- 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. :)
We Do Not Preorder
Seriously, don’t reward this kind of anti-consumer bullshit.
The only acceptable justification I can see is if it’s an indie dev who has really, truly earned the trust of their players and proven that they will work tirelessly to deliver the product people want. And even then I’d be very, very unlikely to. I’m crazy excited for both of Owlcats upcoming games and I still haven’t pre-ordered them, for example.
Pre-orders encourage bad, buggy, incomplete or deceptively marketed releases by juicing day one numbers without any need for the dev / publisher to actually release a worthy product.