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?
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Yes. After clocking up 10,000 hours on Civ VI. Civ VII can take my money!
You’ve spent like a sixth of the time since release playing it? Damn. What’s your playtime across all the games?
Well… I will admit a lot of those hours were from falling asleep with the game running.
No, I do not pre-order games. I have joined some early access campaigns for games I was very interested in, like Kerbal Space Program and Satisfactory, but…generally “pre-order” is something the BIG studios that are all owned by Microsoft now do, they don’t need the funding to get the game done. Meanwhile, Subnautica wouldn’t have made it to 1.0 without their early access campaign.
Especially now that games are often distributed via internet download rather than physical disc or cartridge, it’s not a matter of making sure you can get a copy. The last game I pre-ordered was Majora’s Mask.
Only indie games, because I like to support indie developers.
There are very few reason why I might choose to pre-order a game:
- I know for sure I want to play the game on launch day and dont want to deal with downloading the game all day
- the pre-order comes with physical goods that I want
- the game is made by FromSoftware or Yoko Taro, I know I am basically guaranteed to like anything from either of these
- the game is part of an intellectual property that I like and I want that property to be successful, and I would have purchased the game anyways
Thats really it. Generally niche instances, I don’t find myself pre-ordering games all that often anymore. I pre-ordered the Collectors Edition of Elden Ring, the White Snow edition of NieR Replicant 1.22 (still waiting on that Gestalt 1.22 DLC). But other than those two, I haven’t felt compelled to pre-order anything else. I learned about Dino Crisis on GOG too late if it even had a pre-order period, but I did buy it on release day.
Yes, why? That’s the stupidest thing to do.
I do preorder digital games but not just anything I’m excited about. It has to come from a single dev or small dev team that I specifically want to support, and help fund their progress. In this example, I’d preorder Haunted Chocolatier by ConceredApe (dev behind Stardew Valley).
OR, if the game is made by studio with a stellar track record or an absolutely phenomenal game. These more rare but their are a few. These also need to treat their dev team and customers well. No crunch. No shady micro-transactions.
For example, Hades 2 is something I would consider preordering. The next game by Larian Studios might also be on that list.
Spot on. Larian, fromsoftware, supergiant and concerned ape are some of the few where i would preorder.
No reason to. A while back, some publishers gave 10% off pre orders, I bought maybe one or two like that. Some do digital goodies which doesn’t entice me at all (I’m DLC proof). I can download anything fast enough. So why would I pre order?
As a rule, no, but I’ll make some rare exceptions.
It has to be a small studio, I have to be pretty sure I’ll like their next game, and I have to have enjoyed their past game enough that it’s worth throwing them a few extra bucks.
For instance, I’m going to pre-order Slay the Spire 2.
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Mega Crit is an indie studio.
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I thought StS1 was exquisite, so I’m optimistic about a sequel from the same people.
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I playes StS1 for hundreds of hours, so even if the sequel is a whiff, I’d have got my money’s worth from them.
Similar goes for The Haunted Chocolatier, since I played the heck out of Stardew Valley.
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If I actually have faith in the developer, plan on getting the game at launch, and it has some extra in-game goodies, I might pre-order it.
I pre-ordered Elden Ring and SOTE. I won’t pre-order Nightreign because I’m not sure if it will be something I like, as it doesn’t even sound like an official Fromsoft game; it sounds like a mod made by a teenager.
Never preorder any game.
Not anymore. Mostly for 3 main reasons.
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The only reason I’d ever preorder something now is if there’s a significant risk of stock running out quickly. That’s not a thing with digital games, ask there’s no need to consider it.
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I’ve been burned far too many times by getting shitty games on day one, after having fallen for all the fake hype, deceptive marketing, sophisticated astroturfing, and paid-for reviews. Now, as a rule, I’ll wait for about 2-4 weeks at least to see what the community sentiment is before I buy something.
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And finally, games are fuck all expensive now. 70 dollars is already a bridge too far for many of the bug-riddled, unfinished slop big corpos push out these days. And then there’s “speculation” that RockStar will price GTA6 at a 100 dollars, giving all the publishers out there the precedent to do the same with their own titles. I’ll just take my time and wait for them to go on sale for at least 50% off before I consider getting something. (P.S. I say speculation, but I’m almost entirely convinced that it’s a deliberate industry psyop to get people primed for this insane price tag and reduce the sticker shock-induced backlash)
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No. I am fairly sure almost everything on the top seller lose is also in my ignore category.
If I have trust in the developers that the game won’t be an absolute shitfest (i.e. they have an okayish track record) and I want to play on day one to be part of the community, yes. That said, the last game was Elden Ring and the next is Monster Hunter Wilds, so that doesn’t happen very often.
Nightreign and Subnautica 2 are also on the list, I’m not too hyped about anything else this year.
If I have trust in the developers that the game won’t be an absolute shitfest (i.e. they have an okayish track record)
The problem is that virtually every series has some point where it has bad releases, or we’d just have enormous, permanently-running game series.
I can think of an extremely few very-long-running series that I have a pretty consistently solid opinion of what I’ve seen, like The Legend of Zelda, but even there, there were what I’d call lemons, like the second game in the series. I am out of date on Final Fantasy, but as I recall, at least when it launched, Final Fantasy XIII was…not good.
But the vast majority of series, even those that have managed to get five or six releases, which is a long time to have a successful series of games, wind up coming out with worse releases at some point. I mean, teams change, expectations change, people take technical or design or business risks that don’t pan out.
It’s especially frustrating when a game is fairly unique. I loved Kerbal Space Program, and there isn’t much else like it, but the attempt to develop a sequel really did not go well.
And even where series keep going, some people don’t like them even if they liked earlier games. I personally like Starfield quite a bit, consider it to definitely be worth the price. But a lot of people who did like earlier Bethesda games did not like Starfield.
Honestly, I kind of prefer the Paradox model to the “series” approach, in an era of digital distribution. I play a game, and keep buying DLC as long as I like the game. They do smaller releases that incrementally expand the game. Reduces risks for the player as well as the publisher. That doesn’t work for every genre, can’t do an adventure game like that, but it does work for games that are very replayable.
I very rarely ever did. And when I did I made sure I trusted the studio and knew enough. But even with this preparation I was burned most of the time preordering.
Nowadays I notice a game I like and I wait for 1-3 years, then pick it up DRM free, with all the extensions and fully patched for oftentimes 15€ or so.
I’m going to preorder monster hunter wilds, I’ll do it the day before and pre-download it. Does that count?
