Zelda and Metroid games are in my "no questions asked" category too. Do I really care what some guy on Gamespot thinks of Breath of the Wild? No way, I'm getting it day one, and they can have my money now.
I was the same way up until recently. The last good Metroid was Prime 3, and Skyward Sword looked sorta meh to me.
Though I'll admit, Breath of the Wild has me damn tempted to grab a Switch on release day. I haven't bought a Nintendo console day one since...hell, I don't think I've ever done that.
Agree...Pre-ordering is crap.Originally Posted by Vivian
It distorts the true market value of a release, because pre-order sales are based on the high value of the brand from previous games, and not on the value of the game itself.
I just don't think you guys are getting it. Didn't you ever go to a concert because the last time you saw them, they were incredible? Or maybe revisit a restaurant because your last meal there was super tasty? It's the same kind of thing. Sure, it's somewhat of a leap of faith, but nothing out there is guaranteed. The pressure is still on the party responsible for creating the product, because if they don't maintain a certain level of excellence, they'll eventually lose their following.
I'm not saying you should pre-order everything, but I think it's OK for the top 5% of the stuff you buy.
Regarding preordering in general, I don't see what the big deal is, pro or con. 99% of the time, if I'm really looking forward to something coming from a proven developer with a good recent track record, I'll get it, regardless of the reviews. If I end up being disappointed, oh well. Everyone drops the ball sometimes.
It's only when I'm not sure about a new game, the new Doom being the most recent example, that I'll hold off, and wait for the reviews and general consensus to pop up.
The only thing I don't understand are those people who prebuy games 6 months or so in advance. I just...like, why? What's the point? I can understand your excitement, but really. It's not going anywhere. There's no queue or limited quantities. Just wait until about a week or two before, then get it when the prerelease discounts start showing up.
I'm with Brethren and Renzatic. It's not particularly rational, but sometimes I enjoy getting caught up in the excitement, and the irrationality is part of that. Take Red Dead Redemption 2: I greatly enjoyed pretty much every single Rockstar game I've played (there were always elements I disliked, but they were more than outweighed by what I loved, e.g. the game worlds themselves). I know I'll get more and more excited as more information comes out, and in such a case I feel that the trade-off between rational elements why I can expect I'll greatly enjoy this game too (track record of the company, information coming out before, the genre and style) and the irrational, the rush of exhilaration that is reduced when I switch to a more rational, mature approach according to which preordering is at best no better than buying the game when it's out and at worst fosters unhealthy business practices (such as preorder exclusives) is something I'll accept. There are situations when I end up enjoying something more *because* I don't think about it in purely rational terms.
There's nothing wrong with that, Thirith. God knows, all of us are human and feel the same way to an extent with things we really like, irrational or not.
The thing is, if you have a slice of a demographic that does this regularly, it sends a message to publishers and developers, and it's not a nice one. If an appreciable portion of a customer base lets that exhilaration sway them, the accounting department at a publisher's going to prick their ears up and realise this is an easy way to get money ahead of the curve, and they will try to maximise this through conventional and unconventional means. What Bethesda's done with the pre-review theatrics shows them getting increasingly obnoxious in an effort to go after the bottom line, and where do we as customers draw that line and say, 'You know, you really can't take a customer base for granted like that?'
I absolutely agree with you on everything you've just said, Sulphur. Are my 1-2 preorders per year part of the problem or are they negligible? I don't know, but I know I do not share the preorder absolutism shown by some people here and by RPS because I would miss the element of giddiness, although I agree that they're more rational about the whole thing.
I think there's a difference between pre-ordering a couple games every year (having not picked up DH2/Tyranny yet, I think I've done it twice this year so far) and pre-ordering basically anything that's hyped to hell because the marketing materials were swanky.
I've been excited enough to pre-order in the past, although I'm less and less likely to do so these days. Mortgages tend to laser-focus your attention to expenditures.
One thing I don't like however are pre-order incentives. Cut that shit out. I want to be getting the same game whether I pre-order or wait. If something DOES do that, reviews well and has good word of mouth, it doesn't matter. I'm more likely to wait until there's a definitive edition and that definitive edition's on sale or even worse for the publisher, available for a massively discounted price through one of those sites who sell keys. Fuck going through official channels if a publisher has so little respect for me they're going to treat me like a cash cow to be milked.
What are people's thoughts with respect to crowdfunding as preorders? From what I've read in comment threads on gaming sites, it seems that lots of people see crowdfunding pledges are preorders, but I never see it like that. For me, crowdfunding is much closer to patronage; someone credibly sells me on an idea, so I support them financially. Obviously I hope they'll succeed, but even if they don't, it's worth the idea being given a chance. (For the record, most of the things I've contributed to on Kickstarter have succeeded, and I've enjoyed some of the results a lot, from Wasteland 2 to Anomalisa; those things that didn't work out, such as Tangiers, I still think it was worth giving them the chance.)
I have some trouble reconciling the two, and I must admit, I do still crowd-fund the odd thing. Nowhere near as much as I used to.
I see your point about patronage Thirith, but I suspect it's a pretty lie we tell ourselves. In the end, the concepts of pre-ordering and crowd-funding are pretty much identical.
