Stop Preordering Videogames

The last game I pre-ordered was "Trespasser". Trespasser (video game) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It was released in October, 1998. I'd pre-ordered it sometime before then. ;) It was worse than the reviewers said, and they gave it 1 out of 10, "coaster of the year", etc. Since then, I have never ordered a game without reading a review, first. The review doesn't have to be stellar, but at least I'll be an informed consumer rather than a hopeful contributor.
 
I've been burned by pre-orders in the past and now only do it for games I positively know I'm going to play, like Civ 6 and WoW expansions. FPS games will never be pre-ordered again.
 
You can return games. I do it on steam all the time. I also pre-order for the pre-order bonus. If i don't like a game I return it.
This isn't a big deal.
I'm confused why the mouth breathers get into such a fit about this.

The only reasons not to pre-order (if you wanted to) are: you can't return it or you are having cash flow issues (ie don't spend money on something that isn't out when you can't pay your bills)

otherwise don't tell people what to do with their money. You when you pre-order you are sending an early signal to the publishers that this is a type of game that you'd like.
 
From the article: “You go into a restaurant, they bring you a steak, you eat a bite of it. You say, ‘this is no good, I don’t want it.’ That’s fine. But if you eat the steak? The whole steak? And then you say you want your money back? No way.”

In this case you ordered a 40 oz. medium rare perfect cut steak, but instead the waitress brings you an 8 oz. chicken breast. You think to yourself, well the waitress is cute and very nice, I'll just eat the chicken. The chicken looks alright and has lots of garnishment, clearly the cooks spent a lot of work on the presentation of this chicken. So you decide to eat it, it tastes pretty good but with each bite the pit of your stomach starts feeling uneasy. But you've been working all day and your starving (you did order a 40 oz. steak after all) so you finish the whole chicken in relatively short time, you even have time to examine some of the garnishment while your wife finishes her meal. As soon as you leave the restaurant you start feeling very sick. So sick that your wife has to drive, she says you look terrible and decides to drive to the hospital. You've got salmonella poisoning.

You're damn right you're getting your money back.

Side note: Steam gave me a total refund for No Man's Sky.
 
"Stop Pre-ordering"^H^H^H^H^H^ ....Stop paying more than $5...

I've bought more sub $5 titles in the last 5 years (or free on humble bundles) and I still can't even finish them or keep up.
 
I blew way more on a single night that I regretted the morning after. For some people, $60 is peanuts.
 
I pre-ordered Battlefield One and if there's ever a Left 4 Dead 3 or new Half Life game, I'll pre-order those, that's about it. I usually don't play the Battlefield games since BF2 / BF1942. Battlefield One just looks awesome.
 
so i think people earlier in the thread were questioning "why spend money in advance"...

I think for the case of the last time I preorderd (Uncharted 4), I wasn't really spending money in advance. I don't think Amazon charged my CC until it shipped (or at "worst", very shortly before it shipped, like less than a week). So it's really not any different than waiting until after the a game's release date, except that I got the amazon prime pre-order discount, got the game shipped to my door on release day, got some random preorder benefits.
 
If there's a decent discount, I might pre-order a game from a publisher that's been good in the past. No reason to preorder for no savings though. Extras "skins" or other in-game crap isn't worth the risk.

It's not like the old days when they might run out of copies.
 
M76 said:
News thread or not it's still baseless. Not preordering games won't make investors give developers more time and money to finish games. If anything it could have the opposite effect it seems to me.
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If there is one thing you can count on, it's the money men wanting a quick ROI.
 
zurv said:
You can return games. I do it on steam all the time. I also pre-order for the pre-order bonus. If i don't like a game I return it.
This isn't a big deal.
I'm confused why the mouth breathers get into such a fit about this.

The only reasons not to pre-order (if you wanted to) are: you can't return it or you are having cash flow issues (ie don't spend money on something that isn't out when you can't pay your bills)

otherwise don't tell people what to do with their money. You when you pre-order you are sending an early signal to the publishers that this is a type of game that you'd like.
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Because you can't return 90% of games, that's why. Only certain games are allowed to be returned and only in certain situations and even then half the time you have to fight over it. Now if what you said was universally true (Like it should be), then sure I would agree with you that pre-ordering causes no harm. However right now with the way software works, Pre-ordering is what has things in the current mess they are with so many titles being released unfinished or outright not even as promised. The reason why some of us get up in arms over it is we want this kind of shit to stop and it isn't going to stop as long as publishers know they are going to make most of their money before the bad reviews hit and even then unless things get incredibly bad people can't demand their money back.
 
