Image alt text: An image of Steam’s top 10 best-selling games at the time of posting, three of which are marked as “prepurchase”
I checked the Steam stats and noticed that in the top 10 best selling games by revenue, there’s three games that aren’t even out yet. If we ignore the Steam Deck and f2p games, it’s three out of four games. They have also been in the top 100 for 4, 6, and 8 weeks respectively, so people just keep on buying them. I would love to know why people keep doing this, as the idea of pre-ordering is that there is a physical copy of a game available for you on release, but this is not a concern with digital items. So after so many games lately being utterly broken on release, why do people not wait until launch reviews to buy the game? If you touch a hot stove and get burned multiple times, when does one learn?
Never preorder.
No. I’m doing the opposite.
I’m currently playing PS4 games I have never played before.
You get them on ebay for like $10.
Can’t wait to play PS5 games in 5 years… 🙃
Sounds like you should join us over on [email protected]
Can’t wait to play PS5 games in 5 years…
All six of them.
I almost never preorder any game I’m not 100% sure I’ll play no matter what. Sometimes I’ll do it with online games in 90% sure on bc my internet is horrible and I like being able to get started on the download asap
For example I’m gonna preorder the new Fatal Fury game even though I’m not super confident in SNK to put out a functional game, but I know it’ll have fun gameplay and worst case scenario it’ll get fixed in a while. Being able to download early is worth for me even if I won’t download in time to play early, and worst case scenario it’s completely nonfunctional and I just refund it until it works
Absolutely no reason to, you pay more for a buggier version. I generally wait until there’s a good sale.
Last game I pre-ordered was Cyberpunk 2077. Yeah, it’s a fun and really good now but when it released it was basically unplayable until Phantom Liberty was released. I had already said I would never pre-order a game and I made an exception for CDPR and got Cyberpunk, and I was immediately burned. For real-sies this time, no more exceptions. I will never pre-order another game until the day that I die.
I don’t think digital pre-orders even include banking functionality. I wouldn’t know because I lack the nerd cred of ever pre-ordering a game
Hissssss 🐍
Don’t preorder, what the hell are you people thinking?!
No, but I have purchased Early Access games on Steam.
Honestly, I’ve got lots of hours in Early Access games. That said, they were like $20 when I bought them in EA and as content gets added and they get closer to launch, the price goes up.
I don’t think that’s the same as pre-orders though.
The only digital game I’ve ever preordered was City Skylines 2. I was on vacation the day it came out and didn’t want to miss out on playtime and waste my PTO. Definitely worth it, and I enjoyed it and the lead up to release. (I’m on the fenced whether I enjoy it more than the first, but that’s mostly because I’ve got so many add ons for the first that the second seems like it’s missing things. But it worked well for me and I got hours and hours of playing in that day.
What incentivizes you to pay money for early access games? Wouldn’t you rather wait until it’s done and have a better experience?
Some of them are in a fine state as-is.
I guess maybe for an adventure game or something, you want to have one playthrough and to get as complete of an experience as possible.
But for most stuff I play, like roguelikes/roguelites, that’s not really an issue. For example, Nova Drift, an action roguelite, is out of Early Access now, but I played it for a long time in EA, and it was a perfectly reasonable game in that state. Same thing for Caves of Qud.
I do think that buying Early Access is only really a good idea if you’re going to be okay with the developer terminating development tomorrow and still feel that you’re better off having purchased the game – incomplete or no – than not.
Only if it’s a game I’m going to play regardless. I pre ordered FH4 and FH5 and I easily have 2k+ hours in both of those games.
Never because I’m cheap and also I don’t want to pay a premium for a buggy unoptimized experience. Even when I had the game pass trial I didn’t play games day 1, since games needed several patches to be acceptable.
If there is a game that i’ll definitely buy on launch and there is some real benefit for pre ordering, i might do it. But even then i’ll wait for the last few hours and “pre-order” then. If there is no benefit for me, why should i tell the company “i dont care about quality of your game, i’ll pay anyway”. Because that is how the ones making decisions will see pre order.
I would have pre-ordered Civ7, but then they announced it has Denuvo so now instead of pre-ordering I’m just not going to buy it at all.
Fuck denuvo and fuck corporations who think their customers should just bend over and accept whatever bullshit they offer for the “privilege” of playing their game.
There is so much good indie gaming content these days, we don’t need these abusive mega-corp games.
When starfield released and tried this “early access for extra cash” nonsense, the game was cracked before the regular release was even available.
No.
Especially the big studio games.
They almost always go on sale 3-6 months past release, and they’ve been patched at least once.
You get a better, cheaper game.
These days? No.
I used to when I had very crappy internet speeds, but these days I have a gigabit connection - and I swear the decryption process takes longer than it is to just download the game right after release in an unencrypted state.
And even back then I was very picky on pre-orders. I honestly couldn’t even tell you what was the last one I pre-ordered.
oh man I forgot about this. preload used to be such a big selling point but now it only takes a few minutes to download most games.
No, one time there was a highly anticipated game that I really wanted.
Walked into the store after checking a couple reviews and bought it full price.
Ask the clerk, he confirmed there is never shortages or anything like that for physical disks.
Imo, there is even less of a reasons to preorder digital copies, what are they gonna do, run out of bandwidth?
I think there’s only been one game that I’ve pre-ordered digitally, and it was Cyberpunk 2077 on GoG the day it was supposed to release early for pre-orders.
Ask the clerk, he confirmed there is never shortages or anything like that for physical disks.
Small town?
When stuff only released on disc stores can only get so many copies. Even if it’s a 100 or so, there’s no guarantee they’ll have enough on launch day to even satisfy demand. People would line up the night before as well.
So if you wanted to make sure you got a copy of a good game to play day 1 with your buddies, you HAD to preorder and hope they weren’t out, since they also held stock to sell day of.
No, there is a finite amount, agreed. However, the cost of making and shipping is minimal in the overall production cost. If no they need 100, shipping 120 is easy. Any excess can be used for following weeks and months sales. The gamer doesn’t want to miss out, but the company is much more likely to take active steps to ensure they don’t miss out on a sale. In the age of digital, even if they did sell out, it can still be pirchaesed online. So, it is high risk, low reward to preorder.
So, while missing out on day one is possible, it’s extremely unlikely and so preordering is basically a free loan and handing over money before there is a chance to assess quality.
It’s not the cost, it’s manufacturing capacity and supply.
Theres only so many discs that can me manufactured in a day, they also need to supply movies and the blanks markets.
They have hundreds of other games to print. So yeah they make 500k discs a month ahead of time, and if Walmart gets 20k they have 10k stores, that means each store is getting a whooping 2 units.
You’re missing the point. As digital exists, there is no supply issue. That’s solved. So there is no disc capacity or supply issue, as a result of that. Preordering is taking on their risk, not mitigating yours. Your risk of not purchasing is exceedingly low.
Did you miss the part of my comment where I specified that my information was from when digital was non existent….?
