Stop Preordering Videogames

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While many of you have already ditched the practice of preordering games, there are tons people us that still do. If you are still preordering games, why? What games are you more likely to preorder? Which game are you unwilling to preorder? Is price a factor?

If you’ve ever preordered a videogame and felt disappointed by your purchase later, let me suggest a great thing to try: Stop preordering videogames. Again, if $60 is the sort of cash you might find between your couch cushions, then go nuts. But if there’s even the slightest chance you’ll feel burned, you have an option: just wait.
 
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.
 
I preorder games on a semi regular basis. However I only preorder games that I think I will be safe with.

Price is never a factor, but then again that $60 isn't hurting me. I spend the money and then forget that I even spent it as I have enough extra money to buy a game or two when I want. Normally it is something that they are going to be giving you (preorder and get some game free) and the knowledge that I will be buying it on day one anyway. So about a week before I will order it so that I can have it downloaded and play it upon its release. And honestly I can't really think of a game that really burned me. I did buy Destiny but that wasn't so much as a burn but finding out that they didn't leave out the story in the beta to avoid spoiling it, they just never had a story in the game.
 
I only pre-order a small handful of franchises that I truly love like Dark Souls and Elder Scrolls...never been disappointed...
 
Depends on the game.

Forza Horizon 3? Yes.

Battlefield 1? No.

Both look amazing. BF1 beta is great. I've never been burned with Forza.

EA stuff? Never preorder. Ubisoft? Never. Bethesda? Good odds it'll be great.

I don't pre-order from certain companies. Others, I have no problem with.
 
It's all about hype and people need to stop literally buying into it.

Even if it's a game franchise you know and love, like Forza, there is still no point to preorder. Why spend your money in advance if availability is never an issue?
 
Maybe these companies will actually finish developing the games before release if people quit preordering them.
 
Sonicks said:
Even if it's a game franchise you know and love, like Forza, there is still no point to preorder. Why spend your money in advance if availability is never an issue?
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because you want to play as soon as the game unlocks?
 
I will never pre-order anything again. I promise. Only took once to learn me proper.
 
Sonicks said:
It's all about hype and people need to stop literally buying into it.

Even if it's a game franchise you know and love, like Forza, there is still no point to preorder. Why spend your money in advance if availability is never an issue?
Click to expand...
I will give an answer many people wouldn't even think about.

For the extremely few franchises I pre-order for, I do it as a means of watching my money.

For example... Battlefield 1 is coming up in October. Next two months my combined household income is going to drop drastically and I do not know if I will have the funds after October 1. This game will quite literally be one of two games I will be able to buy this year (DOOM being the other, and I didn't pre-order it). I've held off pre-ordering until I could at least get a good feel for the game in the Beta. So far I'm liking it.

Yes, I could technically put that $70 aside for two months and not spend it till release day October 21. However, I also want to play it 3 days early on October 18th and get ahead of the curve with experience and unlocks. Since this is a franchise I play religiously (1000 hours in BF3, 2000 hours in BF4, countless hours in previous titles), I know what to expect from DICE.

Therefore it is a gamble I'm willing to take. I will likely pre-order BF1. I can always cancel the pre-order if something changes.
 
The factors affecting my decision to pre-order or not:

1. Price. Some Pre-orders offer discount off the initial price, the biggest example of this is Witcher 3, where it was 10% off and a further 5% off for each of the previous Witcher you own, so it was a 20% discount off the bat. I figured this was a good deal, since I feel it'll be a while before the game will be discounted by that much. The problem with this idea was that I decided I wanted to 'complete' TW1 & 2 before moving onto 3, and I am still in the process of replaying 1 (I missed Moonblade due to the completely unobvious bounty quests in act 1), haven't touched 2 too much, so 3 has been left on the backburner, long enough that GoTY edition is now out for the same price as I pre-ordered TW3. Do I regret it? No, because I had every interest in playing the series at the time, just something else caught my attention and I haven't gotten a chance to do it (it's not the game's bad, the playing got delayed to the point where the early buy may not have been the very best of ideas).

