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Kotaku: stop preordering games!
- Thread starter defiant007
- Start date
I have to pre-order PC games or my local Gamestop will not stock them.
Small towns ftw.
...just go digital?
Preordering is for suckers.
Godmachine
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I rarely pre-order now. If I want a game , I walk into the store to get it or nab it off Steam.
Intel_Hydralisk
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Still have advantages like pre-loading before servers are bogged down on release day.
I have not regretted any of my pre-orders.
Only pre-order I regret is ME3. I don't mind pre-orders. It has nothing to do with stock issues, sometimes it's just "Hey I want this game let's get some money on it before I forget about it" or "Hmm that's a neat little bonus for a game I was already going to buy anyway". Honestly I'd rather pre-order a game then buy it on launch day. If I'm already planning to buy a game on launch why shouldn't I pre-order?
rudy
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I have always said do not preorder games, but the industry has come up with a new bait that most people cannot live without. The preorder DLC. Sorry the industry is what it is. Terrible like the movie industry. But such is life.
Also it is amazing now days that people cannot wait even 1 day to get something. I do not buy games until they are out at least a week. The only game I ever preordered in my life was HL2, and yes, I was dissapointed so never again. (just for the record I was dissapointed because it did not come with multiplayer not because HL2 was a bad game)
Also it is amazing now days that people cannot wait even 1 day to get something. I do not buy games until they are out at least a week. The only game I ever preordered in my life was HL2, and yes, I was dissapointed so never again. (just for the record I was dissapointed because it did not come with multiplayer not because HL2 was a bad game)
I know it's been a while, but I don't recall Valve ever saying HL2 would have multiplayer.
As for pre-order bonuses there is nothing wrong with them as long as they are useless little things. Skins and physical items make for great pre-order bonuses, the problem with them comes from shit like "pre-order exclusive limited edition" or early unlocks or pre-order exclusive content that adds value to game. Also I believe every digital pre-order asset should be later sold for a cheap price so everyone can get it if they really want to. Still I'll take pre-order crap before always-on DRM and online passes any day of the week.
Personally I found Portal 2 to be well worth full price, but that is a damn good price for the game.
This is basically my thoughts on the matter too. I rarely preorder, but the few games I do preorder I've never regretted. Last year I preordered TW2 and Space Marine, don't regret either of them.
Especially if you want to play early and you can find a good deal. I intend to play Darksiders 2 as soon as it comes out and I preordered it for $40, granted I could have got it for $35, but given the retail price in australia is likely to be $80 I'm pretty happy with getting it release day for $40 and getting the free DLC which comes out after launch.
I'm not happy about publishers giving preorder bonuses that are in game content (little toys/posters/comics are fine, but in game content I think is bad). BUT, I'm not going to punish myself by NOT preordered a game and NOT getting the content if it's a game I want.
That last point is one people of forget as well "it's a game I want", I don't preorder shit I don't want to play release day regardless, so I don't see the harm in preordering or the point in punishing myself by not getting the preorder goodies if I want them.
People attacking preorders often act as though other people preorder just for the sake of preordering, forgetting that the reason people preorder is because they want the game
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GREAT POST OP
I wish that people realized that the only person looking out for you is YOU!!
Until you say no I am not taking this bs any more.
Each year they introduce new stuff to F us and say HERE pay me Kiss my A#$ and say thank you stupid
NO say I will not pay you until you kiss MY A#$
tell them any way you can DONT PAY AND SAY THANK YOU...they need your money more than you need them.
I wish that people realized that the only person looking out for you is YOU!!
Until you say no I am not taking this bs any more.
Each year they introduce new stuff to F us and say HERE pay me Kiss my A#$ and say thank you stupid
NO say I will not pay you until you kiss MY A#$
tell them any way you can DONT PAY AND SAY THANK YOU...they need your money more than you need them.
Alternatively: Buy the games you want, when you want and don't get worked up by what other people do with THEIR money.
