Pre-Ordering is Still not a Good Idea

So, another year of E3 press conferences has come to a close and, much like in most years preceding this one, said conferences ran the gamut from fairly optimistic like Microsoft's, awkward as hell like the entire intro to Ubisoft's, or just a straight up underwhelming way to spend about one to two hours like EA's or Nintendo's (for those who couldn't care less about Super Smash Brothers Unlimited). Also like every other E3, this year's has brought along the excited customers eagerly pre ordering on Amazon, from Wal Mart and other brick and mortar stores.
 

And I still think it needs to stop.

Don't get me wrong, I get excited about video games too, I wouldn't be writing about them right now if I didn't, but I can't ever get behind giving money to a company for something that simply doesn't exist right now. It might be a tired, dead horse of a subject but it wouldn't be if it weren't such a recurring problem in the industry. While we may be far from the days of Metro Last Light putting "The Way it's Meant to be Played" behind a pre-order (later released as DLC) paywall, or having to use an actual chart to figure out which store you should pre-order Watch_Dogs from (not to mention the spreadsheet you had to use to find out what version you wanted to buy regardless of whether or not you had pre-ordered), we shouldn’t forget about what companies like EA or Ubisoft can and will do again if we let them, just look at what happened to Battlefront 2 once EA had caught wind of how lucrative lootboxes became. 

seriously, look at this thing!

I understand it’s easy to get caught up in the excitement, and maybe saving a couple of dollars on a game is a pretty good deal, but I personally think that not only is it putting a lot of faith in companies who have proven time and time again that they shouldn’t be trusted with such faith, I also think it’s a little bit irresponsible to throw money at something that, in the case of Death Stranding (which, yes, is available for pre-order online right now), very little is known about what it actually is or how the game plays. Yeah, I’m sure it’s going to be really, really good because I like Kojima’s games and the way he tells stories, but that isn’t going to give me good justification for giving his studio 60 dollars right now, probably at least a year away from a release, if not even a release date. 

"thanks for the $60!"

 

I can also hear the argument of “Well I can always just cancel my pre-order later”, but then if that’s a thought you’re having now, then clearly you’re not that invested in pre-orders in the first place. I think the larger problem is the fear of missing out that the games industry has ingrained into people, which is not at all understandable because we live in an age where not obtaining a copy of a game on release day is basically impossible, barring some unforeseen inability to make it to the store, or your internet going down while downloading the digital version.

We live in the age of digital distribution, where you can literally buy a full game from the comfort of your couch, so the “reserving a copy” argument also goes out the window. What else is left in favour of pre-ordering? “I like the bonuses”?, well in a lot of cases (the Metro Last Light example given above can attest to this), pre-order bonuses are often given out later as DLC to everyone else who bought the game, so your cool costume that you got for pre-ordering the game isn’t a special thing anymore as game publishers realized that “Hey, we could release these pre-order bonuses as DLC and get more money”.

We also can’t put complete trust in that what is shown to us at events like E3 is going to be representative of the final product like in the infamous cases of Aliens: Colonial Marines, Killzone 2, and Watch_Dogs, none of which came out as the product advertised, pre-ordering any of those games would have landed you with a final product that is objectively different from the one you would have expected when spending your money on a pre-order.

 Comparison Image courtesy of MACHINA/Gaming on Youtube

The gaming community, unfortunately, sometimes seems like it has the memory of a goldfish and tends to forget that companies can’t be trusted which, I hope, is simply out of love for the franchises and games. And, honestly, I wish I could be that innocent and get excited enough about a product that doesn’t exist to buy it and be able to have the hope that it’ll be what I’m told it will be but I, and the rest of the gaming community, have been beaten and lied to too many times for that to be the case, and while this may come off as a cynical approach, the industry has given me no reason to think otherwise about this.

We simply don’t live in a world where pre ordering is necessary, and honestly I’ll even rebut the “it’s a lower price right now” argument that I mentioned above by saying that the game inevitably will go on sale for the pre order price if not even lower within a few months of release, so honestly you’re not really saving anything that you cannot get later. I don’t mean to derail the hype train here, but it’s the truth.

To bring this rambling, only hopefully coherent argument to an end, I don’t believe pre ordering anything is a necessity, or even a good idea. Game publishers have time and time again proven that they shouldn’t be trusted with the amount of faith placed in them, and while I do hope everyone is enjoying E3, I don’t think that it should be forgotten that game companies are just that – companies – at the end of the day they’re out to make a profit and if that means that they’re going to actually lie to you to make it happen, they have before and will again.

I didn’t mean for this to be a bummer article, I honestly am extremely excited for a lot of the things announced at E3 this year; Last of Us Part 2 looks amazing, Ghost of Tsushima seems gorgeous, and Super Mario Party looks like a fantastic return to form. However, I do still believe that we can be excited about games while also staying cautiously optimistic.

 Please actually look like this on release

It’s been a while since I wrote on here, and while I don’t make any promises that I’ll make this a regular thing, I do hope that I can come up with some more things to write about in the near future, as it’s something I do genuinely enjoy.

Until next time, whenever that may be.