Some perspective on me: I'm a teenager living in America. I'm of working age, but due to a combination of lack of positions and my own schedule, I haven't been able to find a job, so my "income" is my allowance, $5 a week.
If we immediately start from there, then yes, I CAN afford a $3 game. The issue here comes from the fact that I don't have a way to use this money online except through my parents - meaning, I have to go up to one of them (preferably in a good mood), explain that I would like them to purchase something online for me, show them said item so that they know that they're okay with me playing the game/owning the item/whatever, and THEN I have to walk them through the site used to pay for the item, which might cause them to back out of it if they feel that the site is unsafe. Once all of that's done, I have to pay them back with the allowance money that I've gotten from them (meaning that they won't just pay for a $20 game if I ask; I have to wait the 4 weeks to get that allowance money. It's not the same as being legitimately poor, of course, but the point is that I myself don't have the money to use). Considering that the game that you're referring to begins with me waking up after a one-night-stand, I feel that my chances of having my request rejected are fairly high.
The exception to all of these hoops to jump through is sites which are available on sites like Steam, which I can buy gift cards for that can be applied online. And look! The $3 game in question is coming to Steam soon. So, although I'll still have a problem with anything not on Steam or another similarly accessible platform, I can't make any more excuses for this game. Right?
Not quite. Here's the bit about time. I mentioned above that I've been unable to find a job in part due to my schedule. Time is something that is a limited resource for me. For the most part, I'm in school five days a week. There's 35 hours in an average week, taken up. Add to that a 2-hour extracurricular which I go to for 2 days each school week, and we've got 39 hours at school. Sleep is something that I need to function; who knows how much I get, since it fluctuates, but I'll go ahead and say it's probably 6 hours on a weekday and 10 hours on weekends. There's another 50. Then there's homework. Oh, God, the homework. It's tough. It takes up a lot of my time. I'd say it averages 3 hours a day, sometimes more if I've got a huge project, but we'll forget about those for a bit and go with 21 hours as the estimate for homework. Those three combined leave me with an average of 58 total hours remaining in a week - a little more than two days straight.
I'm not going to bother with average times for how long it takes me to eat meals, shower, get dressed, do my chores, etc., but suffice it to say, those take up time, too. I am a teenager, as mentioned before, which means that, to an extent, I'm subject to the whims of my parents. Just last weekend, I went on a backpacking trip with my dad and sister, and so was without an Internet connection (or even an electronic device to play downloaded VNs on) for nearly the whole weekend (the rest of it was spent on that dang homework). I try to have at least
something of a social life on top of all of this, aka I try to hang out with a friend for a bit at least once a week if possible. (Believe me, if any of my friends were into VNs, I'd use this time to play more of them, but thus far I haven't been able to drag anyone to my computer.)
The remaining time goes to enjoying myself. And yes, this does include playing VNs. However, it also includes writing for a VN project that I'm a part of (which I've been unfortunately neglecting due to the very reasons listed here), browsing the forums here to find other VNs and to discuss them, reading books from my backlog of them (I've got at least 20, probably more, and I haven't touched them in months), and trying to watch some shows that I'm interested in (I've been watching
Doctor Who and
Danny Phantom with my mom), among other things. So let's assume I've set some of this time aside for those VNs.
Which of the 40 that I've been wanting to play should I boot up?
That's not an exaggeration, either; I legitimately have a list of visual novels that is 40 VNs long in my Google Docs, waiting to be played. Three or four of them are NaNoRenO games that I still haven't been able to get to - and I only downloaded about a third of them. Once we get down to here, it's simply a matter of priority. I've got to choose
something to play or they'll never get played, but it may not end up being that game that I bought on Steam for $3 a little while ago.
Admittedly, the game in question
is very short and I could probably play it quickly in my free time. You'll also notice that I conveniently neglected to mention "randomly browsing the Internet" in the whole paragraph about things that I do in my free time, which is definitely something that I do far too often and for too long. But even still, even a game that only takes around 1 hour might be difficult for me to just pick up and finish in one sitting.
I know this is probably an awful lot of words and information to get across the idea of "I don't have enough time to play VNs!" and I'm also being something of a hypocrite as it probably took me an hour to write this post (could've played one of the shorter VNs in that amount of time), but I wanted to show just how tight my time ends up being just for that free time - in fact, I myself was surprised after doing the math at just how little time I had; I had thought that it would be closer to 4 days rather than two after the Big Three.
Taleweaver wrote:An idea:
If you want something that would usually come cheap, and you really cannot afford to buy it, but you do have a little time, why not ask the creator whether they are willing to give you free access in exchange for, say, a 200-words-per-dollar-review on any of the sites where they are active? Or where they are selling it, in the case of Steam? In that case, you'd be essentially "working your debts" off, could play the game you so desperately want to play and help the creator at the same time.
TheJerminator15, firecat and everybody else currrently in the proverbial dire straits: Is that something you would consider?
It's a good idea in theory, but I think a problem could arise if I was less than satisfied with the game. Let's assume that I cut a deal like this with the creator of the game. I play the game, but I'm not as impressed with it as I thought I would be; in fact, I realize that I really didn't enjoy the game much at all. At this point, I can either lie and give the game a glowing review that I don't really believe in, or I can give it an honest review and risk the creator being angry about it and accusing me of swindling them out of a copy of their game.
That wouldn't matter if the creator is okay with a not-so-great review, but it would have to be made very clear between both of the parties involved that it would be an "honest review" (aka it might well say "this game is truly a piece of crap"), and the creator would have to be okay with this possibility.
Plus, it feels a little bit too much like begging for me personally. :/ I'm just not sure that I'd feel comfortable asking about it unless I had some history with the creator.