• What about Early Access Games?
  • Do you feel differently about Early Access vs traditional preordering?
  • If you are open to the idea in specific circumstances, what are those?
  • How do you decide if a game qualifies?

I’m interested in the community thoughts on preordering and I’d love to have a thoughtful discussion on the matter.

Personally, I’m against preordering, except in specific situations where I want to actively support the development of a game.

I have been thinking about this because there is a game I’m considering preordering from a medium sized studio, but the reason I want to preorder is for the IP, rather than the game and it goes against my typical stance on this. The game is based on my favorite book series and part of me wants to encourage more games be made based on this series. At the same time, the book series has found commercial success and as a whole does not need my help.

I did name the specifics here because I’m hoping to encourage discussion on preordering as a whole, rather than my example, but if you want to know, I’ll drop a comment and we can have a discussion in the comment thread. :)

  • Sunsofold@lemmings.worldEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Never, ever buy anything based on IP. That is pure familiarity bias, a trick to make you think it will be good. In the particularly susceptible, it can even create self-delusion and confusion. (X is good, therefore this other thing that licensed the name ‘X’ must be good. It doesn’t feel good, though. No, clearly it is my feelings that are wrong. X is good so ‘X’ must be good. It uses the same mouth sounds. How could it not be?)

    A change in medium is inherently a different product and can never be the same as the original. As anyone who has seen a movie based on a book can tell you, there is zero guarantee the movie will have anything more than a passing resemblance to the book *coughEarthseacough* and maybe not even that. *coughWorldWarZcough* Oof, pardon my coughing. The bullshit fumes coming out of the marketing and licensing departments are making it hard to see.

    • w3dd1e@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      21·
      2 days ago

      You make some really good points. The game I’m referring to is Osiris Reborn from The Expanse series, my favorite book series of all time.

      It’s not exactly an unheard of IP and the developer is what I could consider midsized. That’s why I was leaning towards not doing it at all.

      My only motivation is how passionate I am about this series and wanting to see more games, books, shows, movies, etc set in that world. I want to be proactive in spending my money thoughtfully to encourage development in places I support.

      Obviously, one preorder isn’t going to change that for this game and a preorder would likely do more harm to me than it would be to the series if I don’t preorder.

      I’m usually pretty staunchly again preorders since I think it’s bad for players as a whole (and often for devs too), but, if I’m being honest with you, I would probably have done it if my favorite series was being done by a small indie dev team so they could have as much money upfront to make the game as good as it can be.