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 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
Absolutely no reason to, you pay more for a buggier version. I generally wait until there’s a good sale.
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.
No.
Especially the big studio games.
They almost always go on sale 3-6 months past release, and they’ve been patched at least once.
You get a better, cheaper game.
Hissssss 🐍
Don’t preorder, what the hell are you people thinking?!
No, one time there was a highly anticipated game that I really wanted.
Walked into the store after checking a couple reviews and bought it full price.
Ask the clerk, he confirmed there is never shortages or anything like that for physical disks.
Imo, there is even less of a reasons to preorder digital copies, what are they gonna do, run out of bandwidth?
Ask the clerk, he confirmed there is never shortages or anything like that for physical disks.
Small town?
When stuff only released on disc stores can only get so many copies. Even if it’s a 100 or so, there’s no guarantee they’ll have enough on launch day to even satisfy demand. People would line up the night before as well.
So if you wanted to make sure you got a copy of a good game to play day 1 with your buddies, you HAD to preorder and hope they weren’t out, since they also held stock to sell day of.
I think there’s only been one game that I’ve pre-ordered digitally, and it was Cyberpunk 2077 on GoG the day it was supposed to release early for pre-orders.
The reason people do it is poor impulse control for the dopamine hit from buying something they want. I’m pretty sure anyone claiming another reason isn’t being honest with themselves or others.
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.
Yeah I’ll pre order any game that I plan on buying. There’s no practical reason not to.
This is the first comment I see that actually answers the question. Why on earth are people down voting is beyond me…
Now though, I’d love to get more details about the thought process as I myself never preorder anything ?
Edit : I’ve seen your answers to other comments, I guess it makes sense, all good reasons
Yeah people avoid pre ordering because they don’t want to signal to the publishers support for a game before they know it’ll be good. And that’s a perfectly valid reason not to pre order. But it’s also the only reason not to pre order, and it’s more political than practical.
Interesting. I can’t see any practical reason TO preorder. Are they going to run out of digital copies? Am I going to forget to buy it? I’d rather wait for reviews and a couple patches.
- You get content only available if you pre order
- You get early access to the game
- You get some amount of later expansion content for free
- you can preload the game so when it releases, you can just begin playing it.
There are lots of practical reasons TO preorder something, thought it’s not always all of those things. And you can both preorder something and “Wait for reviews” because the vast majority of the time, reviews release before a game releases.
For example, Civ 7 comes out on the 11th, if you pre order you get the benefit of getting to play it on the 6th, and the reviews for it all released today, the 3rd. That means I’ll know today if the game sucks and I can just… cancel my preorder if I wanted to. Then in a couple days I get to play the game early, so in case the reviews were all paid for I get to see for myself if I don’t like the game, and if I don’t like it, I can cancel my pre order.
In case I don’t cancel my pre order, I also save $10 on Civ packs I would otherwise be paying for. If I waited for release day to buy it, I’d lose out on the benefits of pre ordering, but gain nothing.
None of those reasons sound especially practical to me, but I may be in the minority. I’d rather wait and see that the game is stable and if I really want the extra content I’ll get it later (I’m patient).
I worry that pre ordering may send a message to publishers that a game doesn’t need to be good or even finished
They are all objectively practical, every single one. They are upsides without a downside. That being said, it’s ultimately your choice whether you choose practicality over the morals of the thing. If you want to choose not to preorder something just to send a message, I get it.
They are all objectively practical
Exactly, both are completely valid decisions with different base assumptions. It makes sense to pre-order if having that content available sooner is valuable for you, because you can usually get a refund if the game sucks on launch. It makes sense to wait if you want to send a message, or if you’re okay waiting a bit (i.e. you have more important uses of that money).
I’m personally 100% okay with waiting months to years for a game to stabilize and reach what I think is a good value. I also remember pre-ordering a physical copy of a console game years ago because having it a little sooner had value for me (got it at midnight or whatever, which was only available for pre-orders), and the same applies to digital sales.
I very rarely ever did. And when I did I made sure I trusted the studio and knew enough. But even with this preparation I was burned most of the time preordering.
Nowadays I notice a game I like and I wait for 1-3 years, then pick it up DRM free, with all the extensions and fully patched for oftentimes 15€ or so.
never
Rarely. I don’t think I ever have two years in a row.
Usually only if I’m very sure it’s a game I will get a lot of playtime out of due to past titles. For instance, I did pre-order Civ 7 because prior Civs have been the best hours-enjoyed-per-dollar investments I’ve ever made. No exaggeration, even accounting for DLCs I bought at full price.
Only Capcom games. Their demos give you a pretty good idea of what the fully game is going to be and are usually even improved upon. So preordering is mostly a safe bet. Plus you get some early access goodies (which you can also get after release for some extra shmeckles).
Capcom feels like one of the only multiplatform devs that are actually still making games for gamers not for shareholders.
I agree with this take. MH Wilds will be my first prepurchase since RE4. The RE4 demo blew my mind and the Wilds beta had me hooked.
no i have fast internet so if i do buy a massive bloated game i can wait 20 minutes before playing it, or buy it the day of then remote download with the steam mobile app
