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[NullForceOmega]

This stems from a recent discussion I had on Steam (gods those boards are cancerous as hell.)

The setup:  I very occasionally (all of three times now) pre-order games.  Apparently some people take so much umbrage at this that they feel the need to be insulting while failing to establish any meaningful point regarding why my purchase apparently makes me equivalent to Hitler.

So it comes down to this:  What are the positive and negative points of pre-ordering games?

I've got some positives right now:

If the product is approaching completion, and has available media such as extended gameplay footage and interviews with the dev team, then it is entirely possible to be reasonably informed regarding your purchase.

If your current financial situation is such that you can reasonably afford the luxury expense, but you are unsure whether you will still be in that position at the time of release.  (Context: I had birthday money and our bank accounts were well above our safety line.)

So let's hear it Bay 12.

[itisnotlogical]

I actually would pre-order games, if more games that I cared about offered significant preorder bonuses. I don't care about DLC passes or whatever but I absolutely love huge boxes, tins, statues, art books, themed playing cards, and other goodies and feelies that typically come with AAA preorder releases.

[Wiles]

I do occasionally pre-order games. I do not like doing it, but I dislike missing out on content even more than I dislike pre-ordering. It bothers me when content is gated behind pre-ordering. If the bonuses are just cosmetic I don't mind as much but missing out on an extra faction in a strategy game would bother me for example.

If the product is approaching completion, and has available media such as extended gameplay footage and interviews with the dev team, then it is entirely possible to be reasonably informed regarding your purchase.

If we were in a perfect world where devs don't lie and don't doctor footage I would agree, but we don't live in that world. I'm not saying all devs do this but there certainly have been cases where games don't look like their preview footage or even are missing features that devs have alluded to the game having in the past.

[Folly]

If you have some extra monies to burn, pre-ordering games helps support the developer, usually nets you a few cosmetic goodies, and allows you to play the game as soon as possible.
Incentive not to pre-order, you have opportunity to read more comprehensive reviews and decide if you really want the game, and if you wait long enough you can get the game at a discounted price.

[Levi]

I generally only pre-order games if I have a burning desire to play it multiplayer.  I think the last two were Civ 6 and Overwatch.

Otherwise it makes sense to wait for sales.

However I did do an alternate silly/bad thing of subscribing to Humble Monthly for a year.  Stellaris at $12 was too tempting to pass up, even if I don't like the idea of buying things when you don't even know what they are.

[kingboxz]

Positives:- help the dev make more games
                  - if its a genre you like high preorders show the suits(if it's a AAA) that it's worth it to make more games like that.
                  -the bonuses(if you care, I personally loath the practice of preorder exclusives)
Negatives: the game is bad or broken(this outweighs all positives as at this point you've blown your cash on garbage.)
                      -broken dev promises ( a non-issue unless it's what appeared to be a fundamental part of the game)
         

[chaoticag]

Part of the issue with pre-orders is there's a fundamental conflict of interest between players publishers and developers because of how the market works. Publishers are using pre-order sales in order to check on the lifeline of a product, so developers need to make pre-ordering as enticing as possible, and players can fall on either end of getting a good deal from pre-ordering (say exclusives, a bonus DLC, etc.), or you can get kinda shafted (Street fighter V or so I hear, where they had a sale on the game which included extra characters cheaper than you got the game at pre-order).

But yeah, part of the pitfalls is you might do something like pre-order Alien Colonial Marines. Which uh, yeah, if you haven't heard of, I'll leave you to research what the heck happened there because it was a doozy.

On the other hand, if there is a game dev studio that you feel has been shafted by publishers frequently you can grab their games. I mean, hey, since Vanquished is rereleasing I went ahead and grabbed that, plus I got a nifty discount for having Bayonetta PC as well.

[Retropunch]

All Pre-Order is awful and should die a quick death.

It's basically whichever company trying to get you to forfeit your ability to properly assess a game before buying it for a few trinkets.

More than that, gating actual content away behind it is basically forcing people to buy the game without hearing if it's any good or not. As said, this is more or less ok if it's just cosmetics - awful if it's actual factions/whatever.

I also don't buy the 'it supports the developer' angle. If the game is coming out, it's coming out - you pre-ordering it doesn't make any difference (unless you think they're so shady they might buckle). The only way it 'supports them' is if their game is a failure, and they've got some sales already in the bank.

