Pre-orders

[NorthernNikki]

I don't pre-order. I'm not against them in principle, but I want to see some reviews from people I trust before I jump. I have bought pre-orders before, back when I had more faith in developers. Now, not so much.

[JackofTears]

That's one nice thing about Steam's 2 hour refund policy, at least you can get a feel for the game before committing to it. Unfortunately, I'm seeing more and more games pack its best gameplay into the first couple hours in order to combat that.

[Sirgeorge]

I have never preordered in my life. The logical case for it and against it are simple enough. The case for preordering primarily falls in two general groups. One is that it is convenient and two is that it benefits you in some way. The first group is easy enough to explain. In a world where we are constantly seeing a stream of opportunities run by us every day which causes us to be overwhelmed with the choices in front of us (this is called the paradox of choice). Preordering early is an easy way to overcome the issues with the paradox of choice. In essence, it takes the thinking out of deciding when to get your entertainment by simply getting the first thing that you see that strikes you well and since that first impression is when the game is nowhere near out yet you do the next best thing and preorder.

The second group of benefits for preordering is the extra benefits group. Modern business practice in the gaming space is to use preorder numbers as an early indicator for success. Since launch day/period is the best time for sales by far, the only way to get that kind of data early would be through preorders. How this benefits you is that it tells the company that you are buying a game from that the specific game they are offering is worth expanding on in future. Thus, they plan sequels and DLC, for the future, early. It means more content sooner rather then later, and if you participate in preordering but choose not to participate in a specific preordering for a game or another, you signal the opposite; that they shouldn't bother with further expansions or sequels and should dedicate resources to other games that would be better worth playing.

Obviously there are potential issues with the logic above that can result in these strategies backfiring. After all, you don't know what a game will be like before you play it and making that judgement call on first impressions can mean you make the wrong call if you don't like the future product. This can either mean you've signaled to the company wrongly that you won't want to buy the game and they should spend future resources elsewhere which results in delays when you decide to change your mind based on reviews rather then first impressions. This can also mean that you are stuck with a game you deeply regret preordering and aren't able to refund it. While this second point is changing slowly due to changing political shifts in the consumer rights section; preordering now can result in lost money on a poor game for you. This is the case against preordering.


TL;DR: It depends. I've never done it before.. Read above for more details.

[Turnikman228]

I pre-order only those games which I care for and whose devs I like. I pre-ordered HATRED and 20+ hours played later, no regrets. Love it. If World War 3 had a preorder option, I would have done it too.