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?
What if the game launches and you find out everyone is saying it is incomplete, doesn't run properly, and is crashing their consoles over and over?
That would be the practical reason I would think of for not just outright purchasing something that hasn't come out
That kind of thing would likely be made known through reviews that come out a few days to a week before release in which case you could just cancel your preorder. And even if they didn’t, Steam’s refund policy doesn’t care if you preordered or not, you can get a refund either way.
If it’s a console game and the problem is bad enough that it’s crashing consoles, even with refund policies as restrictive as Sony’s, they will issue refunds in cases like that, as we’ve seen a lot of in the past couple years.
The only actual negative scenario that’s left is you play it and you just don’t like it, and you’re not on PC so you can’t get a refund. But not preordering a game doesn’t really solve that problem. If you buy a game on the PS store two weeks after release and it turns out you don’t like the game you’re no better off than if you pre ordered it and didn’t like it. Generally people don’t pre order games that they’re not sure they’re even going to like.
Early access reviews are notoriously unreliable these days. Think Cyberpunk and DAV just to name two. Sure, you can't get a refund if you purchase two weeks later. But even though that's the case, you can still make a more informed decision than going in blind by preordering. 2 weeks later, authentic community sentiment will drown out most of the deceptive marketing and paid-for reviews. Heck, you can even find playthroughs on YouTube to judge a game against your own personal tastes.
Saying that there's no upside to not preordering just isn't true.
All official game reviews are early access reviews. Whether you buy the game on day 1 or you pre order, you’re seeing the same reviews. There are also community reviews of the game, if game journalists are you issue, but more and more these days community reviews are putting out reviews early, including gameplay. It’s very rare to “go in blind” when preordering, when there is so much information prior to release. I certainly didn’t buy Cyberpunk at launch, and I didn’t need to wait two weeks to know that.
And also it doesn’t take 2 weeks for community sentiment to form lol that’s a ludicrous thing to say. You will have full access to community sentiment on day 1. And with a full week to refund, you get an extra 6 of those days to get one. Your argument would be more at home 10-15 years ago, but certainly not today.
There is in fact no practical reason not to pre order.