Late to the Party Retrospective - The Philosophy

With the end of Season 1 of Late to the Party now a couple of weeks behind us, it’s time for a short retrospective series on it. I’m thinking there will be a four entries in this retrospective, though the last entry will be pushed from this Friday to next Monday because of a post I want to publish on Friday for Inauguration Day. Today we begin with the philosophy behind Late to the Party, which I’ve mentioned parts of in various forms in the past, but it’s important enough that I’m going to state it again.




Generally speaking, I am a patient man. I normally do not feel any need to play a game right when it first comes out, and being the introvert that I am, I do not have any urge to be “part of the conversation” the surrounds a game near the time of its launch. Every now and then there is a game that I really want to play when it first comes out, but these are rare instances. Playing a game late normally does not bother me.

I also believe that while there are many games worth playing, there are very few worth actually owning. The vast majority of games I will play a single time and have no desire to come back to. While I could potentially buy and resell games, renting saves me the hassle of finding and negotiating with buyers, and if I rent and play through games in rapid succession I can get considerable cost savings on my gaming hobby. Because new and popular games are often difficult to rent via services such as Gamefly, it usually takes several months to a year before I can easily rent them, and therefore I have another reason to wait before playing a game.

The last major factor behind my being late to the party is that I have no desire to be part of the arms race that characterizes the modern world of games reviews and discussions. For better or for worse, the earlier you can get your review/discussion of a game published, the more clicks you tend to get online, and thus the more money you generate. This means playing a game quickly, creating your content as fast as possible, and then trying to get it online before everyone else has left you behind. I simply refuse to operate under such madness. I like to play games a bit slower and think them over before writing about them, so being late to the party is natural for me.