Yep, which is why I purchase and/or preorder the games I want and give my money to the devs/pubs I want for games I want to play.
there is nothing inherently wrong with pre-order incentives, or choosing to support publishers this way. some devs could not manage to get off the ground without launch support from these sales. people should just think about what they're buying, and how it reduces the initial value of your games.
custom skins that were obviously made seperate from the original game - good
removing all of the new weapons in your latest sequel as pre-order bonus and dlc (who might this be??) - bad
again the point is, what you do with your money affects what everyone (including YOU) gets for their money.
custom skins that were spread like butter across half a dozen retailers as retailer exlusive content - BAD
It's what the mainstream does that affects everyone. For all the bitching and boycotting gaming enthusiasts such as those on this forum have done on a game like COD, which I myself did not buy... it's still a raging success and will have yet another sequel out next year and will continue to shape the face of gaming because that's what the mainstream is flocking to in droves.
People say on forums like this when YOU stop buying it THEY'LL stop making it, when it's the people who never set foot in an enthusiast forum who dictate the market.
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Stay tuned for the next round of huge Madden and COD sales later this year even if a bunch of us here don't bother.
'Nuff said.
rudy
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I cannot recall either, but to me it was just assumed, HL1 had HLDM multiplayer and HL2 should have had HL2MP, instead they made the outrageous claim CSS was the MP.... Ya I really wanted to shoot the most boring guns in the world after playing HL2 with a gravtity gun.
But that is the bigger point, many of us assume games will not go backward, we assume we will be given content that is more and better than the previous title, and that is why it is so important not to preorder, because many of us will be dissapointed.
I am against preorder DLC no matter what, the whole point of preorder DLC is to lock in a sale with no knowledge of the product quality, and this takes away one more incentive for companies to deliver quality products. Just the same as grinding unlocks is also another way to extend the game and skip quality. Niether of these items in themself mean a game will not have quality, they just add one more dimension of manipulation where a company has the option to skip on quality and cover it up with these things.
TwistedAegis
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It just depends on the value the pre-order provides. If it's just paying early for the game, it makes no sense. Some games however offer enough of a carrot to make it a better value if you know you are going to buy the game anyway. BF3 gave me Back to Karkand "free." Plus they gave me Dead Space 2 for free for doing it.
I don't do it very often however. But to just make it as a blanket statement that "all preorders are bad" doesn't make sense; each value proposition has to be analyzed individually.
there are devs who go the extra mile. pre-release demos, open betas, long term updates, etc where it certainly is possible to know exactly what you're getting. devs and publishers that make a genuine effort to build a fanbase and generate good pr, if they want to thank their customers with some decent one-offs and real effort put into it, I don't mind buying at launch, or kicking in a few bucks here and there.
this is obviously a far cry from the money grubbing shit that the big publishers have turned it into, stripping their games bare and whoring it out to all those retailers, scratching each others backs while we end up with whichever half done crap was "unlocked" with our version. when all you got to decide on is some super awsome cinematic trailer, showing zero actual in game footage, that's what the op is getting at.
it's the sad truth, we can't force people to realise they're paying twice as much, for the same amount of content as the last release/sequel/version. people can't tell the difference between stripped content and expansion, so they're viewed as one and the same now, how fucked up is that. this "mainstream" is who the article is aimed at I suppose, really what else can we do besides post in the public forum, you're all idiots and getting ripped off, stop devaluing my games.
This is going to sound very hypocritical coming from me but we can't just go around calling them idiots, it devalues the message. In cases like this it's easier to use logical arguments and also be able to understand that in most cases people are buying yearly sports games or CoD games because they actually enjoy playing them. The truth that enthusiast gamers like to ignore is that if these games weren't fun they simply would not sell. A person isn't going to put upwards of 100+ hours a year into these titles if they aren't having fun doing so.
there is no such thing as having to have a game the day it comes out. or even the week it comes out. anyone who preorders any game is a chump and a sucker. i dont think ive bought a game in the first 6 months it came out in like 3 years. games are a hobby, not my life.
MavericK
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Your post has a lot of merit, but I think part of the problem is that a lot of people who endlessly buy CoD and Madden don't really know (or perhaps care) that there are better alternatives, or that there could be better if they did not buy into the franchise endlessly. I'm sure they have fun with the games to some extent, but I also think they have resigned themselves to mediocrity as well. Plus, for example, I bet a lot of people who buy CoD #20 or whatever and hate it, will see CoD #21's hype and say "Well, it's gotta be better than the last one!" and perpetuate the cycle.
I also think a large portion of the mainstream is comprised of younger kids who only play consoles.
