$60 a Month: Episode XII
Welcome to the final installment of $60 a Month! It has been one year of budgeting and cataloging my gaming purchase habits. Rather than expand on the budget for July and continue the exercise for another year, I thought I would recap the experiment, try to catalog some of the lessons I learned and draw some conclusions about what it means to be a gamer with a budget. As enjoyable as I’ve found the project, I think it is time for it to come to a close before it wears out its welcome.
Before we go further, let’s examine some statistics from the last twelve budget-conscious months:
- I acquired 95 games in the first year, for an average of just under eight games per month.
- I traded away 54 games over the course of the year, averaging four and a half trades per month.
- I earned $43.47 in money by recycling, earned $118.47 in gaming-related cash to add to the budget and used $40 worth of gift cards.
- My total budget, including $60 per month and the additional funds listed above, came to $921.94.
- I spent $876.70 on games in twelve months.
- My average monthly expenditures was $73.06. My average budget was $76.83.
- My total amount carried from one month to the next was $241.93, for an average of $20.16.
- The 12-month difference between available budget and amount spent was $45.24… in the black.
Overall I think the experiment was very, very successful. In the entire year I only overspent my budget one month by $2.91. My most active months were February and May where I acquired and lost a total of twenty games each and June was the quietest month where I only moved seven total games in or out. I didn’t feel over the course of the last year like I didn’t get a chance to play the games I wanted to play nor did I feel like I needed more money than I was able to pull together in almost every month.
So what lessons are there to learn from this ordeal?
Lesson #1: Learn to Trade
The biggest lesson I learned was that trading games is hugely important for the budget-conscious gamer. My trading system of choice is Goozex, but there are plenty of alternatives. Game Trading Zone, Trade Games Now and SwitchPlanet all claim to facilitate trades for video games, and BoardGameGeek offers a trading service for non-video games as well. I haven’t tried any of these services and I don’t know if they work with the same fair points system that Goozex does, but swapping out your existing games that you don’t really play anymore for something you’ve been dying to play is a hugely effective way to keep your library stocked with interesting titles without emptying your wallet dozens of times per year.
However, don’t overlook the moderate overhead costs of game trading. I didn’t monitor the shipping costs for a lot of the trades I made over the year, but for first class shipping to the continental U.S. with delivery confirmation (a must in shipping to strangers on the honor system), average postage is $1.50. When you tally that with my trades over the last year, that’s over $80 in postage fees alone. Plus some sites may charge a modest fee for each transaction; Goozex charges $1 per incoming trade. If half my acquisitions were from Goozex, that’s $45 there, too. I started counting those fees toward the end of the experiment, but a more realistic budget would have to account for those charges every time.
Lesson #2: Practice Patience
One thing I learned that was valuable over the last year was the virtue of patience. Occasionally a game will come along that you just don’t want to wait for. These tend to be highly anticipated games like Halo or Metal Gear Solid. But what I discovered was that by and large most of the games I raced out to break the budget over when they were initially released ended up being mild disappointments. That is to say, I’m glad I played most of them (Halo 3, Mass Effect, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune) but I don’t think any of the impatience I exhibited by paying full price was warranted. In the case of Mass Effect I probably wouldn’t have been discouraged from buying it on day one because of how well I liked Knights of the Old Republic, but my reaction to Halo 3 was nearly identical to Halo 2 so despite the cultural resonance of the moment, I could have easily waited a month or two until someone else got sick of it and popped it onto Goozex.
Likewise many games I anticipated getting on day one like God of War: Chains of Olympus or Overlord but ultimately waited for and got on the cheap (or nearly free) ended up being just as enjoyable later, perhaps more so because the games didn’t have to live up to a $60 price tag. The other benefit of waiting even a week after games launch is that you get a chance to evaluate community members’ opinions that align with your own. If you find yourself frequently agreeing with Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation or Tycho from Penny Arcade, wait until they get excited about something and then go pick up that game. Even a hyper-gamer friend who you have a lot in common with can be a great resource for determining which games are causing a stir (BioShock or Portal, for example) and which are dividing some gamers and might be better pushed back until the price drops (GTA IV or Metal Gear Solid 4 perhaps).
It’s also beneficial to wait and determine what games your friends are picking up, especially if you’re getting into an online game. I jumped the gun on both Call of Duty 4 and Burnout Paradise, assuming plenty of people on my Friends List would be joining my games soon enough. By the time my buddies were thinking about hopping on, I’d long since grown tired of playing solo or against random Live weirdos and never did get a great multiplayer experience out of them.