2. Name of the studio or person involved. This is actually more applicable with Kickstarter than pre-orders. I have backed 3 games so far. Divinity: Original Sin 2, Bloodstained and System Shock remastered. D:OS2 because Larian has been around for a while, and they proved themselves with their last KS project (D:OS1) that they can deliver, so I helped them, it's not often you get good TB games. Bloodstained because of Koji Igarashi's name (Castlevania father), and I haven't had a good Castlevania like platformer in a LONG time. Finally System Shock Remastered, because I thought it was a good gamble, System Shock is a VERY big name in games. But I fully understand the risks involved in KS, so I kept it to minimum.

3. Pre-order bonuses. I am a sucker for this one, but MD was the first time where I decided I want to wait for the game's bonuses to be available later as I currently do not have the hardware to run it, but turns out the pre-order bonuses was a turd, so not much loss. I pre-ordered TW3 partially on this as well, and Pillars of Eternity.

These are pretty much my reasons for pre-orders. I don't Pre-order games that offer me no benefit whatsoever, hence I don't pre-order Bethesda games (they are often of quite high quality, even FO4, which I actually like settlement management).

For all intents and purposes, I treat Season pass as pre-orders for DLCs (because that's essentially what they are), and only treat them as DLC discount package after all the DLCs have been released. FO4 was the first time I got suckered into buying the Season pass because of the price hike, but that would then fall into 1 above.
 
Kickstarters are another thing entirely from pre-orders. I pre-ordered Spore and that turned out to be about a week of cheap lolz followed by never playing it again. Since then, outside of MMO expansions I know I wanted, I haven't pre-ordered anything. I've crowdfunded games though, because that takes a different mindset than pre-ordering. Crowdfunding is far more forgivable because the game isn't getting made without your money. And presumably it never goes to EA.
 
I never understood the idea of preordering anything. Wait till it comes out, and that you know the product is actually delivering. THEN buy.

On similar subject, years back I was looking into Bitcoin mining knowing that I'm late in the game, but every single ASIC you had to preorder, guess what, most of them never delivered or by the time they did, the difficulty had gone up and made them obsolete.

I DID go against my normal behavior though and preordered Super Mario Maker when it was about to come out. But think it was the first time I did that and did it since I was really stoked for that game and one of my friends had preordered it too. I preordered it digitally though, so was able to download it on release date, he had to wait because it was a physical copy being shipped out. :p
 
I never bothered with preordering when I was younger since I was playing more games, but now I spend my time on only a handful of games during the year. As the gap between games increased I would preorder games that I felt were safe bets. They would be part of a continuing franchise and from companies whose games I tend to like a lot. By now I've been burned more often than not, so I'm down to one or two games I'm still willing to preorder, and even then I think it's a bit of coin toss. If Civilization VI turns out to be a flop like Beyond Earth then I think I'll be done.
 
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Just downloaded battlefield one beta. game runs great. seems a good way to justify a pre-order. going in blind not a good idea.
 
I preorder video games so that I can download my digital online copy the second it comes out, because if I waited for the release date then... oh yeah, I could do the same thing, and actually check a review and see if its a flop and has tons of bugs at launch.

The weirdest thing to me is when people pre-order games, even though they have a huge backlog of games on their Steam account they haven't even installed yet.
 
I preorder games because guys like Steve remind me that I can preorder The Witcher III: Complete Edition from Amazon for a great price.

But since that is a mature edition of a heavily vetted game, I guess I'm not part of the problem.
 
Pre ordering, getting too risky lately. So afraid gonna get burned not getting features promised. Seen it alot. Well I guess we all have.
 
I preorder collectors editions I want or the odd game, but those are physical boxes and I'm only charged when they ship, unlike blizz legion preorder from 6+ months ago where you get charged right aways for something that's still half a year or so away.
 
