Image alt text: An image of Steam's top 10 best-selling games at the time of posting, three of which are marked as "prepurchase"
I checked the Steam stats and noticed that in the top 10 best selling games by revenue, there's three games that aren't even out yet. If we ignore the Steam Deck and f2p games, it's three out of four games. They have also been in the top 100 for 4, 6, and 8 weeks respectively, so people just keep on buying them. I would love to know why people keep doing this, as the idea of pre-ordering is that there is a physical copy of a game available for you on release, but this is not a concern with digital items. So after so many games lately being utterly broken on release, why do people not wait until launch reviews to buy the game? If you touch a hot stove and get burned multiple times, when does one learn?
There are very few reason why I might choose to pre-order a game:
Thats really it. Generally niche instances, I don't find myself pre-ordering games all that often anymore. I pre-ordered the Collectors Edition of Elden Ring, the White Snow edition of NieR Replicant 1.22 (still waiting on that Gestalt 1.22 DLC). But other than those two, I haven't felt compelled to pre-order anything else. I learned about Dino Crisis on GOG too late if it even had a pre-order period, but I did buy it on release day.