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?
I’ll do it to support indie devs. Though I haven’t ever done it through Steam – just Kickstarter
Yes, why? That’s the stupidest thing to do.
No, I do not pre-order games. I have joined some early access campaigns for games I was very interested in, like Kerbal Space Program and Satisfactory, but…generally “pre-order” is something the BIG studios that are all owned by Microsoft now do, they don’t need the funding to get the game done. Meanwhile, Subnautica wouldn’t have made it to 1.0 without their early access campaign.
Especially now that games are often distributed via internet download rather than physical disc or cartridge, it’s not a matter of making sure you can get a copy. The last game I pre-ordered was Majora’s Mask.
I’ve pre-ordered games due to hype a few times and every time I do I get shafted and dev runs with my money. Now I stick to promising EAs. If I pay 20-30 bucks for EA, get some fun out of it and then dev runs at least I got some fun out of it.
Do I pay full price for games before they are available to play and are most likely not going to be finished upon release? No.
Preordering anything with no real or artificial scarcity doesn’t really make financial sense. It’s a predatory sales tactic to get people to part with their money sooner, in this case before customers have a chance to use software that is pretty much unreturnable. Gaming publishers love digital preorders because some customers end up paying full price for games they don’t even like and can’t even resell.
Sadly, for at least the last ten years or more, most non-online games are best played a few years after release date when they’ve had their bugs fixed or their ‘complete edition’ released.
No, it just doesn’t make sense to me to do so. I mostly play single player games, so special skins to show you preordered are pretty pointless, and the most you tend to get is a discount on some DLC that I can just buy later, once I know I’ve enjoyed the game enough to warrant it, or items to give you a stat boost.
It’s not like preordering a physical game, where at least I get an art book or something in exchange for handing my money over.
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… 🙃
Only games I’m super confident I’ll love. Never got screwed over.
Haven’t played the other two, but have been playing monster hunter for almost 20 years now. Capcom is wysiwyg when it comes to monhunbo. And the recent releases have had exclusive pre-release gear (albeit ones with short lived usefulness). And while they and hello games are still releasing new content for free, they can have my money any time they want.
I trust my credit card more with Sean Murray than my wife.
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.
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.
I pre-order games. Steams refund policy makes it pretty much risk-free. Usually it’s shortly before launch, if I want to play the game immediately anyway. For big games, reviews pretty much always come out before launch or on the day of, so I can still always cancel, if it looks bad. I don’t remember regretting any of these purchases, even if I didn’t like all the games.
So why not just buy it on the day of the launch? See the reviews, or even better yet wait a few days before seeing actual reviews and not reviews against free/early access copies?
Reviews almost always come out several days to a week before release so by the release day I’ve seen them all. In addition to that, lots of the genres I like have well known players in the community who often get a chance to play early builds for marketing purposes so you’ll get an idea of whether the game’s at least worthwhile WELL before release. And if the game ends up being terrible, well Steam doesn’t care if you pre ordered or bought the game at launch, they’ll refund you just the same.
And when games I like come out I usually want to play them at release so if I waited for the game to release to buy it I’d have to sit there and download it first. You’d also lose out on any pre order bonuses which are often like free access to paid content which saves you a little money in the long run, or maybe you get to play the game early.
I guess the idea behind not preordering is you don’t want to get bamboozled into buying a bad game? But the thing is once you’ve been playing games for awhile and you know what you like, it’s actually REALLY hard to be tricked into buying a game you won’t like. It is very easy to tell when a game is going to release with issues or be something you don’t like. In 20 years of preordering games I think the only time I ever got duped by a game was No Mans Sky, but to be fair they put a lot of effort into lying about that one, to the point that I was able to get a refund on it outside of the refund window. So it still worked out.
Sometimes I want the freebies you get with the pre-order, sometimes it’s about pre-loading.
before seeing actual reviews and not reviews against free/early access copies?
“Actual reviews”, because you can only have an opinion on something, if you paid for it.
No reason to. A while back, some publishers gave 10% off pre orders, I bought maybe one or two like that. Some do digital goodies which doesn’t entice me at all (I’m DLC proof). I can download anything fast enough. So why would I pre order?
theres no difference between preorder and buying on release date
so if youre buying it anyway, may as well preorder and cancel it if reviews are sketchy
And you can even return it, if it’s released and you haven’t installed it… Or if it’s on Steam, and you played it less than 2 hours.
There really isn’t a lot of reason to strenuously avoid pre-ordering if you’re pretty sure you’ll buy it at release.
And even better, a lot of games have pre-installs that can save you time at release. You could be playing the game instead of being mad that it isn’t downloaded yet.
No.
My backlog is so big and my interested in gaming became so little I prefer watching YT or stuff on my Jellyfin server.
I wanted to play Helldivers 2 but decided against it because I had nobody else and now it’s kinda in late-progress I won’t even bother.No, I was thinking about civ7 but was unsure because, while firaxis is very talented, I do not trust 2k, once they added denuvo I decided to not even buy it at launch even if the reviews are positive (and £120 for the founders edition is stupid, especially since, if the game is updated like all previous civs, it will be necessary).
I will be waiting for denuvo to be removed (because it always is) and for a sale.