EDIT: To add a bit, I think a lot of the tension between console and PC gamers is that only in (relatively) recent years have the two markets started to intermingle closely with each other, in terms of cross-platform titles and "ports". Back in the day you had people who played Nintendo, people who played PC games, oftentimes people who had both, and there was really no conflict between them because they were entirely different markets. Nowadays, a great many PC games are being "console-ized", whether it be due to shitty ports, poor controller-centric controls/UIs, or what have you, and that is causing a lot of primarily PC gamers to get angry. Then, when they do so, they are called "spoiled" and "entitled" and "elitist". Sure, gamers exist that fit these titles (on BOTH sides), but expecting PC games to be developed with a PC in mind is none of those things.
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I had gotten pretty bad with the whole Steam pre-order thing. Then Sword of the Stars 2 burnt me bad. ("We had a finished game, but the dog ate the code, so here's a pre-alpha for you at full price.") Since then I will not buy a game until it has been out at least a month and I've read some actual user reviews.
Have fun on your high horse, hope you don't smack your head on a tree branch while riding it.
Better is a HIGHLY relative term. I could say a game like Hard Reset is a much better alternative to both CoD AND Battlefied because I couldn't give a crap about either franchise. We're so busy looking at the world from our own viewpoint that we miss the fact that other people don't see it the same way.
Enthusiast gamers aren't immune to "maybe the next one will be better" syndrome either, just our disappointing sequels are more than a year apart.
Actually the vast majority of gamers are adults. The average age of a gamer is something like 18-35 now.
On your edit: Yes and no. I've called plenty of people those things over the years and most of the time it's been and easily defendable position. There are a lot of level-headed PC gamers that simply demand a game work properly on their platform of choice, but the loudest and most annoying ones are the types that will bitch about anything and everything no matter how small the "slight" is. They give every one of us a bad image.
MavericK
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True. I guess maybe a more apt term would be "different".
I've heard that too, but I have to wonder about that statistic sometimes, both with the general attitude/maturity of a lot of gamers (console and otherwise), coupled with the fact that some of these people have hundreds of hours into games. Must be students, unemployed, or both. Or the stats are questionable.
Also true, but it equally seems like it's been the new trend to just bust that excuse out whenever someone calls a PC game less than perfection.
Here's why pre-orders exist:
They exist to help the stores gauge the number of copies they will need on hand at launch so the inventory control analysts can more intelligently purchase from the vendor. A company like Gamestop has to watch it's bottom line closely, and this is a tool for that. Everything else is a secondary effect or stems from this.
This simply proves the people at Kotaku have no idea how retail works. This is a streamlining of the process to help B&M and vendors both. Keep in mind that should a company like Gamestop over-order their deals with a vendor might not include the ability to return all copies, or only return at X percentage of purchase price or whatever they have worked out with that vendor. Shipping is also an expense that correctly calculating need helps everyone involved, vendor and retailer.
Pre-orders might have their negatives, but really they are a net positive thing.
They exist to help the stores gauge the number of copies they will need on hand at launch so the inventory control analysts can more intelligently purchase from the vendor. A company like Gamestop has to watch it's bottom line closely, and this is a tool for that. Everything else is a secondary effect or stems from this.
This simply proves the people at Kotaku have no idea how retail works. This is a streamlining of the process to help B&M and vendors both. Keep in mind that should a company like Gamestop over-order their deals with a vendor might not include the ability to return all copies, or only return at X percentage of purchase price or whatever they have worked out with that vendor. Shipping is also an expense that correctly calculating need helps everyone involved, vendor and retailer.
Pre-orders might have their negatives, but really they are a net positive thing.
MavericK
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Why can you still pre-order digital copies, then?
I can probably dream up a couple reasons, including properly gauging if your server capacity is going to be enough for the multiplayer interest.
he calls games expensive hahahha.
games are cheaper than they have ever been.
games were 50 dollars for Sega Genesis and that came out in 1988
What cost $50 in 1988 would cost $90.95 in 2010.
Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2010 and 1988,
they would cost you $50 and $26.83 respectively.
games are cheaper than they have ever been.
games were 50 dollars for Sega Genesis and that came out in 1988
What cost $50 in 1988 would cost $90.95 in 2010.
Also, if you were to buy exactly the same products in 2010 and 1988,
they would cost you $50 and $26.83 respectively.