As many others here, I have accumulated a bit of a "backlog" over the years, consisting of games that were cheap to pick up on sale, games that I have/had general interest in, or new game releases. Whenever a new game came out, I felt kind of urged to play the new game, drop everything else, and quite often end up not picking up the "abandoned" games again.
Sometime last year, when money was a bit tight, I just started playing games I already had instead of worrying about keeping up with new game releases, and it's been really liberating. I finished Mass Effect 1-3 over a combined ~100h, I platinumed Sekiro, Bloodborne, and started Dark Souls and Elden Ring, I found my love for Frostpunk and have been blasting that for the past months. I'm just having a great time overall.
I think a good help in that regard was a comment I read on the rexxit equivalent of this community where they proposed to see games as countries and giving them a shot is like coming there to visit: visiting a country is cool, but you don't have stay there indefinitely to have a good time; it's always fine to leave the country and go visit another, and not seeing everything the country has to offer does not worsen your experience there.
I don't stress about picking something back up again after having a good time with it and looking for something else to play. I don't stress about new releases (too much - Diablo 4 is currently pretty difficult to stay away from for me lol) because the game won't vanish magically if I check it out a week later, several months later, a year later. I just play whatever I feel like playing and whenever I feel like playing it. If I end up deleting something off the console - that's fine. There's always something else to play.
Not really sure what my point is, really, but felt inclined to get the ball rolling in this community. I like the idea of being a patient gamer a lot, and it's helped me enjoy games a lot more than I used to, so I wanted to contribute too and be a more active part of the "movement".
Thanks to everyone who's part of the community and who's been promoting good vibes!
The only games I tend to buy on release day are Nintendo games, because they hardly ever drop in price, but it often enough takes a year+ for me to get to them anyway.
I even have a beefy PC, but the recent shitstorm of horrible PC ports really does not give me any confidence or reason to play most of those games day one. I started playing RDR2 a couple of months ago for the first time, and I'm having a blast, most of the bugs fixed, besides some occasional stutter that happens on every PC, and most importantly, the game only cost me third of its original price.
Not caring about most GaaS games, the current FOTM game and FOMO in general has been really liberating, I can choose whatever I want to play, whenever I want to, instead of twitch dictating me what I'm supposed to be enjoying. I also recently bought a PSP to play all of the cool spinoff games because I never had one as a kid, and most of the games are super cheap to get, unlike the DS, so I'm reliving my childhood a bit as well.
Even for Nintendo IT could be beneficiary to stay Patient and buy later, AS their cardridges will get the newest Game Release regularly. Patches, Features, Bug fixes.
That I agree with, something like Animal Crossing New Horizons on release date did ship with a massive chunk of the game content completely missing without patches. That is another game I actually played day one, though, and got bored of it after two months or so.
This is not much of a choice when you're one in the market for collector's editions, most of them you have to get day one, so they don't get snatched, or resold by scalpers at insane prices. But there are sometimes okay-ish discounts, when I can get a 60 EUR retail game for let's say 30-50, usually at the higher end of that spectrum.