A hot potato: Are you one of those people who rarely, if ever, buy a game at full price, preferring instead to wait for discount events or its arrival on a subscription service? It's a practice familiar to most of us, but one developer says that if you really love a game and want a sequel, you should "buy it at f****** full price."

As reported by VGC, Days Gone creative director and writer John Garvin made the comments on God of War creator David Jaffe's YouTube show. He was asked if the game's arrival on Sony's PlayStation Plus service had resulted in a "meaningful uptick of engagement" for the post-apocalyptic action-adventure.

"I do have an opinion on something that your audience may find of interest, and it might piss some of them off," Garvin replied. "If you love a game, buy it at f****** full price. I can't tell you how many times I've seen gamers say 'yeah, I got that on sale, I got it through PS Plus, whatever'."

The problem with this view, of course, is how are people going to know if they love a game without playing it? Jaffe posed this conundrum to Garvin, who replied with: "I'm just saying, you don't, but don't complain if a game doesn't get a sequel if it wasn't supported at launch."

"It's like, God of War got whatever number millions of sales at launch and, you know, Days Gone didn't. [I'm] just speaking for me personally as a developer. I don't work for Sony; I don't know what the numbers are."

Bloomberg earlier this month reported that developer Sony Bend made a pitch for Days Gone 2 in 2019 but was turned down due to the original's mixed reception and long development time.

Garvin also talked about piracy and torrent sites and their effect on developers.

"I can tell you that when we were doing [Syphon Filter] Dark Mirror [on PSP], we got so f***** on Dark Mirror because piracy was a thing and Sony wasn't really caught up on what piracy was doing to sales," he said. "And we would show them torrents, a torrent site had 200,000 copies of Dark Mirror being downloaded. If I remember it right, the numbers could be wrong, but regardless, I was pissed about it then. I was like, 'this is money out of my pocket.'"

"So I think the uptick in engagement with the game is not as important as, did you buy the game at full price?" Garvin summarized. "Because if you did, then that's supporting the developers directly."

Days Gone mostly received average reviews when it launched on the PS4 in 2019, though it does have a user score of 8.3 on Metacritic. It loses its PlayStation exclusivity on May 18 when it arrives on PC, bringing a host of platform-specific features, including 21:9 ultra-wide monitor support, unlocked frame rates, and Freaker hordes that can now number up to 500 in size.