My thoughts on this (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Saturday, April 01, 2017, 03:31 (2582 days ago) @ Ragashingo

It's a measure by degrees, not absolutes. If you could have 20% more Destiny because of a shift of a few millions of dollars away from pre-order hype advertising and towards development, wouldn't you want that? That's what I'm talking about. Reversing the incremental budgetary swing from development towards advertising that's been trending for two decades now.

Yes, of course there would be backlash if all you got was a sticky note. But come on, I'm not saying pre-orders are lies. I'm saying that pre-orders have resulted in some money which would have been used for development being used for advertising instead. Boycotting pre-orders will eventually swing the pendulum the other way. This is not an all-or nothing plan - companies need to spend money on advertising as well as game development, for sure. This is about ensuring you know the real content of a game before you buy it. Yes, there is a supposition here that current return policies of most brick and mortar stores remain in place (namely, no returns on open boxes). If a robust return policy became the law of the land and you could get a full refund within, say, a week of your purchase, then pre-ordering wouldn't matter at all. Right now that's not the case. I know that steam has a limited return policy, but I'm not super familiar with it. Amazon will sometimes take things back, but again, not always the case with video games.

So yes, there are absolutely changes to the current business model that would make me be totally fine with pre-ordering. That being said, the only place where I can have a direct effect, right now, today, is the decision to pre-order or not. I choose not to, because I think that if enough of us do the same, we'll influence the business model to shift money back towards development rather than marketing, and eventually influence the changes that will allow full refunds if a game stinks, which will put pre-orders back on the menu in a more healthy (for the game industry) way.