $20?

I don’t dislike sales, far from it. I’ve gotten many of my favorites on sale, games like Crow Country, Tormented Souls and Signalis. I just kind of wish I had better impulse control during those sale periods. It’s one of the things that’s convenient about Nintendo, I suppose. They never put their stuff on sale, so I almost never buy it. Maybe the story would be different if Nintendo’ stuff was of the same caliber (and frequency) that it was up until the Switch era, but I guess that’s neither here nor there at the moment.

So, I guess this where I stop rambling and put the question to you, dear reader. How do you handle game sales on the likes of Steam or the PS Store? Are you able to keep it together and resist the FOMO or have you found yourself with a backlog of games that you snapped up when you probably shouldn’t have? One last thought, though. With how things have been progressing in gaming as of late, perhaps having a backlog of unplayed “traditional” games isn’t the worst thing in the world after all?

Image is Resident Evil 2 promo art