I honestly don't understand the people who are pre-ordering Battlefield 1. Every single game that EA/DICE has released in the last 5 years has been fucked up in some way on release, and every time people complain about it and how they're never going to pre-order again. Battlefront was especially heinous and yet, here we still have people pre-ordering the latest EA/DICE game.

You know why they keep doing it? Because you keep pre-ordering.
 
I agree with the sentiment here that preordering from certain companies usually turns out OK. There is something fun about playing a title on the day it comes out.
 
The last game I actually pre-ordered was way way back when Burnout Paradise came out on PS3. That was certainly worth it. Everything after that has been literally hit or miss....
 
dark_reign said:
It's common sense to just wait a few days or weeks after the release. By then a few patches have been released and you get a better sense if the game is worth the price. Preorders may include exclusive content but the majority of it is just fluff. The good stuff usually ends up as DLC that you have to pay for.
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Honestly I wait sometimes for the 'game of the year' or complete edition to come out....then I buy it. Like the new witcher 3 complete bundle that is coming out, that I will most likely buy as I haven't gotten around to it yet.
 
To me this is like people who keep paying for cable.
Everybody 'hates' it, no significant mass cuts happen.
Most people are just full of it most of the time.
 
natos said:
The last game I actually pre-ordered was way way back when Burnout Paradise came out on PS3. That was certainly worth it. Everything after that has been literally hit or miss....
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I still break that one out and play it. Honestly has to be my favorite one out of all the NFS type games.
 
I never pre-order but for a different reason, time management. Just because I want to do something later, doesn't mean I'll have the time when the time arrives ...
 
ipkh said:
I only preorder games that are from reliable studios. For example, Bioware, Firaxis, and games in long running series such as Mass Effect, Deus Ex and Civilization. Other games can wait for proper reviews for purchase.
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This...
 
You used to get free shit when you pre-ordered games back in the day, like t-shirts. Now all you get is a game you can't play on day 1 until it's been patched 5 times because releasing broken games for the PC is all the rage, it would seem.
 
Preordered Battlefield 1 because I'm enjoying the hell out of the beta.

Suck it.

People preorder for different reasons, and the market will continue to decide whether or not preordering remains a thing, just as it always has; not angsty millennials on Reddit with their perpetual-fail "Don't preorder u gais" bandwagon crusades.
 
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Bah, there are more legit reasons to pre-order today in the digital download world than there were in the retail disc world of "I have to guarantee a copy even being available". Namely, price discounts, in game incentives (especially when the value is $60 in WoW) and steam refunds. That said, one should be very selective when doing so.
 
All EA/DICE games should be boycotted period. I screwed up and preorderd BattleFront (ITS STAR WARS MAN!!) never again. The game now has massive FPS drops in certain game types, content is more Battlefield than Battlefront (jump packs for all? really?), everything that was suppose to be in the game that was in the Original Battlefronts is now DLC. DLC is the developers way of being lazy and jerking us around. I got ripped on by the developers during the Hardline Beta for telling them if that, that shit needed to be released as an Expansion not an actual game. I went on to tell DICE that they should be putting more of their resources/people into BattleFront so we could get a complete game Star Wars game. Well here we are and the average amount of players for PC is around 2400 at any time if not way less. No more preorders from me, specially anything that is now EA owned. Can't believe the amount of idiots I read up on that can't wait for Battlefront 2. No class selection i,e. rocket soldier, sniper, regular soldier, etc. You can be a scout without a sniper rifle and use any other weapon? What shit is that?
 
I pre-order sometimes. Only two games in the past several years. Portal 2 and uncharted 4.

Usually though I just wait until the pre-order edition was over produced and is sold for the same price as normal retail.
 
SnowBeast said:
All EA/DICE games should be boycotted period. I screwed up and preorderd BattleFront (ITS STAR WARS MAN!!) never again. The game now has massive FPS drops in certain game types, content is more Battlefield than Battlefront (jump packs for all? really?), everything that was suppose to be in the game that was in the Original Battlefronts is now DLC. DLC is the developers way of being lazy and jerking us around. I got ripped on by the developers during the Hardline Beta for telling them if that, that shit needed to be released as an Expansion not an actual game. I went on to tell DICE that they should be putting more of their resources/people into BattleFront so we could get a complete game Star Wars game. Well here we are and the average amount of players for PC is around 2400 at any time if not way less. No more preorders from me, specially anything that is now EA owned. Can't believe the amount of idiots I read up on that can't wait for Battlefront 2. No class selection i,e. rocket soldier, sniper, regular soldier, etc. You can be a scout without a sniper rifle and use any other weapon? What shit is that?
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So, all EA/DICE games should be boycotted because one game doesn't conform precisely to your personal hierarchy of needs? That seems a little childish.
 
