Preorders: Have you been screwed?

[omicron1]

I tend to have a pretty good head for these things - I can sort of tell when a game's going to be good prior to buying. There are signs...
...one of the biggest being review embargoes. I don't preorder without a handful of good ratings. There's often a day or so of preorder gap between reviews and release, so...

 

[Sack of Cheese]

I preorder around 2-3 games a year, only with games that guarantee at least 20 hours of gameplay and replayability. (sandbox or RPG)

I generally enjoyed what I got, the only games I still haven't finished despite getting it Day 1 is Borderland 2. It feels soulless for some reasons, like an MMO.

 

[babinro]

I preordered Resident Evil 6 Anthology knowing that RE6 was going to have no 'survival horror' elements to it.

The game itself was unbearable. Thankfully the pack came with RE1-5.
I don't own RE 1-3 and never played through all of 2 or 3.
In the end the game was worth the money because of the time spent with the classics.

RE6 on the other hand isn't even worth $10.00 IMO.

Note: Having revisited them all, RE3 is surprisingly great but RE4 is still king of the franchise and by a very wide margin IMO.

 

[TrevHead]

I usually don't buy at launch and wait for the game to drop in price a little, the only games I do pre-order are Japanese localisations that I want to support and I know are good before release (Akia Katana or Zone of Enders HD 360) Buying buggy PC games blind at launch has stopped me been a sucker.

I've watched Total Biscuit's vid and while I agree with him, he might aswell be telling the sea's tide to not come in. This gen is littered with the corpses of critically acclaimed games and cult favorites as marketing & hype sell games, quality sadly doesn't unless it has a gimmick tacked on.

Edit Although RE6, Deadspace 3 and DMC have all sold under expected numbers, so maybe more gamers are been more discerning in their purchases (or it could be more gamers are sticking to Fifa and CoD).

 

[RedDeadFred]

I have never EVER preordered a game. No matter how certain that I am going to love it (Skyrim and Borderlands 2). I never believe that a game is great until it has hit the shelves and I have gotten to see some reviews and reactions to it.

 

[Dansen]

Only once have I felt really screwed over by a pre-order, and that was with BRINK. In fact me and a decent group of fellas pre-ordered that one and we were gonna have an awesome time playing together...at least until we found out it sucked. Besides that I have had a pretty solid time with any game I decided to pre-order.

Same experience, and my pre-order bonus didn't even arrive with the fucking game.

 

[Commissar Sae]

Only pre-order that burned me was Sniper: Ghost Warrior. I see the possibilities of the game, but the game was just mediocre and I barely spent any time on it.

Most of the other games I've pre-ordered have been well worth my time. Skyrim, New Vegas, Xcom, BRINK (yes I actually enjoyed it), Red Orchestra 2, Every Mount & Blade game after the first, Left 4 Dead 2, Space Marine. These were all well worth my time and money and every single one of them was played into the ground.

Technically I have also preordered a few Kickstarter games as well, but those aren't quite the same thing/

 

[guidance]

I don't see the point at all in preordering from steam. It's a digital download, they aren't going to run out.

I do however see the point in preordering a retail copy of a game. I didn't think I was going to get diablo 3 but then decided to join all my friends a month later. It was sold out everywhere, had to go on a 2 hour bus ride to go find a hard copy (I really like physical copies of games).

If I know I really want the game, and if there is a high chance it being sold out for a while after release, then I will preorder. Most times I don't so I have never gotten screwed.

 

[Jfswift]

Does WarZ count? It looked like fun so I preordered the lower tier version for myself and a friend. It was on sale at the time so its not like I was out a lot of money but still.

I will occasionally preorder because of the bonus crap the store or game company throws in to sweeten the deal, but it is a risk. I didn't on Dragons Dogma though, waiting for reviews first before buying.

 

[Nouw]

Yup. They weren't bad games mind you, just not worth the full price.

 

[porous_shield]

I think pre-ordering is a suckers game. I have never pre-ordered a game and I plan never to do so. I've never been so impatient that I have to play a game day 1, and I'm a PC gamer, so there are huge discounts at a number of digital distributors within months of release.

 

[rcs619]

Sword of the Stars II

I loved the original, put a ton of hours in it, and pre-ordered the sequel. I normally don't do pre-orders for the exact reasons Totalbiscuit listed, but hey, it's the sequel to one of my favorite games, it'll be fine, right? Nope.

They released a beta. The final product did not match up with what was promised, it wasn't a finished game. To the point where they patched it bi-weekly for over a year, still fixing bugs and glitches the whole time.

Apparently I got the first expansion for free because I pre-ordered (which is the least they could do), but I figure I'll give SOTS II another year or so of patching and expansions before I re-install it and give it a shot. I hear it is basically playable now, if still a bit wonky.

