I’ve stopped pre-ordering video games, and you should too

I remember in how, back in my younger days, I would pre-order pretty much any game that caught my eye. I’d even stand in line for midnight releases from time to time. Despite the fact that the game would be available in most stores whether I pre-ordered or not, I still did so, a lot of times I did it for the nifty pre-order bonuses that most games have nowadays. I’ve since stopped doing this for a number of reasons, which Luke Plunkett explains perfectly in his recent article on Kotaku. 

It seems like everywhere you look, a new video game is broken. Your time and your money deserve better. So stop preordering video games. This isn’t the first time I’ve said this. It won’t be the last. More than anything else—the advertising, the budgets, the DLC—it’s the culture surrounding preorders that is most responsible for the trail of broken and unfinished games that clutter the sales charts, and for the anger and angst that follow in its wake. There once was a time, 10-15 years ago, when the concept of pre-ordering made sense. Every video game on the market was pressed onto a disc, and those discs had to be manufactured, shipped and sold in a store. Often, due to demand, popular games would sell out, leading to frustrated customers (and lost profits for businesses). Soon enough, though, companies like Gamestop and Amazon figured out that if you could pay for a game before it shipped, then you could avoid missing out. Publishers would have a better idea of how many boxes they’d actually need to ship, and customers could guarantee they’d get hold of the latest game as soon as it was released, avoiding the small but genuine heartache of a sold-out sign.