As much as we all want to support every single developer we love, the fact is simple, each person only has a finite amount of disposable income. This means that for the price of one brand new game you get two games on sale, but there is something about playing the latest and greatest games available. This is why finding out approximately how long before games go on sale became interesting. How is it possible to get the best of both worlds between paying a little less than the normal, while still supporting the developers and not buying second hand while also being able to enjoy the game near it release. For the most part this means also being able to partake in the discussion around the new game if as we are still talking about a new release.
It doesn’t matter if we are talking about annualized titles like Call of Duty or Madden, whether we are talking about some of the biggest games of the year including Far Cry 6 and DeathLoop, or if we are talking about some high profile independent games like Kena: Bridge of Spirts. If there is one guarantee you can make about the gaming industry, its that games go on sale sooner or later, because there are constantly hundreds of games being released and outside of the release window, developers and publishers need to continue to draw interest in their title.
There are many ways to do this including post launch expansions, or being nominated for end of the year awards and the easiest way of all is to reduce the price of the game to attract new customers. Our goal is to find out approximately how long before games go on sale, which can help you determine if you want to pay full price immediately or wait for a sale.
Criteria
The collection of games that we have gathered for use in this experiment are typically the biggest games of the fall. We collected data on over ten of the higher profile releases starting in August with games like Madden moving all the way to some of the falls biggest releases of the year in October with games like Far Cry 6
This does two things, first, every year during fall we are hit by a barrage of video game releases that typically start late September and early October and using these titles will be reflective of the typical release time frame that games will release at every year.
This is important because it leads us into the second reason that we have selected these games during this time frame is that games typically always go on sale during Black Friday and this will give us some good data and be very reflective of the reality of how long games take to get discounted.
Nintendont
Nintendo first party games won’t be considered for this list because they rarely go on sale and this would skew the numbers in a way that wouldn’t be realistic. The good news is that even though first party Nintendo retains its full price always, they still do have some sales during a few days of the year like Black Friday, Boxing Day and usually some anniversary of a game or Nintendo character, so just be patient and they usually go on sale for about 30% off.
Outside of that for Nintendo, you can always expect to pay full price for a first party Nintendo title, which isn’t always a bad thing as if you are the buyer then your purchase will retain its high value, meaning if you ever decide you want to sell your Nintendo products, you should be able to recoup most of your initial cost, unlike games on other systems which usually go for pennies on the dollar.
Game Pass
The other factor that was taken into consideration when sourcing data for this list was to mainly use the PlayStation store for deals. With Game Pass being such a fantastic deal that it is and many games being available day one including Back 4 Blood, which was one of the most anticipated games of the year, it becomes a little more confusing to try to figure out data using Xbox. If you are digesting this content and you still aren’t subscribed to Game Pass, then I would highly suggest signing up for the Xbox service because around the cost of buying one or two games a year you could have access to hundreds of games with many getting released on Game Pass early, same time or slightly later.
Exceptions
Keep in mind that even though this theory covers the average time it takes to go on sale, there are still plenty of outliers that will go on sale even sooner or worse much longer than the games we included in our research. Certain games that we put on the radar to keep an eye for a discount included something like the PlayStation exclusive indie, Kena: Bridge of Spirits. Released on September 21 at a already indie price point of around 40-50 dollars depending on your region, it was to be expected that with a reduced marketing push due to its indie nature that Kena would have received a small discount to keep it at the top of the store and drive more people to it after it gained most of its sales during the first month like most games do. At the time of concluding the research, Kena had still not received a discount, over two full months after release, which is very surprising.
Monthly Matters
We can figure out the average time before a game goes on sale but digging a little deeper into the data we can see that the average time you would need to wait varies drastically depending on what month the game is released. If a game gets released in August, such as Madden, Aliens Fireteam Elite or Ghost of Tsushima: Director’s Cut then these games tend to have the longest amount of time before a sale happens with an average of 71.3 days.
August is typically a great time to try new games as around the end of summer not many new games are being released meaning that you would have more time to devote to August releases. Unfortunately, by the time these games do go on sale well over two months later by average you are well into October when it begins to feel like there is an abundance of games released and not enough time to play everything.
Oddly enough, when you get into October when most of the biggest titles of the year get released, that is the month that time to sale is the lowest at just over 30 days with an average of 31.7. Some titles that were released in October we actually on sale within about three weeks including Riders Republic from Ubisoft and Guardians of the Galaxy from Eidos Montreal.
The short time to sale in October is due to the closeness of Black Friday primarily, but I also think that publishers are extremely proud of their game and the chances it has against the busy fall competition, until a few weeks after release it gets lost in the shuffle. These two factors lead to a very short time before the price gets discounted.
Verdict
TLDR: The average time for a game to go on sale is 46.6 days.
To sum it all up, if a game releases in August that you really want to play then it would make sense to purchase it immediately because it won’t go on sale for over two months and by then you might not have time for it. On the other hand, if a game you are looking forward to gets released mid September to end of October, the recommended plan of action would be to wait a little over 30 days for a sale of around 30 percent minimum.
Of course, you should throw all of this information out the window if you are really looking forward to a game, you should just buy it at full price and be happy. Life is too short not to be happy and saving a few bucks won’t make you that much happier. After all we are only talking around 30 percent discount, which works out to 20 bucks or so, which you could spend on fast food in one sitting. At least you will enjoy the game for more than 15 minutes.
House of ashes - oct 21 - November 19 33% 29 days
Far cry 6 - oct 6- November 19 33% 44 days
Back 4 blood - oct 12- nov 19 30% 38 days
Guardians oct26 nov 19 35% 24 days
Riders republic oct 28 nov 26 33% 22 days
Kena sept 21- inconclusive
DeathLoop sept 14 sale oct 27 35 % 43 days
Ghost director aug 20 - November 19 - 94 days
NBA 2k22 sept 10 sale oct 21 33% 41 days
Madden aug 20 sale oct 21 35% 62 days
Aliens aug 24 - oct 21 sale 20% 58 days
Vanguard nov 5 - inconclusive
Diablo 2 resurrection- sep 23 on sale oct 21 30 percent28 days
August average 71.3 days
September average 37.3 days
October average 31.4 days
total average 46.6 days
