We Do Not Preorder

Seriously, don’t reward this kind of anti-consumer bullshit.

The only acceptable justification I can see is if it’s an indie dev who has really, truly earned the trust of their players and proven that they will work tirelessly to deliver the product people want. And even then I’d be very, very unlikely to. I’m crazy excited for both of Owlcats upcoming games and I still haven’t pre-ordered them, for example.

Pre-orders encourage bad, buggy, incomplete or deceptively marketed releases by juicing day one numbers without any need for the dev / publisher to actually release a worthy product.

I never pre-order, there is no benefit.

Early access is misleading, there are games which are “released” and would barely count as early access and vice-versa, so I just treat them equally.

The criteria for me is that based on reviews or some gameplay footage it seems like I can get £1/hour worth of enjoyment out of it. I tend to look for how many hours do people have when they leave reviews and how many have they played since, rather than just what they say. If I’m unsure if I’ll like it and there is not enough videos or reviews to give me certainty, i may take a risk on £10 and below games depending on how bored I am at the time.

THE ONLY REASON TO PREORDER IS TO ENSURE YOU HAVE A COPY ON LAUNCH.

Do you think they will run out of digital copies of you to download? (Just in case someone doesn’t know, that’s not how digital downloads work)

It’s that fucking simple. Pre-order bonuses are almost never worth it on their own, and even for those that are, you’re enabling and supporting a predatory/anti-consumer practice.

Never preorder. Will do early access, mostly from indie devs.

I used to more when things were more disc based from stores, but it’s rare that I do now.

Occasionally I still may if I have the money and it’s a game I know I want and will highly likely enjoy, if only for the pre-load capability. But it’s far rarer now. Sometimes they throw in some pre-order dlc, and if I know I’m going to buy it at launch anyways I may as well just technically pre-order it. But again, I do it much rarer now than I did a few console gens ago.

Early access is a bit of a different story, and I will sometimes buy an early access game if I like where it’s going and want to support it. But those are also pretty rare for me.

No preorder for me. I almost do the opposite. I buy games after they get cheap in 1 to 5 years, lol

Never. I hate the preorder exclusive bonuses; it’s anti-consumer bullshit, especially in an age where every game is available as a digital download, even the physical copies usually require downloads. Publishers are enticing customers to pay while hype is high, before the product is actually available, before quality has been proven and before reviews are published.

I hate gift cards for the same reason, you’re giving money to corporations before they’ve provided anything to you.

Hold on to your money, wait for reviews, then pay them for the finished product if you still want it.

I also think the rising launch prices of AAA games is bullshit, especially for singleplayer games. I’ll usually wait for a decent discount.

I often preorder games that I know are sure bets. I won’t preorder games that I’m not sure I’ll like or by a developer with a rocky reputation (Ubisoft, etc).

I love buying early access games. Many of the best games ever made spent a lengthy time in early access, and it was worth every penny. Some I’ve bought 2-3 times in early access on different platforms just to support the developers (Satisfactory, Factorio, Rimworld, Baldurs Gate 3). I just bought Satisfactory for the third time and it was worth it.

Never pre-order.

I do early access only in very specific cases where it’s an indie studio and the game already offers a lot of value. E.g. Satisfactory was in early access for a long time when it was basically a finished game you could sink hundreds of hours into. But I read and watch a lot of reviews before I buy into one of those. Can’t do that with a pre-order.

I try not to pre-order or get early access. However I am not perfect, I did pre order Dragon Quest 11 when it came out.

I never pre-order nor pay for early access. Examples are plenty, but a couple that spring to mind are New World and Ashes of Creation. (Even excluding the infinite early access of PUBG, and whatever the hell Star Citizen is).

For the former, their “beta test” was “yeah, it runs: ship it” and ZERO feedback was noted or actioned. The release day was The Single Worst game release I’ve ever seen, and 4 years later when Amazon decided to kill it, ALL of the beta bugs were still there. To be fair, it was a “pay once” game. With MTX, of course.

For the latter, people started by paying $300+ for “alpha access” and more recently $100 for the same thing. And it’s clearly 2-4 years away from being remotely ready for release. Those people are paying to do QA. And it will be pay-per-month on release, as if it was 2010.

If your FOMO overrides your other faculties, and you’re willing to put up with all of that, then fine. You do you. 👍🏻

Every pre-order bonus I’ve seen is a skin, title or other tat that doesn’t have any value beyond signalling that you pre-ordered the game.

Me? I’m done playing these financial games with video games. Until a game is released/GA, it’s vapourware and non-existent. But again: you do you.

I stopped after Cyberpunk.

Pre-ordering existed for the customer’s benefit back when all games were physical and you wanted to guarantee you’d have a copy available for you at launch. At some point, companies realized that they could use it to forecast success or, more nefariously, entice you to buy a stinker of a game before you’ve had time to hear that it sucks. I haven’t bought physical games in a while now, but when I did, the last time I had a hard time acquiring one at launch was more than 20 years ago (I remember Halo 2 being the mile marker for when companies got to be pretty good at meeting demand). In the digital space, it makes even less sense. They still do pre-order incentives sometimes, for the same reason as above, even when the game is good, but the bonuses are so throwaway anyway that it usually doesn’t matter. Digital storefronts on PC have a pretty good refund policy, so if you’re diligent enough, you can pre-order the day before it comes out, get the bonus, let the dust settle on review scores, and decide if you want to keep the game with the pre-order bonus or just refund it. There’s very little risk in that. Without a pre-order bonus, there’s absolutely no reason to bother, and quite frankly, I don’t feel good about supporting those bonuses in the first place.

I have no issue with early access games, especially if the game lends itself to the model, which would be anything sufficiently sandboxy that can be heavily modified by changing some variables or adding a single mechanic. Larian’s RPGs are very freeform in the ways they let you solve problems and can be upended by different powerful abilities and whatnot; roguelikes are perfect for this model, because you’re replaying them a lot anyway; regardless of genre, the ones that would catch my eye are the ones that are looking for gameplay feedback and not outsourcing QA for finding bugs to a bunch of paid customers. The real problem with early access for me now is that there are so many finished games coming out all the time that look interesting that it’s difficult to justify playing one that’s not done.

I “built” my first desktop (that’s a whole story) for Cyberpunk. I preordered the game. Suffice to say I’ve never preordered a game since