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?
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.
Yeah I’ll pre order any game that I plan on buying. There’s no practical reason not to.
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
What if the game launches and you find out everyone is saying it is incomplete, doesn’t run properly, and is crashing their consoles over and over?
That would be the practical reason I would think of for not just outright purchasing something that hasn’t come out
That kind of thing would likely be made known through reviews that come out a few days to a week before release in which case you could just cancel your preorder. And even if they didn’t, Steam’s refund policy doesn’t care if you preordered or not, you can get a refund either way.
If it’s a console game and the problem is bad enough that it’s crashing consoles, even with refund policies as restrictive as Sony’s, they will issue refunds in cases like that, as we’ve seen a lot of in the past couple years.
The only actual negative scenario that’s left is you play it and you just don’t like it, and you’re not on PC so you can’t get a refund. But not preordering a game doesn’t really solve that problem. If you buy a game on the PS store two weeks after release and it turns out you don’t like the game you’re no better off than if you pre ordered it and didn’t like it. Generally people don’t pre order games that they’re not sure they’re even going to like.
Early access reviews are notoriously unreliable these days. Think Cyberpunk and DAV just to name two. Sure, you can’t get a refund if you purchase two weeks later. But even though that’s the case, you can still make a more informed decision than going in blind by preordering. 2 weeks later, authentic community sentiment will drown out most of the deceptive marketing and paid-for reviews. Heck, you can even find playthroughs on YouTube to judge a game against your own personal tastes.
Saying that there’s no upside to not preordering just isn’t true.
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.
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.
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.
No. I am fairly sure almost everything on the top seller lose is also in my ignore category.
Very rarely, usually out of interest for the bonuses or out of spite to a circlejerk that has formed against it. Have they been great games? No, but they have also not turned out to be bad games or something I did not expect, as I did my homework.
