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?
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
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
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.
never
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.
If I have trust in the developers that the game won’t be an absolute shitfest (i.e. they have an okayish track record) and I want to play on day one to be part of the community, yes. That said, the last game was Elden Ring and the next is Monster Hunter Wilds, so that doesn’t happen very often.
Nightreign and Subnautica 2 are also on the list, I’m not too hyped about anything else this year.
All they have to do is add a skin or some shit as a pre-order bonus and people will deposit money. It’s absolutely crazy, especially with the state almost every launch is in these days.
Big games are like 50% off after a few months anyway, no point buying those at all until then.
Yes. After clocking up 10,000 hours on Civ VI. Civ VII can take my money!
You’ve spent like a sixth of the time since release playing it? Damn. What’s your playtime across all the games?
Well… I will admit a lot of those hours were from falling asleep with the game running.
I mean, Civ is a pretty established line of games. If you are into those things you probably know you’re going to get the new one. Same for Monster Hunter, especially with this one returning to world’s formula, which was hugely popular, and having multiple betas people could have tried to before prepurchasing. I assume kingdom come deliverance is the same.
No issue preordering a game I know I’m going to get either way.
But with new games, or AAA shit, or titles I may enjoy but are not a guaranteed buy, then preordering is stupid as hell.
If I know I’d be buying day 1 anyway, yes I’ll preorder. I know I’ll be playing Avowed day one because it looks like my cup of tea, and I’ll be playing Wilds day one because I have a ton of friends who want to play it together.
I almost never preorder any game I’m not 100% sure I’ll play no matter what. Sometimes I’ll do it with online games in 90% sure on bc my internet is horrible and I like being able to get started on the download asap
For example I’m gonna preorder the new Fatal Fury game even though I’m not super confident in SNK to put out a functional game, but I know it’ll have fun gameplay and worst case scenario it’ll get fixed in a while. Being able to download early is worth for me even if I won’t download in time to play early, and worst case scenario it’s completely nonfunctional and I just refund it until it works
No. Heck, I don’t even play Early Access games (with rare exceptions, like Satisfactory). I’m not paying to be a beta tester.
