Diablo 3 in the discount bin?

Are you tempted to hold off from buying Diablo 3 when it's released in the hopes of picking it later at a discount? You might have a very long wait ahead of you. While most of us like good deals of the sort that can be often found on Steam, it remains a fact that Blizzard's games don't usually end up in the discount bin - that is, unless you're prepared to wait 10 or more years.

Blizzard is such a big player in the gaming world that they can afford not to go through the usual distribution channels. For one thing, you can't find their games on Steam where the best discounts can be had. For another, they are their own distributors for the digital editions of their games. That means they can set their own price and hold it there indefinitely.

Boxed games are a slightly different beast. Looking at prices for Diablo 2 on Amazon, it seems that you can still get the Battlechest box (containing D2 and the Lord of Destruction expansion) for between $20 and $30. This isn't bad at all but if you try to buy the same thing from Blizzard's site, it'll cost you $20 apiece, or $40 for both D2 and its expansion, and that's only the digital edition, no box there.

The bottom line is that you won't be seeing a discounted Diablo 3 any time soon. I don't even expect it to drop from $60 to $50 in a year. The earliest you can hope for is when an expansion will be released but that's probably 2 years away. So just buy the game at release and recoup the full price by playing it.