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I can only really see any reason to preorder online games. and back before it was all digital download..

otherwise who cares if you have to wait 3 days for a physical copy to arrive its not a worse game still the same experience
and with digital download how can it even be delayed. it just download an go. instant supply


my last preorder was ESO platinumedition and just to get the extra perks. it was suppoed to replace FFXI that me and my wife used to play. but yeah not even close.. did the 30 days and then cancled.
I'm just a sucker for the small extra things.
 
M76 said:
News thread or not it's still baseless. Not preordering games won't make investors give developers more time and money to finish games. If anything it could have the opposite effect it seems to me.
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"Citation_needed".jpg
 
listening to many people here the issues isn't preordering, it is playing shitty games. Stop playing and buying shitty games (ie call of duty, battlefield, etc) and you will find that you don't suffer from problems
 
A bakery owner demands his baker bakes a cake in 20 minutes and without a few key ingredients the owner has decided were too expensive. The baker does as the owner asks, but the cake is an under cooked mess that people refuse to buy.
The owner demands to know why no one will buy the cake, and the baker tells him the cake needs those missing ingredients and 40 minutes to cook.
The bakery owner now has several things he can try.
He can follow the advice of the baker and give him 40 minutes and all of the ingredients to bake the cake, and get a pretty decent cake.
He can try to find a baker that can make a cake without those ingredients in 20 minutes, and end up with another shitty cake.
He can market the shit out of his cake like substance, offer to take peoples money today for cake that will be delivered later, and hope enough people pre-order his cake so that he makes his money regardless of whether the cake comes out like shit or not.

He says what the hell, and tries the last option. People pre-order the cake, the cake sucks, but they defend their purchasing decision due to their pride. They do not want to admit they got took. The bakery owner sees this shit and jumps for joy. He does not need to sell a good cake, he just has to market that cake right. He fires his best bakers, since they are no longer needed, and hires more marketing staff and c

Now the only reason he gets to do this, is because people continue to pre-order, continue to buy regardless of quality b4 it is released.

This is why as much as 60-75% of a games budget is spent on marketing and not the game. Enough people are suckers.

$60 three months prior to it's release, for a broken game at launch, that I have to wait months for them to fix, if at all, makes me feel like a chump. I hate feeling like a chump, so I don't preorder.
 
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SnowBeast said:
All EA/DICE games should be boycotted period. I screwed up and preorderd BattleFront (ITS STAR WARS MAN!!) never again. The game now has massive FPS drops in certain game types, content is more Battlefield than Battlefront (jump packs for all? really?), everything that was suppose to be in the game that was in the Original Battlefronts is now DLC. DLC is the developers way of being lazy and jerking us around. I got ripped on by the developers during the Hardline Beta for telling them if that, that shit needed to be released as an Expansion not an actual game. I went on to tell DICE that they should be putting more of their resources/people into BattleFront so we could get a complete game Star Wars game. Well here we are and the average amount of players for PC is around 2400 at any time if not way less. No more preorders from me, specially anything that is now EA owned. Can't believe the amount of idiots I read up on that can't wait for Battlefront 2. No class selection i,e. rocket soldier, sniper, regular soldier, etc. You can be a scout without a sniper rifle and use any other weapon? What shit is that?
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Been saying this since shortly after the release of BF2. I've put in thousands of hours into BF1942 + mods, BF:V and mods, BF2 and mods. EA/Dice just took a giant shit on the community as a whole and the series and nothing past BF2 is even worth touching. Yet for whatever reason despite the fact that it is well damn known how anti consumer they are..people are buying BF in record numbers. I swear to god gamer's all have stockholm's syndrome.

DPI said:
So, all EA/DICE games should be boycotted because one game doesn't conform precisely to your personal hierarchy of needs? That seems a little childish.
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It isn't one game, they have a proven track record of shitting on their consumer base. It would be nice if most of it would quit acting like a bunch of kidnap victims and defending this garbage.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
Been saying this since shortly after the release of BF2. I've put in thousands of hours into BF1942 + mods, BF:V and mods, BF2 and mods. EA/Dice just took a giant shit on the community as a whole and the series and nothing past BF2 is even worth touching. Yet for whatever reason despite the fact that it is well damn known how anti consumer they are..people are buying BF in record numbers. I swear to god gamer's all have stockholm's syndrome.



It isn't one game, they have a proven track record of shitting on their consumer base. It would be nice if most of it would quit acting like a bunch of kidnap victims and defending this garbage.
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You're 100% correct. EA has been practicing shitting on their customers for about 16 years now and they have gotten really good at it. The games they released and their association with other developers started going sharply down hill after they dissolved Westwood Studios.
 
Come to think of it, I don't think I have EVER felt, after pre-ordering or buying any $60 games, that I felt it was a shitty game enough that I regretted paying for the game.