What difference does it make? If you want the game, you're going to buy it anyway. You aren't going to listen to some review or "Let's Play" two hours after the game is released. You'll end up buying it within a few days of release unless you weren't really that interested. And if you weren't really that interested, then you never would have preordered.

So there you go. It's a foregone conclusion. Might as well get a discount or cool bonus whatever it is for pre-ordering because you're going to buy it anyway within 48 hours.

For the record, I don't pre-order games. I can't recall the last game I preordered. I WOULD pre-order a game I wanted to get something out of it.
 
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.
 
In 2001 when the store was going to literally run out of the game, OK makes sense. In 2016 when you can always buy it no matter what it makes no sense.
 
I made a post in the last thread about this. I thought I had learned my lesson on pre-ordering crap until Bethesda released the Pip-Boy Edition of FO4. Of course me, being the huge sucker I am, pre-ordered the damn thing and bought the season pass. Low and behold the game was total crap and I wasted $150 on the thing. I thought it was going to be fine. Bethesda did great with FO3 and Obsidian made a really fun game with FNV. /endrant

Anyway, that was the final straw. I thought I could trust Bethesda to put out a decent game. It might've been full of bugs at release but it would at least be fun to play. Boy was I wrong. If I can't trust them anymore I be damned if I'm going to pre-order from anyone else.
 
Pre-ordered fallout 4 for the pip boy case and sw the old republic for something I don't remember at the moment, but both I knew I'd enjoy and both because the perks were limited. If I'm to preorder, I not only need to feel there's no risk but also give me something extra for loaning you my money.
 
pre-orders i have done in the past if i know it is a safe bet (whether playing beta or trusting the company). Typically this just happens when I have a little play money, maybe later on at release date I may or may not have extra cash, so it is kind of nice to just all of a sudden get a game to play, in some cases I have almost forgotten the release date if it was far enough in advance.
 
Yeha preorder... great. What? 65 bucks for a game? I'll post-order it when it gets to sensible prices (15-20 bucks).
 
I never preorder. I mean what is the point? Back in the days we used to have shortage of disk, and people being afraid not finding it on day one. I have never run in to this situation last few years. Any game can be had anytime disk or download.

don't get the idea of preordering. May be few perks? like in game rewards or some shit. But not worth the regret.

are people actually afraid of not having a game on on day one anymore?
 
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The last Console that people NEEDED to pre-order games for was the N64 because it took so long to manufacture cartridges, it was hard for studios to determine demand and increase supple quickly...
 
I preorder limited/collector's editions that have something I'd want. Outside of that, pretty much only Blizzard.
 
I preorder games I'm going to get day one. So far its worked out well for me. Now that I get 20% off with Amazon Prime that makes even better deal.
 
Way to much over hyped over priced crap out these days. I almost always wait for steam sale as I still have plenty of other games to catch up on. Just wait for the bugs to be worked out then it will be cheaper.
 
Depends on studio and game. Money is not a factor.

In short, I will continue to preorder the amount I always did.

I would say buying season passes is worse than preorder. Not to mention early access.

I preordered Project Highrise as the latest one. I could preorder Civilization 6, since I want that too and got positively surprised by its development. But I may not depending if I will be able to play it on day 1 or not.
 
I quit pre-ordering most games years ago. I also actively discourage people from doing it. There are just far too many half baked releases being shoved out by publishers. I will only ever pre-order specific franchise games like Final Fantasy where I know it isn't going to be released half finished, I know I'm going to get a minimum of 60+ hours out of it and I'm going to enjoy it. I will absolutely NEVER pre-order new IP's. That is just plain stupid as far as I am concerned. Far too many releases where they failed entirely to live up to promised features, or offer a horrible time of play for $ spent value or just end up being all around overhyped messes.

Come to think of it, FF is the only game I've pre-ordered in 8+ years now. The only time I can remember regretting this was FFX-2. The rest of them, even the worst one was still worth playing through.
 
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