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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Last game I preordered was World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade and I stood in line for 12 hours to make sure I was the very first to have it. Haven’t preordered any game since then. They weren’t distributed digitally back then, so running out of ‘copies’ was a real thing.
Now, I perpetually buy games that are 1-2 years old. They’ve been patched, they’ve been balanced, they’re stable, and I can watch someone on Twitch beforehand to decide if it’s worth purchasing.
If I know I’d be buying day 1 anyway, yes I’ll preorder. I know I’ll be playing Avowed day one because it looks like my cup of tea, and I’ll be playing Wilds day one because I have a ton of friends who want to play it together.
I’m going to preorder monster hunter wilds, I’ll do it the day before and pre-download it. Does that count?
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.
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 get lost in the hype and I do, last one was armored core and cyberpunk before that
I will say this, the hype is also entertainment and I had more fun with the buildup to cyberpunk than with the game itself and I’m glad I experienced it all, steam servers crashing was wild
The real cyberpunk was the friends we made along the way unironically
I read so much about the lore of cyberpunk before the release just to be met with a boring mess.
Not digital. I used to preorder popular games way back before digital was a thing as supply could be tight, but it makes zero sense in a digital world where they can’t run out of supply.
Especially with how the trend today is release and drop hotfixes (or in some cases just laugh to the bank) I won’t drop $$$ until its in a good state
Does steam let you pre install? Only reason I can think of and I have never done it
never
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.
Almost never. The last one I digitally pre-ordered was Borderlands 3, and given how that turned out, I think I might buy BL4 on release day, if not a few weeks later
What’s the difference between doing your way and maybe wait a day or 2 until gameplay is published?
Well I mean my way is waiting until gameplay is published, as well as making sure the story isn’t ass. I’m gonna let my coplayer decide if he wants to get it day one, but I imagine he’ll hold out for a bit
Wrt BL3, we were gonna buy that on release anyway because we’d done the same for every other entry and DLC since the day BL2 came out. If we’d waited a few weeks, the only difference would be that we’re prepared for the story to be ass
Makes sense.
Though I wouldnt pre-order anyway just to not count against the pre-order metric.
Not counting Kickstarter projects, which I rarely back anymore, no. I’ll wait for reviews and probably a sale.
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.
There’s no point because you do not know how the games are.
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.
