Imagine a world where the majority of a game's sales occurred a week after its release or later. Why it is almost as if people could buy things based on word of mouth feedback then. I guess it is only natural to hate any force trying to prevent this kind of world. From pushy pre-order packages, to every time a game discussed online is vehemently defended by people who have never played the game.
Of course the issue with "Aliens: Colonial Marines" is an easy one to avoid, don't trust and previews to a game that doesn't let lots of people play it. Even if everything shown in the demo was in the game, you still can't trust it will be a clear representation of the game. I thought we learn to stop trusting demo pictures and movies with Final Fantasy VIII. Even if consumers smarten up to some of these tricks, and folks reviewing games don't let companies get away with this, this is not going to cure the culture of gamers who are all too willing to pre-order everything. I am not sure if there is any way of changing people's attitudes, but here are some hair brain ideas:
Consumers have the power to just unanimously wait a week for a game, and put an end to this behavior.
Publishers could stop judging games by their initial sales and focus on what made games a long term hit, even without stopping their content hiding pre-order tricks. Or use that statistic monitoring on about how player play games might mean they could see when players stopped playing there games.
I hate to say this, but pirating and use games encourage publishers to feed this pre-order madness. So while I know I can't stop the practice, it might make some difference if enough people who do this form of smart shopping also found ways of getting money to the developer when it is a good game. Maybe if there is a movement of buying after release date, you could pirate on release date and buy it later if it was good. On the publisher's side I don't see a down side for having a pay after play option, even if players donate money to a game they like just to encourage a sequel or how about pay for free DLC everyone will get to enjoy. I'd like any such system if it went straight to the dev-team and not touch the publishers, as this would encourage both sides in utilizing this.
There is one type of game that does escape this behavior, and that's a game that encourages other games to be built base on it. Publishers should encourage this, from mods with their engines, to remakes, parodies or even fanfic games. As long as there is some way of monetizing it, I don't see a down side in this behavior from the publisher's point of view. And these later sales by their nature will always come in delayed waves after a well received game was released.