On the bright side, the original SOTS is still great fun.

I won't pre-order anything again, that's for sure.

 

[MissP]

*sigh* really disappointed that Aliens ended up being so terrible.

I hardly ever preorder games, but I did it with Diablo 3...and that'll be the last time I ever do it, most likely. I wanted to guarantee that I'd have a physical copy, and I thought it was a no-brainer since Blizzard had a great track record with me. Everyone already knows why that game didn't exactly live up to expectations.

Never again! D:

 

[jollybarracuda]

Eh, i don't see what's the matter with preordering a game. For the most part, a common gamer will be able to tell if a game will be crap or not, just off of experience and human intuition. There's exceptions, of course; i think its fair to say people didn't expect AC3 to be met with quite the response it got, but for the most part, people can tell if they like what they see, and if Steam offers an early install of the game to play it right when it comes out, and you've got that extreme excitement to play the game as soon as possible, then yah, why the hell not preorder. If I had a good enough computer to play Skyrim when it was releasing, you can bet that i would have preordered it (not sure if it had an early install though).

Basically, let people do what they want. I've yet to see TB's video on the matter, but the whole concept of a "Should you preorder" video just seems like unnecessary preaching. Thanks, but no thanks, TB. I love your commentary and opinion on games themselves, but don't act like you can tell people whether it's right or not to preorder. Even if there's no incentive, I don't see the problem. Maybe I have the money now and want to get the payment process out of the way?

 

[Exius Xavarus]

I have never preodered anything. So i have never been screwed . I don't buy collector editions of games so i don't need to preorder . I ALMOST preordered the Wii-U then Said fuck it, i don'f even want it on release . Funny thing is , stores never ran out of stock because no one was buying it .

My GameStop was out of stock a month and a half before it was released. They ceased all pre-orders and set up a waiting list. Even now with it being out for a while, they're continually out of stock. People must not like it so much where you are. o_o

I've never really been screwed, per se. But I have gotten pointless pre-order bonuses. Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time is a prime example of this. The bonus is a Sanzaru logo paraglider skin and a camo paraglider skin for Sly, and the Ultimate Murray costume for Murray. Normally that'd be pretty cool. Neat little bonus and all that fun.

...Except that those bonuses are hardly anything unique or difficult to obtain. You get the two paraglider skins by finding 5 and 10 hidden sly masks and you get the Ultimate Murray costume for finding 30 masks. By the time I'd gotten around to redeeming my bonus, I'd already earned those bonuses the long way. Talk about a let-down.

 

[Karthesios]

Only problem I ever had was pre-ordering Borderlands 2's ultimate loot chest collector's edition. Turns out the problem was with Play'n'Trade, where I ordered it. Spent the months leading up to its release paying it down little by little ($150 over four months sounds cheap, but bear with me here...), to find out on release that the store wasn't allocated any units of the package.

I settled for the game by itself and fortunately got back the difference in price in the combination of store credit and cash I put in. I'll still buy from Play'n'Trade, but it's unlikely I'll ever pre-order anything from them again.

 

[soren7550]

Nah, never been burned by a pre-order. Then again, only pre-ordered three or so games because I can't afford to get games regularly.

Wait, that's not entirely true. For Fable 3, for whatever reason I didn't get that pre-order thing where you could make a character online and they'd hand you a quest. Other than that, my pre-order experiences have been good.

 

[JagermanXcell]

The last and only game I ever pre-ordered was the cult classic monstrosity that is Metroid: Other M
This game, made me so mad, I sold my entire Wii to my dad to make 80$ and my copy of SSBB (sad face), coming to about 90$, and even after I made the money back...
I STILL FEEL RIPPED OFF TO THIS VERY DAY.

Never again.

 

[The_Echo]

I don't pre-order. The incentives are never that great, (barring special editions that are available as preorder only, e.g. Skyrim) and I always keep tabs on a game up until its release before I decide to buy it. Generally, I'll buy a game on day one, provided I have the cash for it.

The only game I've bought that sucked was Paper Mario: Sticker Star. (And, to an extent, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron, but I haven't gotten very far into it yet.) And even then, I seem to be the minority in that opinion.

 

[Happiness Assassin]

I have only pre-ordered 2 games in my life: Battlefield 3 and Mass Effect 3. I played demos of both, knew I would play both with my friends, and pre-ordered on the last day just to get the bonuses. I have spent a combined 400 hours in those games and continue to play them to this day. Because I am on an extremely limited budget I almost never get games unless I do serious research into them. Preordering games without looking into what they are and how they play is basically just a gamble.