On 5ch’s Hardware/Industry board — known as “Geha” (ゲハ), a notoriously contentious console-war subforum of Japan’s largest anonymous forum — a game developer’s lament that “too many customers wait for download sales” went viral. Posters agreed that waiting for a price drop is nothing new, but repeatedly pointed out that the people who used to buy at full price on release day were the very same crowd who used to trade physical discs secondhand. Now that secondhand disc trading has gotten harder, that demand has simply shifted over to sales. Commenters also cited titles like Factorio that never go on sale at all, along with how fast Square Enix and Capcom slash prices, converging on the view that it’s publishers’ own pricing — plus gamers’ ever-growing backlogs (“tsumige,” 積みゲー, literally “piled-up games”) — that’s really driving “sale-waiting.”
What people said
1AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:13
We're finally clawing back the profits the secondhand market used to skim off us — devs should be happy about this.
2AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:15
Unless it's a game I actually want to play on day one, I wait for a sale.
3AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:16
Then just… don't run sales?
16AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:25
Re: #3
Some games actually declare they'll never go on sale. Like Factorio — its price has actually gone UP over time.
4AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:16
Blame your own lack of talent for only making solid-but-forgettable games that people are fine sale-waiting on. If it bugs you so much, make something compelling enough that people HAVE to buy it day one.
49AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:44
Re: #4
If even a solid game gets sale-waited, what kind of masterpiece would actually get bought at full price…?
5AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:20
The fair price for a game is like ¥7,000 tops. Sitting in front of a monitor mashing buttons isn't worth more than that.
6AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:20
Every player can tell when a launch price is clearly set assuming a future 50%-off sale — nobody's fooled.
7AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:21
People have been saying 'buying a game on release day is dumb' for years now, if not longer.
10AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:22
With secondhand, the publisher gets nothing. With a sale, they at least get paid — so what's the problem?
11AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:23
Blame the publishers who slash prices 30% within a few months of launch.
12AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:24
Why not just declare 'we will never put this on sale,' like Factorio does?
13AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:24
If I get hooked on a game I bought on sale, I'll buy the sequel day one.
14AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:25
The real whale customers are the ones who buy day one, serve as free debuggers, and play it before any extra content even exists.
15AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:25
Just do what Factorio does and never go on sale. Discount too aggressively and people lose all motivation to ever pay full price.
17AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:25
There are games that make you want to play the moment they launch, and games that don't.
18AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:26
Just make games people want to jump into the second they buy them. Backlogs are already so huge that people don't even start new day-one purchases right away — that's exactly why they end up waiting for the price to drop instead.
19AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:28
With PlayStation dropping discs, now there's also 'this might be a dud, better hold off' hesitation stacking on top. Day-one sales are only going to get worse.
33AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:36
Square Enix stuff basically halves in price if you just wait. Capcom's down to ¥990, so the earlier you buy, the more you lose. Personally, half-price is basically my starting point now. If I really, really want something I'll still buy day one — but even then it always drops later anyway.
39AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:39
Re: #33
We already get kept waiting something like 5 years just for these games to come out, so waiting another six months on top of that feels easy.
42AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:39
It's not really about assigning blame — games just aren't a priority anymore, which is what lets people wait for the sale in the first place.
44AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:41
Re: #42
Six months feels like forever to a kid, but it's nothing to an adult. Nintendo has a lot of kid players, and kids have school to talk about games with their friends.
45AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:42
There are just so many games now. Even buying day one, if it lands in your backlog, the price drops eventually anyway… And with key-card releases, there's not much reason to buy physical anymore either. A real game card at least saves storage space no matter the price, so that's still worth buying.
53AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:46
Re: #45
These days over 20,000 titles ship in a year, easy, lol.
'Steam's weekly new-release count now tops 700 titles — roughly 100 games launching per day. Some on social media say devs' real challenge has shifted from just shipping the game to getting it discovered.'
https://news.denfaminicogamer.jp/news/2609032d
48AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:43
Sales have their upside too — you end up grabbing stuff you had zero interest in just because it's cheap. Then it goes straight into the backlog. Whatever happens after the purchase, at least it sold.
59AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:53
Re: #48
Seasonal sales feel like a festival, so every time I set myself a budget — like ¥5,000 — and buy a grab-bag of stuff.
63AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:57
Honestly I'm just waiting for Pragmata to get cheaper.
66AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:58
Re: #63
Yeah, once it hits half-price I'd want to try it. ¥990 is probably still a long way off though — even [Monster Hunter] Wilds (digital) hasn't gotten there yet.
65AnonymousSep 29, 2026 14:58
I figure Nintendo will roll out a bundle voucher deal once they've got enough titles piled up, so I'm holding off on the so-so ones. ¥9,000 for Mario Kart World is way too much.
76AnonymousSep 29, 2026 15:10
Re: #65
I doubt Switch 2 will get a bundle-voucher program ("katachike" — Nintendo eShop's multi-game discount ticket system). Even if there's ever a discount, it'll probably be something small like ¥1,000–2,000 off for buying two games.
77AnonymousSep 29, 2026 15:10
A secondhand copy is someone else's used goods, but a download sale is the publisher officially declaring 'this brand-new copy is now only worth this much.' Sale-waiting basically means the customer never valued it as more than that to begin with.
81AnonymousSep 29, 2026 15:11
Re: #77
If it plays out like it has for Capcom — more users AND more profit — I don't see the downside.
78AnonymousSep 29, 2026 15:10
Unlike physical copies, there's no risk of selling out, so you don't have to panic-buy and pile up your backlog even faster.
84AnonymousSep 29, 2026 15:13
Re: #78
No sellouts, sure, but sales do run on a countdown — and that's exactly what fills the backlog up faster.
93AnonymousSep 29, 2026 15:23
From a publisher's perspective, a sale-price digital purchase still beats losing that sale to secondhand entirely.
96AnonymousSep 29, 2026 15:33
Re: #93
Actually the opposite — a lot of publishers oppose dropping discs specifically because physical releases let them dodge the full platform cut ('furupura,' full platform fee) on new titles.
99AnonymousSep 29, 2026 15:40
Re: #93
Physical already has thin margins on top of the secondhand problem, so I'd think publishers actually welcome the shift to digital.
Background and Key Points of the Debate
In the background lies Japan’s history of legal disputes over “secondhand resale rights” for console games, in which publishers fought — and lost — attempts to restrict resale. Physical secondhand trading has long been legal but generates zero revenue for developers, a sore point in the industry for decades. The thread’s real point isn’t “sale-waiting customers are the villains” — it’s that as disc distribution shrinks and more games go download-only, demand that used to flow into the secondhand market has simply migrated to sales instead, which, if anything, is an improvement for publishers since they actually get paid this time. That said, examples like Square Enix and Capcom cutting prices sharply within a short window of release were also raised, and it’s easy to overlook how the sheer speed of those markdowns is itself what trains customers to learn “just wait, it’ll get cheaper.” The thread also cited a report that Steam now sees roughly 700 new titles released per week, pointing to a deeper structural factor: with that much supply competing for the same finite time and money, waiting for a sale only becomes more appealing.
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