By ALEXANDER PECHA
Staff Writer
Pre-Ordering is a relatively new practice in the video game industry, the idea being that you pay for a game in advance of getting it and receive the game on the very day it comes out.
The system has its fair share of detractors but in the end many people pre-order games based only on what developers and public relations people have showed them in relation to the game.
How I view pre-ordering is probably crystal clear already, but in case it wasn’t obvious I see pre-ordering in a very bad light. While I believe there are exceptions: such as you being able to have some sort of access to the game through a beta program or knowing a developer who can give you early copies of the games, overall I believe that pre-ordering is both bad for the consumer and bad for the company’s overall quality and honesty.
What Pre-Ordering is, is you effectively paying for a product that has no true backing or promise of quality behind it and no proof that it will be worth the 60 dollars that most games cost today.
When you pre-order, you are handing the developer and publisher your money on the idea that the game will be good; except for the rare exceptions mentioned above you have no idea how good or bad the game will be except from promotional materials that are released by the very company trying to convince people their product is awesome and worth your money, even if it isn’t.
This isn’t idle speculation either; there are many cases of pre-ordering punishing consumers for their optimism.
Perhaps the most infamous case of pre-ordering coming back to haunt consumers is the Aliens: Colonial Marines fiasco. In that particular case the developers (Gearbox, the developers of Borderlands) outright lied about the quality of the game and what it would look and play like.
Not only were consumers shafted with their purchases, but the developer itself lost a lot of respect from the gaming community for their low brow tricks. A more minor case was the pre-orders of Duke Nukem, which was a game that had been anticipated for more than a decade but arrived with more a grunting noise than the fanfare people thought it would.
Despite these cases, fans of certain developers and publishers continue to pre-order games, sometimes to an insane degree. Bungie (The developer of the old Halo games) announced their new IP and game “Destiny” last year and about one day after they announced Infinity Bungie also announced that you could pre-order the game. That’s insane; the game had no actual gameplay trailers at the time, no true idea of the grand scope of the game, nothing. Thousands upon thousands of people spent money on a game just because they know the developer, with no true idea of what the game even really was until later in the year.
Then there are the pre-order exclusives, pieces of the game deliberately cut out as to encourage you to pre-order the game. The worst case of this was Mass Effect 3 which cut out an entire squad mate with important information and lore related to the overall story and made it so you could only get him if you pre-ordered a version of the game or paid extra money after release.
This is perhaps the most dubious practice in regards to pre-ordering. The idea that companies will purposely handicap their games for the general public in the hopes of making a quick buck off of “late” consumers is not one that sits particularly well with me.
What this says to me is that developers care more about hitting sale quotas than making sure you enjoy the game they have made for the masses, which is a breach of artistic integrity. And at the end of the day that’s what video games are: art.
The idea of buying a game before you know its good is also a great hypocrisy by many people, especially college students.
Many people claim they don’t have enough money for entertainment, but yet are willing to drop 60 dollars or more on an item they are not even sure will be good. You can’t complain about money when you are dropping what little money you have on a game that isn’t even out yet.
Basically pre-ordering a game is putting faith in a company that you may or may not trust to deliver on a product that may or may not be good while being expected to pay for the product in full. While in the ideal world company’s would always deliver on the product they promise we have plenty of examples of this not being true. As such the pre-ordering business seems more like a scam than anything.
In short, wait for a game to be reviewed by someone you trust before blowing your hard earned money on it.