I do like the increased development transparency of the crowd-funding projects I've backed; I may not read every update, but when I do read them, they're generally filled with interesting insights.
Where crowd-funding does differ from pre-ordering I find, is in the revival of genres sidelined by the mainstream in favour of more homogenised accessibility. Or in projects that have a degree of originality that the traditional industry is less likely to take a risk on. I become the person willing to take that risk, and sometimes it pays off.
And to be fair, there are only two crowd-funding projects I've backed that I've regretted: Godus and Shroud of the Avatar. Even then, with Shroud of the Avatar I'm willing to cut it some slack as it's not been released yet. Really haven't liked the way they've been selling in-game advantages prior to release though. It's been even seedier than Star Citizen's ship selling.
Really? Would you back something even if you didn't get a copy of it when it's done?
Because it's certainly both of those things for me.
It's gonna have to fill these 3 criteria:
-It looks like a great concept that I feel needs to get made, and also has a tech demo or believable-enough video material to make me feel confident in the developer's ability to deliver.
-It looks like it might have trouble hitting it's funding target, so my backing it will actually count. (if it's doing well enough to easily get funded without me, I'll wait for release and reviews before buying)
-I get a copy of the finished product.
Yeah man, reputation, exactly. If no-one has played it, there is no reputation, really. There is the impression you've got from marketing, and something like dishonored is deffo being fairly carefully marketed. And the difference between pre-ordering and buying after release is exactly what sulphur said, you aren't putting money into the pre-order pot, you aren't encouraging the devs to maximise pre-order sales, wasting time, money and effort that should have gone into the game itself on developing pre-order incentive dlc's, etc.
Buy a CD????? fucking hell mate it's not the 90's..
Obviously I'd want the finished product when it comes out - but I don't feel cheated if the project falls apart, unless the information I receive leads me to expect that this was not done in good faith. E.g. the guy who was working on Tangiers hasn't given up yet, as far as I know, but everything sounds like chances are slim it'll ever be finished, but I have no reason to think that he didn't give it his best. The reasons why I pledged to the project were valid, and the project falling through is something that happens. I'm sad for the game and for the guy, but I've spent more money on games that came out that in hindsight I wish I hadn't spent any money on.
Edit: I might feel differently about this if 'my' success rate was lower, but I've crowdfunded a lot of projects, and out of those only a very small number fell through in spite of being funded.
Last edited by Thirith; 4th Nov 2016 at 07:43.
I guess I DID back the ss1-redo kickstarter, for exactly the reasons you are talking about. So I am a hypocrite. But that feels different?
IMO the validity of an argument isn't weakened by us not being 100% consistent. We're human, after all. If you argued against preorders but preordered every big release coming out, then we're be entitled to throwing raw eggs at you.
I have to agree with the fact that you often can't know if you'll like a game before you've actually played it, but previous history is often a good indicator of what the game will end up being like.
Probably better than reviews, though that may also be because I'm looking at the wrong reviews.
For example I regularly watch Zero Punctuation, but while his reviews are sometimes good, I also often totally disagree with him. I know he's paid to write negative reviews and people get upset with him when he actually gives something a positive review, but it's not just that, he simply has different ideas and tastes than me. For example, he said Mirror's Edge was awful and first-person platforming could never work (I strongly disagree) and he pretty much hates anything complex or RPG-related on sight.
The real problem you're talking about is that no one makes demos any more. Third-party reviews and marketing hype both fail to really give you a sense of what a game is about in the same way as demos used to.
It's actually a well-cemented industry practice to never offer demos:
Pre-orders are pretty much anti-demos.
Ok, we're pretty much on the same page then. I would feel cheated if a project just went up into thin air without anything being released, but as long as some semblance of what I backed ends up in my lap I'm pretty much cool with it. Sui Generis for instance morphed into Sui Generis-prequel Exanima, which 2.5 years after the stated release date is still in Early Access, but I've played that thing for 31 hours already, so I'm not complaining. Certainly got my £10's worth of enjoyment from it.
ITT: There are different types of consumers with different tolerance for risk and price.
So you'd feel actively cheated if a one-man team whose project you'd pledged $10 to goes belly up because shit happens in their lives that they have little influence on? Or would you consider such projects too risky to support to begin with?
I think it matters more than that - there is an argument that pre-orders, in general, have a negative effect on game quality.
Can you lay it out for me? I've been thinking about it but I don't see how it affects the quality of games in the long term. Does it open the consumer to a bait and switch? Absolutely. But there's only so many times the market will tolerate a No Man's Sky situation.
For the record, I was burned on Skyrim (PS3) despite a meta critic score of 92. After that I've avoided pre-orders.
Well, all the stuff we've been talking about really. The most successful games are obviously massively influential on what sort of games get made, and the pre-order thing means that games that no-one has even played yet can be already successful enough to be influential. And once pre-order sales are an important factor in development, money, time and effort gets diverted to generating them- content gets divvied up into (often vendor-specific) preorder 'bonuses', marketing becomes more important than quality (arguably that happens anyway), no-one makes demos anymore, etc.
There's a Kotaku post here that sums it up: http://kotaku.com/5909105/stop-preor...o-games-please
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