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

by Ragashingo , Official DBO Cryptarch, Friday, March 31, 2017, 16:29 (2582 days ago) @ Kahzgul

There may be some truth in the idea that preorders do some harm to games, especially when viewed over the long term, but there are also major problems with the idea, like:
1. Have games' ad budgets been increasingly subtracted from their development budgets over the years, or has the market grown bigger so that there is more total money to spend?
2. If a game only starts taking preorders and running marketing five months from shipping, like Destiny 2, can a preorder boycott actually have any impact on development?
3. Would pouring all the marketing money into a game's development even work? Would more programmers, artists, etc fix a game's problems? And even if it did, would something like that be sustainable? That is: Does a perfect game that nobody knows about get any sales?
4. Finally, how much of a studio's time / effort is spent on the marketing vs the game they are making? It seems... questionable... that the two have much to do with each other. For instance, how many of Bungie's programmers, environment artists, tools designers, etc even touched the Destiny 2 teaser and trailer? And of the ~3 years Destiny 2 has been in development, what percent of the studio's time was spent on the advertising vs the game?

I do like the idea that games should get sales based on their quality vs a flash ad campaign. And paying for a game before anyone even knows if it is good or not does seem silly. Especially new games in a series like Destiny 1. But even if a good ad campaign gets a lot of undeserved sales, wouldn't a bad or disappointing game cause hesitation next time?

Isn't that what we're kinda seeing around here with Destiny 2 right now?

Ultimately, I think a blanket statement that preorders hurt the quality of games is, at best, ignoring too many economic, marketing, and software development realities to be valid. Even when we do see an example of a game with good marketing turning out to be a disappointment, like with Destiny 1, it is probably the case that it was poor development decisions made long before a single pixel of marketing material was created that caused the disappointment. And not the fact that some millions of dollars were spent on that marketing two or three years later.