EDIT: I don't think that people are bad/stupid for pre-ordering, as sometimes it's the only way to get the full content. I just hate the companies for doing it.

[nenjin]

Pre-Orders: What is best in life?

I struggle to think of many positives for AAA games. As was said, pre-orders used to be because of limited availability at retail brick and mortar stores before digital purchase became the way of the future. Eventually when pre-orders started falling off (i.e. not selling out before release) publishers started feeling the need to incentivize people to pre-order with the gimmicks we're all now familiar with.

Pre-orders have always really just been a chance for publishers to start recouping their money faster (since they take their cut first in most publishing deals), which I suppose means developers can start recouping profits sooner.

In reality, I think publishers are just ravenous to know if a game will meet their (often wildly optimistic) sales goals. This is an industry where if a AAA game doesn't make back 5x what was invested within the first month (or even weeks), publishers consider it a "disappointment." Think about that timeline as it relates to other publisher-backed industries. Pre-orders are also a way for publishers to forecast sales so they can plan ahead of a game's release what they'll do with a particular IP or dev house. Games take years to make so if you're going to do a sequel to a successful game, you start thinking about it early. So the pre-order numbers look good? Give them more money if they need it or if you're already greenlighting more. Numbers look bad? Decide very quickly how soon you will discount the game and possibly close the dev studio down if it's a child of the parent company. No sense in continuing to invest in a dud right? Especially for unestablished developers or developers who are just shifted around a huge network of linked studios.

And that's just the business side of it. As a gamer, pre-order schemes are confusing, almost universally a bad deal when you consider most of that will show up as DLC that will be on sale within a year or two once preorders and Season Passes have run their course. (Season passes btw, almost entirely a bad investment. The implication is the game will content season...after season...after season. Except that amounts to a year or less of new content before the game and the hype dies off.) Pre-Orders are there to exploit your inability to wait, your need to play after being fed so much hype. For some people, they can afford to impulse buy, and as like Shadow of War pre-orders show, there are whales that will buy insanely expensive pre-orders. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's just that the huge sliding scale of privilege and price has a bunch of knock on effects. It dictates the approach to selling the game for devs and publishers, what to parcel out to what. And that in turn forces developers to slice their game up, and/or spend resources on things not everyone will see rather than pouring all their effort into the core game experience everyone is guaranteed to have. (I.e, QA, polishing, bug fixing or just giving content more depth.) Sometimes this is a trivial exchange (some weapon skins and tweaked stats do not take an eternity to do)....and sometimes it's not (whole DLC side missions, areas, content and/or game modes.)

So for me I have to feel very comfortable with a game to preorder. The perks just generally aren't worth the risk to me. I'd rather wait a day or two after release to see what the shell shockers are (Mass Effect 4, ha. Ha. Ha.) before I commit to paying for yet another game I probably won't, in the end, finish and which will totally crowd out other games I have been playing, since it's the new hotness. If I was 15 but had the money I do as a 30 year old, pffft. I'd grind through games non-stop. But I'm not so wealthy or overflowing with free time I'm cool with spending a ton of money for benefits only to back log the game, ultimately. (That's what Steam sales are for >.>) For the person with tons of free time and money, sure, Pre-Orders are grand. For the average consumer I think they're mostly a trap, because very few devs or publishers want to give something truly worth a shit as a pure preorder exclusive. You're never going to see 1-time Pre-Order only content you will actually miss. If it took any amount of money to make, both developers and publishers have a mandate to use it to sell to everyone over time.

And I dunno, maybe this is just me but....I do not consider Kickstarters are pre-order, as I understand them. There's tangible, demonstrable gameplay you can see with most AAA games, and there's almost never any doubt that a AAA game that is offering a pre-order will actually get made.

Kickstarters.....are far, far riskier than a pre-order. I tend to judge games immediately on their aesthetic for whether they're a fit for me. And there's plenty of Kickstarter games I've backed where, in the final analysis, I didn't like what I paid for. That doesn't tend to happen with AAA games, which there is some ability to research what you're actually going to get. With how many notable failures and no-shows there've been with Kickstarter, I think it's risky to mentally equate the two. Kickstarter isn't an investment, and it isn't a pre-order. It's a donation with benefits.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Ultimately, pre-ordering is a particularly powerful way of voting with your wallet. Unfortunately, that vote is inevitably cast in favor of "cut and parcel" game distribution and the empowerment of the Cult of Content.

