Staying geeky on a budget requires a combination of early adoption and long-tail style waiting. Tools like camelcamelcamel make watching for your price point on late adoption products easy.
The price on all games will drop. I don’t care how awesome the graphics, how addictive the multiplayer or how immersive the gameplay; just like your high school physique that $60 price tag will not last. Sooner or later our favorite games are going to fall into the greatest hits bin, begging to be picked up for $15, $10, or even $5 before they die off. Knowing the mortality of game prices, how do we buy at the point to maximize our gaming pleasure per dollar?
No, I am not an economist; I am just a Cheap Geek, and core to Cheap Geekerie is the tenet to, “Adopt early, sparingly.” Early adoption, albeit geeky, is expensive; and as fun as it is to have the latest and greatest toys most geeks have to face the reality that they don’t have the means to own all the latest gadgets or the time to try out all the latest tech. So here we are, regular geeks, with an economic problem. The solution, of course, is to only adopt early for the things which you get the greatest added value from early adoption. I would also add that late adoption needs to be applied holistically to a category of purchases.
Console Gaming
Console gaming is an excellent candidate for a late adoption approach, as it, like many areas of tech, has a steady progression in quality (mainly graphics) that forces price drops in older versions; but has many other measures of quality (story line, game play) that keep well with time. Again, apply this philosophy holistically. There is no need to get a HD tv for your PS2, and that RPG that should survive on store line alone may not seem as appealing after playing a first person shooter that pushes your graphics to the bleeding edge.
Just as console gaming is a great candidate so are some games. Blur, from what I have played so far, was a very accurately reviewed game. Solid highly stylized racer that while enjoyable will not become a mainstay. Translation: a good game that will soon drop in price. At the beginning of the month, about 6 months after release, Blur dropped to the sub $20 range. An excellent buy for a late adoptor in retrospect, but how do you see these coming?
Tools
Half the battle is knowing your price point, the other half is knowing when the price point has been hit. Enter price history and notification tools. CamelCamelCamel offers both tools via browser plug-in and email/twitter notifications. Camelizer (FF/chrome) is a browser plugin that will track the price history of products while you shop on sites like amazon.com, newegg.com, and bestbuy.com. Camel Concierge is a price watching notification service that will email or message you via twitter when a desired product hits your price point. Both tools require very low level of efforts and provide a lot of value.
More obvious but still worth mentioning is that, one huge advantage to adopting late is that early adopters have already adopted and reviewed the product over and over. Reviews should be a tool in every Cheap Geek’s toolbox. This saves you cash two ways, not only has the product in question likely dropped in price, but there should be much less risk of purchasing shoddy wares. For most products you should weigh user reviews highly. Learn to read these quickly and use sites bubble good reviews to the top via an up/down vote system and/or allow you to search the reviews for keywords.
Additionally, some sites have decent loyalty programs, and it can be worth your time to sign up for the email or to follow on FB or twitter. Others can offer good deals via coupon codes. Sometimes even brick and mortar stores can run a good deal. The key to being a Cheap Geek is to know what you really will enjoy having before everyone else and what your price point is on everything else.
Feedback
This is the first in what I hope to be a long running series on Cheap Geekerie, so give me some feedback. What tools for getting geeky gadgets on the cheap did I leave out? What is the thing that no one should adopt late? How wrong am I about console gaming?
