Today's Hipster Title: The Price We Pay Will Be Our Own

Super Sweet MS Paint Art!

So it's Veteran's Day, or at least, the day we observe it, as opposed to the actual Veteran's Day, which was yesterday, Sunday November 11th.  Part of me felt that I should post something Veteran related, but I don't know much of anything about that world.  I've had some friends over the years that were in varying branches and degrees of the military although those topics never readily came up.  So now I'm going to talk about something I will claim to know about.

The stock market.  That's something that I don't really know anything about either.  I know there's the NYSE, there's the NASDAQ, the S&P500, and there's some over in Europe and Japan too.  It's not the stock market itself that I'm conjuring, but just the way that the value of stocks moving up and down and how people will wait.....wait......SELL!SELL!SELL!!!!  That magic price, whatever it is in that magical number that tells them that now's the time to either sell or buy.  It's a bull market.

I'm that way with video games at Amazon.  Whenever I find a game I want, I'll put it in my shopping cart, then click the "save it for later" link so that I can watch the price fluctuate multiple times every day.  I've recently done this with Radiant Historia for the DS.

First off, Radiant Historia is a game by Atlus and the "gimmick" for this game is somewhat similar to Chrono Trigger in that you're able to move back and forth through time to alter events.  That's the extent of the information that I've looked up.  I don't want to know anymore than that.  So the game comes out at the regular DS price of $29.99.  At some point, the game jumped up to $75.99, possibly because it came out at the tail end of the DS's life, just as the 3DS was being released (RH: February 2011 & 3DS: March 2011) and because that's what seems to happen with niche RPG's from Japan.  Limited release in the US because distributors aren't sure if a popular game in Japan will sell well in the US.  Then it becomes popular with low stock.  I even checked at Gamestop, both new and used and the price was higher than I wanted to pay for a game.

Within the last week though, I noticed the price of Radiant Historia was dropping.  It went from $29.99 to $25 something to $22.  The morning of the 10th (Saturday), I told myself after waking up, that if the price was under $20, that I would purchase the game.  The price was $18.10.  I purchased it.  The conundrum was weather or not the price would continue to fall, or if it would jump back up to some insanely high price, which for me, is over $25.  The morning of the 11th, after Amazon told me my order had been shipped, the price dropped again to $16.20.  Sure I was annoyed, but not mad.  This morning when I checked, the price was again $29.99, which is still what the price is, 12am on the 13th.

I have absolutely no explanation for why the price at Amazon will fluctuate so drastically over the course of a week.  Maybe it works like the stock market?  Someone mentions something good about Atlus, the price goes up, metacritic hates the game, the price goes down.  Rotten Tomatoes thinks the guy who did voice acting for a game is a sell out tool because he forgot his indie roots when he signed with Warner Brothers, the price stays the same.  I can't say.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

First World Problems Abound

P.S.  I also have the same train of thought when it comes to buying gas.  One day the price will be $3.89 a gallon and it'll drop down to $3.65 the next day.  I'll need gas, but wait just in case it drops the following day.  That next day, I forget to buy gas because it's my two days off and I'm not driving anywhere.  Then, the day I get back in my car, I remember about the gas, and the price jumps up to $3.99 a gallon.  Stuff like that.