I buy games that are real, and are complete. No exceptions. Otherwise it creates a sort of reverse feature creep where more and more things are cast as "just extra" and can be sold for revenue separately. Imagine this in terms of cars. Now cars do demonstrate some level of this in meatspace already, but it tends to be limited to more comprehensive things that most people won't shell out for like a better components package or genuinely superfluous things like LED strings.

But what if the car sales industry decided that, in order to draw up profits, they'd create a "value" package for cars? A car doesn't need a radio, or windows, or a trunk, or soft seats to be street legal. In fact, there's a large number of things it doesn't need for that. But wait. Why go and release this new value car's value package at a reduced price from the standard of the "extra" car, anyway? You might get more sales overall from having more potential buyers, but you'd make even more than that if you had your typical market continuing to buy the value car at the same price while also creating an additional market for more wealthy buyers who like your car enough to pay out for the extra package.

That's what's happening to video games. We're maximizing, but we're maximizing for profit instead of for quality. There was a time which even my youthful ass remembers when devs would put in fun, superfluous, and secret things as a matter of course. Beat the game, unlock skins and big head mode. 100% it and get the cheat console. Now? We're way past just cutting up those skins for 99 cents a piece and throwing out the rest of the fun. Take some of the more developed sidequests and stick them in a mission pack, occasionally one that can only be gotten by preorders so people will be incentivized, much like a special edition car body.

Nobody can control what eight year olds choose to do with dad's credit card, but the rest of the gaming community needs to develop discipline. Our lack of discipline is feeding in to the lack of discipline by publishers, which in turn leads to a lack of discipline by developers. It's a serious mess, and only grassroots action really has a chance of fending it off. We have to hit them where it hurts, and the only place they can feel pain is in the quarterly.

Crowdfunding I'm actually alright with, so long as it's not being done by AAA companies. A crowdfund isn't a preorder but a vote of confidence, which may succeed or fail. But both the successes and failures improve the overall market and the experience of crowdfunders. That these votes of confidence sometimes come with a guarantee for the game doesn't make it a pre-order, because it does not have the same overall effect.

[nenjin]

We're victims of hype culture, I tells ya!

A lack of discipline is right. In the heat of the moment, most gamers don't think about what message their dollars send, their interest is piqued and they know 40+ hours of entertainment is just a couple clicks away (they hope anyways.) We do have outrage culture now too though, but that doesn't really create the kind of correction we hope it does, it's usually about some unrelated politics. It HAS occasionally stopped developing trends (remember Oblivion horse armor DLC back in the day?) The value of DLC is a little better than it could have been without buyer backlash, but it doesn't stop the underlying suckage, which is as you mentioned, "no fun allowed."

Compare that to an indie game like River City Ransom Underground, which went so far out of its way doing extra things not even covered by the Kickstarter it damn near broke them.

I dunno if I totally agree with the your car comparison though. I think a much, much better analogy is the AIRLINE industry, where leg room, seat position, boarding order, and half a dozen other things are all ala carte purchases now, and everything is getting smaller and smaller and more expensive. (Just flew today so it's on my mind.) Video games aren't there yet, everyone still gets the same basic package (I suppose you could say "the game" = "the flight"), but I think it could easily head there. Luckily gaming is something you do in comfort and relaxation and isn't a required part of life, so we can bitch about it at length and still choose to just opt out. Unlike say, needing to fly or needing to drive for most people.

[Retropunch]

Agreed that

Video games aren't there yet, everyone still gets the same basic package (I suppose you could say "the game" = "the flight"), but I think it could easily head there.

I'd say we're very, very close and over the line in some cases. Take Total War:Warhammer; a whole race was locked behind preorder - it came out as DLC later, but the fundamental gameplay was different for pre-orderers than not.

They're basically saying 'if you don't blindly trust us, we're not giving you as much' - which is a dangerous road to tread. There's also stuff like pre-order weapon packs/XP/upgrades, which changes the gameplay for those that did pre-order.

I'm all for cosmetics, soundtracks and all the rest, but when they're saying 'buy early or miss out on actual content' then I draw the line.

[Baffler]

I like it for one reason alone: pre-downloads. I have dial-up because I live in the middle of nowhere, and I pre-ordered civ 6 solely so I could start downloading it a couple days in advance.

[gomez]

I'll make a comment on my thoughts on this in 24 hours, however if you want to throw some money at me then I will PM you my thoughts first.