Friendly reminder: Pre-orders are a metric guaging support (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Friday, March 31, 2017, 04:02 (2582 days ago) @ Harmanimus

I disagree with your supposition at a root level. No developer tries to create poor content. And advertising is not going to make a poor product successful. Bungie is a known quantity. Destiny is also at this point a known quantity. The product quality isn't going to be worse than Vanilla Destiny, which could be argued was the worst time for Destiny.

Side note: voting with your money only matters when applied to directly competing product. Abstaining from pre-order is a personal choice that should be weighed on cost/benefit, not on the assumption that a pre-order makes a worse game.

My supposition is thus:

A game has a budget of $100M. With pre-orders driving sales, that game will likely spend $50M on game development and $50M on advertising. Without pre-orders, the numbers will look more like $70M on game development and $30M on advertising. This is my personal experience from when I worked in game dev, some 12 or so years ago. Perhaps it's different now, but I doubt it.

The developers are of course trying to make a great game that they can be proud of. But that's a hell of a lot easier with more tools, more coders, and longer development cycles. AKA more money for development.

Advertising sells poor products all the time. Remember No Man's Sky? Diablo 3? Destiny 1? Master Chief Collection? None of these titles lived up to the launch day, advertising based, hype. Some patched themselves to acceptability.

Also, Bungie is not a known quantity. Marty is gone, Joe is gone, many others are gone. The people who you "knew" at Bungie aren't necessarily there to steer the ship. They now work with Activision, who is pulling at least some of the strings. Destiny, for me, was a big letdown. I have been a massive fan of Bungie for decades because of their incredible story, writing, and gameplay. And Destiny had loads of setting but almost no story. The dialogue was a joke. The play control is amazing, but the enemies you fight with it are lackluster. It felt - it still feels like - the game a company would make before making Halo 1. Not 10 years after. Just my opinion. Bungie ceased to be a god to me with this game, and lost my undying loyalty. I'm glad you're still a fan.

The product could absolutely be worse than vanilla destiny. Don't you know about sequels? They can easily be worse than the game they were born from. Toe Jam and Earl 2, anyone? Assassin's Creed 3? Diablo 3? Also, I argue that the product quality now, with respect to the PvP game balance, is the worst it's ever been. The special ammo changes are horrid.

Side note response: There are tons of competing products. If you only ever buy games that are reviewed at an 8 or higher, for example, then your "vote" is going to any competitor that is a high scoring game. That puts pressure on companies to earn your money with a good game, lest you buy a different one instead.