Friendly reminder: Pre-orders are bad for game quality (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, March 31, 2017, 03:47 (2580 days ago) @ Claude Errera

I love you all (even Raga), and just want to remind everyone that buying pre-orders puts the onus of sale on the advertising for a game, whereas waiting for reviews to come out before you buy puts the onus of sale on the actual quality of the game itself.

Please don't pre-order this game or any other. Force game devs to focus on making great games rather than making great advertisements.

Of note: This ad was a better pre-rendered sequence than anything in vanilla Destiny.

Of double-note: If Bungie does put more effort into the game than they put into this ad, that means the game is going to be gorgeous, well acted, and have a plot! Get HYPED (but don't pre-order)!

The fact that beta access is tied to a pre-order would suggest that in this case, your argument could be wrong. The best way to judge the quality of the game is to play it - and giving it a chance in beta format tells you at least whether the game is up your alley or not.

If it's not, you can cancel the preorder after you play - but without the preorder, you cannot play.

This is totally valid, and I apologize if I came across as sounding like I'm promising Destiny 2 will be bad or something.

I want to be very, very clear: I have no idea if Destiny 2 will be good or not. I hope it will be OMGWTFBBQAmazeballs11!!!111! but I really don't know. I am not saying "Don't preorder Destiny 2." I'm saying "Don't preorder. Anything. Full stop."

/me gets on soapbox:

The existence of pre-orders does not mean that any game that lets you pre-order it will be bad. Far from it. Rather, it means that the companies offering the pre-orders are spending more (FAR more) money on pre-launch advertising than the companies that are not offering pre-orders. This money doesn't come out of thin air. Rather, it is money that would otherwise have been part of the game's budget instead of the marketing budget. Did you love Destiny 1? It could have been $50-$100 million bigger and better if there hadn't been such a massive pre-launch, pre-order focused marketing campaign. Literally. A game with a big pre-order push will spend *half* of its budget on advertising. The other half is actual game development. Games without big pre-order pushes spend around 1/4 to 1/3 of their budget on advertising. That's still a ton of money, but when you have a (reported) $500M game, spending $250M on advertising vs. spending $125M on advertising means massive amounts of additional programming, art, and other developmental support.

I am a fan of video games. I want the good games to be even better. I want more of them. I want a larger percentage of my money going into making the game instead of into making the ads for the game. If you feel the same way, then pre-orders are a thing you want to discourage.

Secondly, when games are sold based on pre-orders, and most (definitely not all) retail outlets will not let you return a game once it's been opened, there is very little reason to guarantee the quality of a game. As long as full refunds for bad games don't exist, pre-orders remove the pressure of making a quality title from a dev team. They can spit out crap, package it all nice, and sell it to you before you or anyone else knows that in a month (or 4) you'll be getting crap. On the other hand, if you wait for reviews - if we ALL wait for reviews - before purchasing games, there's a lot more pressure on developers to make Quality games. It becomes far more important to their bottom lines that the games be good. Again, if you want the devs to feel more pressure to make good, fun games, rather than just shoveling out whatever crap they happen to have on their servers come launch time, pre-orders are bad.

Before you say it, yes, I know that most developers want to make great games. The guys I worked with put themselves under tremendous pressure to deliver quality. But we also know that sometimes developers just ship something broken and try to fix it with a 0-day patch. Why? Because they're also under tremendous pressure from corporate to deliver on certain deadlines. Deadlines they simply can't always meet. Corporate doesn't care if the game is crap if the game has made money on pre-orders. In fact, they'll see that they made 80% of their sales from pre-orders and think "man, if we spend even more of our budget on advertising, we can sell even more pre-orders!" They're not thinking "we only sold 20% after launch because our game sucked. We'd better spend more on game development." That's not how they operate.

So yeah, I view pre-orders as an evil that hurts game developers and the overall quality of video games in general. They totally help marketing teams though, so if you love some good marketing, I guess pre-orders are your jam.

/me gets off soapbox.