Not even the base D3, which I barely put 100 hours into. It's always been the $60 games that I don't buy that seem to always get bad reviews, but somehow, never the ones I buy.

I was almost pre-ordering Mankind Divided, before I decided against it due to lack of hardware, figured by the time I got the hardware and gotten around to finish HR, It'd be on discount or DC edition, which turned out to have micros (not too fussed about it TBH).

Lucky, or just simply a low standard of taste?
 
Gorankar said:
A bakery owner demands his baker bakes a cake in 20 minutes and without a few key ingredients the owner has decided were too expensive. The baker does as the owner asks, but the cake is an under cooked mess that people refuse to buy.
The owner demands to know why no one will buy the cake, and the baker tells him the cake needs those missing ingredients and 40 minutes to cook.
The bakery owner now has several things he can try.
He can follow the advice of the baker and give him 40 minutes and all of the ingredients to bake the cake, and get a pretty decent cake.
He can try to find a baker that can make a cake without those ingredients in 20 minutes, and end up with another shitty cake.
He can market the shit out of his cake like substance, offer to take peoples money today for cake that will be delivered later, and hope enough people pre-order his cake so that he makes his money regardless of whether the cake comes out like shit or not.

He says what the hell, and tries the last option. People pre-order the cake, the cake sucks, but they defend their purchasing decision due to their pride. They do not want to admit they got took. The bakery owner sees this shit and jumps for joy. He does not need to sell a good cake, he just has to market that cake right. He fires his best bakers, since they are no longer needed, and hires more marketing staff and c

Now the only reason he gets to do this, is because people continue to pre-order, continue to buy regardless of quality b4 it is released.

This is why as much as 60-75% of a games budget is spent on marketing and not the game. Enough people are suckers.

$60 three months prior to it's release, for a broken game at launch, that I have to wait months for them to fix, if at all, makes me feel like a chump. I hate feeling like a chump, so I don't preorder.
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Lets fix your example because you are wrong.

A baker bakes 20 different kinds of cakes, 15 of which they bake all the time, 5 new ones. Of the 15, 3 of them are never made correctly because of the owner trying to do something different or cut cost on ingredients. You know what 3 cakes these are that are never made right. Yet you decide that even though these 3 were shit the last 10 times you bought said cakes you are going to special order all 3 of them because they can't be as bad as last time right. Those that buy the other 12 ones they bake all the time have no problem with those as they know they are all good. They enjoy the cakes they buy, they special order them all the time and never have a bad experience. They even special order one or two of the other 5 if they appear to be of the flavor they would like and they find them to be ok. Yet there you are, ignoring any reason and buying those same bad cakes because you like 1 of the ingredients so are determined to make yourself like all the others in it even it not made right.

chenw said:
Come to think of it, I don't think I have EVER felt, after pre-ordering or buying any $60 games, that I felt it was a shitty game enough that I regretted paying for the game.

Not even the base D3, which I barely put 100 hours into. It's always been the $60 games that I don't buy that seem to always get bad reviews, but somehow, never the ones I buy.

I was almost pre-ordering Mankind Divided, before I decided against it due to lack of hardware, figured by the time I got the hardware and gotten around to finish HR, It'd be on discount or DC edition, which turned out to have micros (not too fussed about it TBH).

Lucky, or just simply a low standard of taste?
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I am with you. I can't think of a single game I ever preordered and it was broke to the point that I couldn't play it. I actually haven't ever purchased a single game that was broke like that. Although I also do 75% of my gaming on consoles and the 25% I do on the pc I don't ever try to push to the absolute extreme. Although I also am not preordering the same games that people normally do that are completely broke. If I did play battlefield or call of duty, I knew that those games normally are broke so don't bother trying to play for the first few months. Only game that could have maybe caught me was Assassin's Creed Unity as that was broke on everything. But I still own and need to beat 3 and 4 before I get Unity and Syndicate so I missed out on that. Destiny and The Division were ok, I got the games on day one, played them through to the end and was done with them then. I got over 60 hours in both games so I feel ok with my $60 purchase. Which for the division I would say me not getting to play much for the first 2 months actually is part of the reason it is nice to have games on day one as by the time I went out into the pvp area I was so far behind everyone else I was getting my ass handed to me by people as soon as I entered. So I just ended up avoiding the pvp area as it wasn't worth it. Which is how some multiplayer games are, if you aren't there on day one playing then by the time you jump in everyone is going to over power you.
 
I stopped preordering when availability was a non issue. Issues like FF7, Panzer Dragoon Saga, etc are long gone.

I could see limited edition collector item cases and boxes but the games themselves? Nope.
 
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