But you're right, I do have a choice to pre-order or not. And I know I'm going to buy D2. But I'm not going to pre-order it.

I admire your principled stand. The reviews could say that Destiny 2 is absolute dumpster fire garbage, and I'd still buy it. At that point, why not preorder and get a few goodies? I get why people don't, I do. It's just not a battle I'm particularly interested in fighting, and I'm even less interested in being told over and over that I should be fighting it.

That's not really directed at you, or anyone here. This place is pretty good for discussing things like this, but I spend a lot of time on reddit, and people over there have huge hard ons for blasting people that preorder, and I think it's asinine.

No no, you have a good point. I already know I'm buying the game. It's sold in my mind. It would take a truckload of negative press and a disaster of a launch day to convince me not to buy it. The far more likely scenario is that I buy it and love it.

But I lived through a time of change (at Activision, no less) when I saw millions of dollars which would, in the past, have been used to fund a game's development be used to fund advertising for that game instead. And in recent years we all saw a stretch of advertising and press that was misleading at best and at worst blatantly false. Destiny 1 did this to a degree (though later xpacs got much better), No mans' sky was a fiasco, DayZ will never be officially released... And I can draw a line directly from advertising emphasising pre-orders to pre-orders making a game profitable entirely on their own to companies investing in more advertising instead of in making better games. So I don't pre-order. It used to be that a pre-order was needed to ensure you had a copy reserved on launch day, and you'd sometimes wait a week or more for a copy if you hadn't pre-ordered. With the advent of digital delivery and amazon, however, that's no longer a concern.

I've also grown wary of the bait and switch, and Destiny's pre-order bonuses have been masterful executions of that. "Gain exclusive access to the vanguard armory - a completely unique set of weapons." Followed by video of Deej or some dev saying how flippin' awesome the vanguard armory weapons are and how they all look really cool and everyone will know how rad you are if you're using one. Only for the game to come out and they're level 5 and they are easily outclassed by everything and if you use one everyone will know you're a noob, actually. Technically bungie didn't lie in their advertising, but they certainly led you believe you were getting something you would care about when, in fact, you were getting junk.

Now, the RoI pre-order bonus was actually good: The iron gjallerwing looked cool, and - more importantly - had that awesome gjaller horn. That was super cool. Didn't affect gameplay, looked awesome, and was pretty much exactly as advertised.

Which leaves me confused about this latest announcement. Did they fix their misleading ways and put a truly awesome weapon into a retailer-specific pre-order only bonus, which would be the shittiest of shitty things to do (short of console exclusives which last for years)? Or did they relapse and just lie to everyone about how great this gun is and/or how exclusive it is to pre-orderers?

I'm hoping it's that second one, but I don't feel good about it. Really, I don't feel good about either option. I'm very disappointed in Bungie right now, and in the marketing team that probably forced/coerced them into doing this.

So, to pull this full circle: I can also draw a direct line between marketing teams having bigger budgets and marketing teams having sway over actual design decisions within the games themselves. And that's the tail wagging the dog if ever anything was.

Look, I'm not mad at you or anyone else for pre-ordering. I just want to make sure everyone understands the impact that pre-orders have had on the industry, and how voting with our wallets is really the only way to correct the course of game development. Some believe none of these things are problems, and that's fine to think so. This is just how I feel.

Of note, various digital retailers now have refund policies if you only play a little bit and then decide you want your money back. I think it's fine to pre-order under those circumstances as long as you're the sort of person who is likely to follow through and pursue a refund if you find that you purchased the game under false pretenses.

Except its not working. I'm not basing my preorder on this new info because I preordered weeks and weeks ago. They missed out on their chance to influence me...

Read what you wrote again.

This wasn't aimed at you, BECAUSE YOU ALREADY PREORDERED. This is aimed at people on the fence. You're just a bystander who happens to benefit from it.

Presumably retailer specific bonuses are meant to influence me to spend money at one retailer over the other. But I had to choose to preorder somewhere before last Tuesday or Wednesday to get into the beta early... Wouldn’t it make more sense to have these special bonuses on offer before that deadline had come and gone?