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?
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
What’s the difference between doing your way and maybe wait a day or 2 until gameplay is published?
Well I mean my way is waiting until gameplay is published, as well as making sure the story isn’t ass. I’m gonna let my coplayer decide if he wants to get it day one, but I imagine he’ll hold out for a bit
Wrt BL3, we were gonna buy that on release anyway because we’d done the same for every other entry and DLC since the day BL2 came out. If we’d waited a few weeks, the only difference would be that we’re prepared for the story to be ass
Makes sense.
Though I wouldnt pre-order anyway just to not count against the pre-order metric.