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 preorder FromSoft Souls games, thats it. But I have been a huge fan since PS3 Demon’s Souls, and I even preordered that one, I havent been burned yet by them as I have gotten well over 300 hours on each title.
Literally everything else? Hell no.
Never preorder.
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… 🙃
Can’t wait to play PS5 games in 5 years…
All six of them.
Sounds like you should join us over on !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
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.
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
Hissssss 🐍
Don’t preorder, what the hell are you people thinking?!
No, but I have purchased Early Access games on Steam.
Honestly, I’ve got lots of hours in Early Access games. That said, they were like $20 when I bought them in EA and as content gets added and they get closer to launch, the price goes up.
I don’t think that’s the same as pre-orders though.
The only digital game I’ve ever preordered was City Skylines 2. I was on vacation the day it came out and didn’t want to miss out on playtime and waste my PTO. Definitely worth it, and I enjoyed it and the lead up to release. (I’m on the fenced whether I enjoy it more than the first, but that’s mostly because I’ve got so many add ons for the first that the second seems like it’s missing things. But it worked well for me and I got hours and hours of playing in that day.
What incentivizes you to pay money for early access games? Wouldn’t you rather wait until it’s done and have a better experience?
Some of them are in a fine state as-is.
I guess maybe for an adventure game or something, you want to have one playthrough and to get as complete of an experience as possible.
But for most stuff I play, like roguelikes/roguelites, that’s not really an issue. For example, Nova Drift, an action roguelite, is out of Early Access now, but I played it for a long time in EA, and it was a perfectly reasonable game in that state. Same thing for Caves of Qud.
I do think that buying Early Access is only really a good idea if you’re going to be okay with the developer terminating development tomorrow and still feel that you’re better off having purchased the game – incomplete or no – than not.
Only if it’s a game I’m going to play regardless. I pre ordered FH4 and FH5 and I easily have 2k+ hours in both of those games.
Never because I’m cheap and also I don’t want to pay a premium for a buggy unoptimized experience. Even when I had the game pass trial I didn’t play games day 1, since games needed several patches to be acceptable.
You are assuming the reviews have any bearing on whether I want to play the game. This is a risky assumption.
When Cyberpunk was busted and everybody was hating that’s what prompted me to jump in. I went and got a PS4 physical version of the 1.0 last-gen release when I could find one on sale, even though I primarily played the game on PC. It’s one of my favorite gaming artifacts. I like it more than any collector’s edition nonsense.
Also, what reviews? I don’t know if I know what “reviews” for videogames even mean anymore.
Anyway, to answer your actual question, if there is a discount at launch (which is increasingly a thing, which is kind of sad) or a decent preorder bonus I can prepurchase. I don’t mind. Otherwise I just get things when I get things.
It’s true, I feel like instinctively people think videogame reviews were good at one point because it seems odd a whole industry exists that never did the thing it does reasonably, but even going back to 80’s and 90’s magazines, slop got 5’s while classics in retrospect got 3’s in many cases. Videogame reviews have always been marketing propaganda with no relationship to reality.
It did the thing reasonably for the time and the context, I can tell you that first hand.
The set of values was just different early on and so was the purpose of reviews.
It’s weirder to me that the audience consensus ended up being that game reviews are meant to be consumer advocacy, like they’re crash test reports for cars or something. I find that depressing. I’ve always gotten mad when reviewers tell you whether a game is “worth your time” or “worth your money”. What do you know of my time and how I want to use it? Or what value I put in money?
Ideally art criticism is about finding a view on a piece of work, an intellectual framing for it, and sharing it with the audience, and there was a brief time of sheer hubris where a few critics thought that was more or less what they were doing.
And then influencers happened and streamers became a thing and now it’s something else. A bit of community curation, maybe.
In the 80s and 90s? It was targeted marketing for a thing that nobody knew about. You didn’t read a review to know if a game was good, you read it to know that it existed, whether it did anything technical that was exciting and perhaps if it did the thing that the arcade game you already knew was doing. A four star review was often on the basis of “sprites big”, and we were all fine with that.
Well I can tell you I spent MANY months of saved allowance at the expense of keeping up with comics I followed and going to the arcade with friends (that bus fare alone is 1/200th of an NES game) for MANY a stinker game with great reviews in the 80’s and 90’s, and I was NOT fine with that.
