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 !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
Can’t wait to play PS5 games in 5 years…
All six of them.
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
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
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.
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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Hissssss 🐍
Don’t preorder, what the hell are you people thinking?!
Absolutely no reason to, you pay more for a buggier version. I generally wait until there’s a good sale.
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.
Never. I only rarely buy a game within a year of release. Too fucking many good cheap or free games to justify paying msrp before it even gets reviews.
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.
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.
I pre-ordered No Man’s Sky and that was the first and last time I pre-ordered anything.
Beyond the painful lesson, pre-ordering is just a large risk that you’re going to get a crap game - which is doubly unpleasant because you’ve basically paid good money to buy yourself a feeling of frustration and the experience of having been scammed - and all that you gain from pre-ordering a digital game is at best being able to play the exact same game a few minutes or maybe hours earlier than if you bought it on day 1, which is a “gain” not worth taking on that risk.
This is even more so in this day and age of totally overhyped bullshit and industry reviews being either pretty much paid for or done against beta versions hence not mentioning software problems such as bugs and slowness.
In fact I would even advise against buying a game on the first week or month for similar reasons - you want to reduce the risk of wasting your money and of frustration, by waiting for others to have played it and user reviews to come out and by buying later you’ll probably going to end up with a better version of the game because the worst post-release bugs will have started being patched.
You could say that from the point of view of the buyer, it doesn’t make business sense to pre-ordered a digital good for which there is no scarcity.
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.
I stopped pre-ordering games long ago. THhe last 3 I ever pre-ordered were Shenmue 3, No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077. The all had a disastrous launch to some degree, and I said never again. I also pre-ordered Vampire: The Masquerade 2, but I cancelled it years ago. The last physical game I bought was Metal Gear Solid V, and it was a DVD with a fucking Steam installer inside.
Never again.
