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?
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. 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… 🙃
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?
Never preorder.
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.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.
Not counting Kickstarter projects, which I rarely back anymore, no. I’ll wait for reviews and probably a sale.
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.
Almost never. The last one I digitally pre-ordered was Borderlands 3, and given how that turned out, I think I might buy BL4 on release day, if not a few weeks later
What’s the difference between doing your way and maybe wait a day or 2 until gameplay is published?
Well I mean my way is waiting until gameplay is published, as well as making sure the story isn’t ass. I’m gonna let my coplayer decide if he wants to get it day one, but I imagine he’ll hold out for a bit
Wrt BL3, we were gonna buy that on release anyway because we’d done the same for every other entry and DLC since the day BL2 came out. If we’d waited a few weeks, the only difference would be that we’re prepared for the story to be ass
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.
Does steam let you pre install? Only reason I can think of and I have never done it
never
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.
Not digital. I used to preorder popular games way back before digital was a thing as supply could be tight, but it makes zero sense in a digital world where they can’t run out of supply.
Especially with how the trend today is release and drop hotfixes (or in some cases just laugh to the bank) I won’t drop $$$ until its in a good state
Absolutely not!
(I pre-ordered stalker 2. Can’t help that I’m a Stan for the series and mod scene. I was happy with this purchase.)
It can be hard to get over the urge if you’re a fan of a series. The next game MUST be better… right? It’s a hard thing to truly get too mad at others since it’s pretty much human nature, even if we can all agree it’s not healthy.