Hah. That’s what you get for playing on a closed system instead of copying computer disks and tapes like us normal people.
I certainly cared a lot more about that cost in the 16 bit era when I was on a console instead, but by that time there were fancy things like VHS tapes with footage of games and demo kiosks and stuff.
But all through the 8 bit era over here there weren’t ads for games anywhere. Not on TV, not anywhere else. Today we’d say magazines were about discoverability. Without them you were limited to whatever was on the cover or the back of the box. It was a crapshoot. At least in reviews you got some screenshots and a description, distorted as it could be.
And it’s not like I was immune to that, either. I had my nose glued to the computer shop every other day staring at Barbarian or Space Ace, which barely count as games by modern standards. I don’t think I ever thought to question whether playing them was any good. That barely felt like the point.
That is also all tinged by it being a formative period and growing up and so forth, so most of us are unreliable narrators, I suppose.
I had an Atari ST and a relative was in the 80’s ST piracy scene so I’d get massive stacks of pirated cracked games on floppies, which was AMAZEBALLS, but the basic level design on those games was almost universally with a few, mostly, late exceptions UNMITIGATED ASS. I totally had your thing where I never actually questioned if James Pond or whatever was “good” but I still intuitively knew the design on the console games was better and there was no social cache or ability to multiplayer with your bros on a normal gamepad (I maintain every Atari joystick ever was ass).
Meeeeh, I’m with you on some bits, not so much in others.
I agree that controller design was much, much better on consoles. I agree that we didn’t understand the technical limitations that made computer action games so much worse. I remember at best we could tell when a game was “fast” or not, but had no concept of framerate, and we were disproportionately obsessed with parallax scrolling but didn’t parse the value of smooth scrolling nearly as much.
But design wasn’t universally bad at all, we’ve just refocused on different things over time, so the list of games that hold up does not line up with what was exciting at the time at all.
I can play Eye of the Beholder right now and have fun. That’s up there with modern entries on that genre today. I can play Lemmings and have fun. I can play Monkey Island or Loom and be absolutely delighted. Civ 1 is simplistic but the core of what’s good in the series is there. Ditto for Sim City. I can play Another World or Prince of Persia, that’s a genre playing to the strenghts of that hardware.
It’s just at the time we were all freaking out about Gods instead, which is barely playable. Or about Dizzy, which is shallow and inscrutable. It was all happening at once and nobody had an understanding of why things were different from other things. It was a beautiful mess and we mostly didn’t even realize.
To keep it on topic, writing game reviews at the time must have been impossible. Nobody knew what they were talking about, and those who did were making games, not writing about them. We couldn’t tell what good looked like on that area, either.
I agree it was impossible in the computer space, but I feel like publications of the time reflected that in the computer space. I forget the name of the publication, but I used to get an Atari ST magazine that came with a demo disk every issue in a bag with the magazine, and its focus was less “here’s what to buy” but you actually got demos of most games they covered, and it was more like, “here’s what’s going on in Atari ST stuff” idk that they even had numerical ratings. I also don’t remember there being a print media space around DOS games in the same way to begin with. On the other side, console gaming magazines were like “THIS IS THE HOT SHIT BUY IT NOW 5/5!!!” And then the game was a scam.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
No, there is a finite amount, agreed. However, the cost of making and shipping is minimal in the overall production cost. If no they need 100, shipping 120 is easy. Any excess can be used for following weeks and months sales. The gamer doesn’t want to miss out, but the company is much more likely to take active steps to ensure they don’t miss out on a sale. In the age of digital, even if they did sell out, it can still be pirchaesed online. So, it is high risk, low reward to preorder.
So, while missing out on day one is possible, it’s extremely unlikely and so preordering is basically a free loan and handing over money before there is a chance to assess quality.
It’s not the cost, it’s manufacturing capacity and supply.
Theres only so many discs that can me manufactured in a day, they also need to supply movies and the blanks markets.
They have hundreds of other games to print. So yeah they make 500k discs a month ahead of time, and if Walmart gets 20k they have 10k stores, that means each store is getting a whooping 2 units.
You’re missing the point. As digital exists, there is no supply issue. That’s solved. So there is no disc capacity or supply issue, as a result of that. Preordering is taking on their risk, not mitigating yours. Your risk of not purchasing is exceedingly low.
Did you miss the part of my comment where I specified that my information was from when digital was non existent….?
