Not guaranteeing sales before actually finishing the game makes people work harder

Aug 8, 2014 09:44 GMT  ·  By

Activision's latest financial report has informed that video game pre-orders are taking a global dive, and the trend of diminishing pre-orders has been corroborated by other industry sources, and I can only say one thing: finally!

This is proof that people are starting to realize that pre-orders are becoming increasingly pointless in this day and age, and that shiny store-specific hats are a ridiculous and irrelevant to most gamers. I'll reveal the reasons I think that pre-orders are detrimental in a bit, but first let's look at how they came to be.

Pre-orders served a very good purpose a long time ago, in a time when demand for games was small enough for publishers not to distribute too many copies to stores, but big enough so that popular games were consistently out of stock pretty much everywhere.

These were the times when the concept of a pre-order was invented, because the limited amount of physical copies that would end up in store shelves meant that you couldn't reliably get your hands on new games at launch, especially in the case of more mainstream titles or very limited-appeal niche titles, if you were unfortunate enough to have three more train simulator enthusiasts living near you.

Those days are thankfully long gone, with digital distribution completely taking limited stock out of the equations. Games are also much more mainstream today than they were 15 years ago, with popular franchises selling in the millions, so you're almost always guaranteed to find whatever it is you're looking for even in a boxed format.

Pre-orders however have remained a fact of the industry, even in spite of the fact that Steam, Amazon, GOG and many other digital retailers have been in business for years, and this is mainly because publishers started offering all sorts of carrots on sticks to consumers, from fancy hats to exclusive or timed exclusive DLC and other pieces of riff-raff.

In addition to this, publishers also started putting together all sorts of special editions and gating content behind pre-orders, with some multiplayer maps unavailable for regular consumers and other such unhealthy practices.

Pre-ordering games now seems more like a bid to not miss out on various goodies and a promise that you'll buy the game even if it turns out pretty bad, rather than a way to guarantee that you actually get the product on time.

Pre-orders have a use when it comes to funding indie games, but aside from the fact that publishers can gauge interest in their games by looking at the level of pre-orders, they serve little actual purpose.

In fact, pre-orders might actually do harm, because instead of having actual gameplay footage drive interest in a certain property, oftentimes there are more media offerings regarding pre-order bonuses and collector's edition goodies.

Furthermore, without having a guarantee of sales, publishers would be more interested in delivering a good enough product, and people wouldn't end up with a broken product, like in the case of Aliens: Colonial Marines, where customers who pre-ordered the title didn't get to read any reviews and were simply stuck with a misleading game.

The industry-wide decline in pre-orders is not causing harm to anyone and is simply a normal consequence of progress. There are gamers who will always buy the next Civilization, Company of Heroes, Call of Duty and whatnot, but that is mainly because they trust an established series and its developer.

There is also a flip side to this however, as in the recent case of Sacred 3, which Steam users tried to tag as "not Sacred," but unfortunately couldn't because business lacks humor. The people who pre-ordered the game hoping to get the next entry in the Sacred franchise were displeased (to say the least) with the game, and stuck with it, without the option to read any reviews that would have pointed them in another direction.

Now, onward to the decline of day-one DLC.