Man, I hate sales. Or rather, I love them, too much, and just hate what they do to my bank account.

Today, there happened to be a big sale on Paradox-published titles on Steam. And I, being the fool that I am, clicked on it. You know, just to see what was there. The sale advertised up to 80% off, which might be some good times, if there was something I wanted.

Now, my main problem with Paradox stuff is that the base games are OK, and often priced right, and go on deep sales frequently; but they are loaded with expensive DLC to “fix” the problems in the base game. I don’t like to participate in this gaming environment, but modders live and die by the updates the devs make, including DLC.

And Cities Skylines is no exception. I looked at C:S’s page, just to see what was going on: the base game was down below $10 (I think $7.50 more specifically), and wanted to see how the DLC was doing: it’s been a long time since I’ve played, so surely some stuff has come out. And stuff indeed has. That picture above is only the bottom of the list. But it was 51% off! Crazy deals!

Normally, such a lowly sum wouldn’t even bother me. Well, not much. But there are two things wrong: first, it’s DLC. Crazy to pay that much, even at half-off. Second, and more importantly, I’d already spent a bunch of money this month on vidya games. (I think I’ve told this story before, but…) At the beginning of the month (or the end of last month, I don’t remember), Hilda came out in Pokemon Masters. She is the FeMC of Pokemon Black/White, which was my reintroduction to the Pokemon games (having last played the original Red/Blue). She was my main interest in this game [Masters] for that reason. So I rolled and rolled, and even bought out all the original discount gem packs. I don’t normally buy gacha currency just to do more rolls (only ever having done so when I had a lot of extra money to burn and no particular expenses), so this shows my dedication. But what do I get? Not Hilda. Such is life in the gacha game. And it wasn’t a small sum, either. (Not a huge sum, since there were only a few discount packs to buy, but still a larger sum than I’ll readily admit to.)

(Even so, I lost all of what little motivation I had to even get the daily login bonuses. And to add insult to injury, I got Hilbert, the other MC of Black/White. I hear Hilda actually sucks as a unit, but I don’t care.

In an aside, I should mention that the game kinda really sucks, as a game. So much so that both producers wrote an apology letter to the players, acknowledging this fact, and promising to do better in the future. We’ll see if that’s enough to get me to come back. This is the kind of stuff that takes months to make course corrections on.)

So, I bought this stuff, when I didn’t really want to, for a game I’m not going to play anytime soon (get in line behind all the other games, chump!), and didn’t really want to pay that much anyways. But buy it I did. Not that it’s going to make any real financial impact in my life – unless my car explodes tonight or something, $50 isn’t much in the scheme of things – but it’s just embarrassing, or perhaps more accurately, mortifying (since I didn’t have to tell anyone about this), that I keep falling for this. And to fall for this in particular, when I could have used that money to buy actual, full games, and not just pieces of games I already have, that I already enjoy.

I guess I’m the type of customer that keeps these games going. Vote with your wallet, indeed.