The difference is that if you don’t preorder a shitty game you won’t hate yourself afterwards.
This effect is hard to quantify in numbers, but it is very much real.
Comment on Please Don't Preorder This...
ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 6 days ago
Controversial opinion:
Pre-ordering or not make no difference.
You can search for it, in 2014 they have reports of a declining in pre-orders industry wide, they don’t give numbers of pre-orders but even if you look at the ranking of sold games in online platforms people buy more days after the release than before or in day of the release.
The boycott of pre-order kinda of worked, more people avoid pre-ordering than before and did that make any difference in the quality of game release? Hell no, they still release game with bugs, not finished with need of day one patches, the entire boycott made 0 impact on this shit.
regdog@lemmy.world 5 days ago
acosmichippo@lemmy.world 5 days ago
i think you are misunderstanding the point of the no preorder movement. There never should have been an expectation for it to improve the Day 1 quality of game releases.
The main benefit of not preordering is consumer protection, so we can judge a game’s quality after people who we trust have played and review it.
ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 5 days ago
“it’s the culture surrounding preorders that is most responsible for the trail of broken and unfinished games that clutter the sales charts” Kotaku 2015
“By pre-ordering, you’re also saying that you’re ok with them cutting content, and that you don’t mind the bugs and problems of the launch copies.” Techraptor 2015
And many other articles or reddit discussions about the topic. That’s what game journalist told the gamers and what many believe. The consumer protection was always the part that made sense, but they tried to push this idea of we could fix the broken release culture by not pre-ordering.