Lesson #3: Shop For Deals and Items You Want Together
It’s almost a corollary to the lesson above, but one of the things that you gain when you stop trying to stay ahead of the release cycle is the freedom to identify things you want and the price point you’re willing to pay for them. It prevents two problems of monthly budgets which are the psychological sense that you need to spend all your budget every time it comes around and the need to have everything you want regardless of whether you can afford it.
Since some months are going to be packed full of items you desire and others won’t have much that interests you at all, you’re generally better off not trying to wrangle three or four games into a single budget cycle and you’re just as well not filling empty months with random bargain shopping because it’s an “unbeatable deal.” Ideally you identify what you’re looking for and then look for it at the right price, whenever that may come. Call of Duty 4, many people’s Game of the Year for 2007, can now be found pretty consistently for $40 on Xbox 360 (some $20 off the day-one price) and I’ve seen it advertised on special for as low as $30. If you were on the fence about the game, you can do a lot worse for a half-price title.
Meanwhile, identifying what you’re after early and looking for the right deal can also yield great fruit through alternative options like game trading as described above or online auctions like eBay. Even private sellers on sites like Craigslist can offer some fantastic deals quite often. In many cases it makes more sense for people to sell their games online that way than try to get cash back for them from retail outlets who frequently pay far less than a private buyer would be willing. If you’re already exercising the patience, it should be trivial to do a bit of research to find a really good deal.
Lesson #4: Know When to Rent
Through the course of the last year I rented some of the games cataloged above. Unlike trading for games where you actually own whatever is in your house, you have to return rented games within a time period. For services like GameFly and Gameznflix, you can control how often you return the games, but you have to pay a recurring monthly fee. When I did Gameznflix at the beginning of the year, I calculated each game’s monthly fee by averaging out the subscription rate divided by the number of games I’d played that month from the service. Ultimately I felt it wasn’t a great deal. To make the math add up you have to play service-rented games almost exclusively and hope their turnaround time is quick enough to make everything cost effective.
The other option is renting from a regular brick and mortar store like Blockbuster or Hollywood Video. These stores typically charge more per game than mail-based services and have a strict time limit on how long you can keep the game. While it’s beneficial to have the freedom with a service to hang onto a game as long as you like, you do pay for the game as long as you hang onto it. But the lack of late charges, which can really add up, makes it seem like a better deal. Yet if you apply a specific strategy to renting games from stores, you can avoid the pitfalls of a recurring fee without killing yourself on late fees.
Your key strategy is game knowledge when it comes to rental games. By and large the formula is pretty simple: The typical time to completion for a given title is the basic factor you need to know. You then estimate your typical amount of play time for a given rental period (usually about a week) and divide the time to completion by the amount of time you have to play. That should indicate the number of rental periods it would take you to finish the game in question. You then multiply the number of rental periods by the rental fee and that equals the cost to you to play through the game in question. Usually I add an extra rental period just in case it takes me a bit longer than most people. If this cost to play the game is significantly less than both the cost to purchase the game and the value you could incur by purchasing it and trading it away, it’s a solid rental.
As an example, most people say it takes about eight hours to finish Heavenly Sword. If I can play about five hours per week and it costs $8 to rent a game for a week at my local shop, I can estimate it will take me two weeks to finish. Conservatively I’ll give myself three weeks so the price for me to rent the game and play through it is an estimated $24. The game is still selling for a minimum of $50 (used) and it didn’t get great reviews. Mostly this seems like a good candidate for rental. The difficulty is that sometimes it’s hard to find information about the length of games. Generally speaking action titles with no real multiplayer are pretty quick plays. Occasionally you can justify a longer game’s rental by assuming you’re doing an evaluation. Epic games that seem to be a bit divisive like Lost Odyssey might be worth a week’s rental to see if you really want to pony up full price, but budget-wise it’s usually better to try a free demo or simply wait for prices to drop.
The Bottom Line
So after a year of $60 gaming budgets I’m generally thrilled with how well it went. I do intend to continue minding the budget when it comes to games, I just won’t be chronicling it in a regular feature. The lessons above are lessons that I’m not just passing along, but lessons I actually learned through this process. I’m sure there is plenty more to learn about how to reduce a budget, how to manage it more effectively and how to even trim it down when necessary. But I think this has been a great experience and I hope you’ve found it enlightening or at least enjoyable.