Borderlands 4 just launched and, predictably, players on Steam are already criticizing its PC performance. Meanwhile, the just-released Hollow Knight: Silksong didn’t raise any performance concerns, but gamers in China were dismayed to discover that the Chinese translation was botched.
Those are just a couple of the reasons some gamers have chosen to reject launch day hype in favor of “patient gaming”: Waiting a year or more to play new games, which means getting them cheaper during a sale and playing them after a bunch of big performance and quality-of-life patches have likely made them much better than they were at launch.
There’s even a pretty active subreddit dedicated to the idea: the main rule is that you’re not allowed to post about games that are under a year old.
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But there’s also a reason HBO’s servers sometimes struggled with Sunday night demand at the height of Game of Thrones’ popularity. There’s something special about being there on day one (before they edit out the Starbucks cups) and reacting and emoting with the crowd. As I write, nearly 200,000 people are playing Borderlands 4 on Steam just hours after it released—on what is for me a Thursday morning.
Clearly, being a part of the launch day hubbub outweighs the benefits of waiting for a lot of people, and I don’t think it’s just because of publisher-manufactured FOMO.
I’m curious to know how PC Gamer readers feel about this trade-off. Do you usually take a wait-and-see approach to game launches, or are you preloading every time? Have you ever regretted playing a game at launch because it was later improved? Let us know in the comments below!