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?
They are all objectively practical, every single one. They are upsides without a downside. That being said, it’s ultimately your choice whether you choose practicality over the morals of the thing. If you want to choose not to preorder something just to send a message, I get it.
Exactly, both are completely valid decisions with different base assumptions. It makes sense to pre-order if having that content available sooner is valuable for you, because you can usually get a refund if the game sucks on launch. It makes sense to wait if you want to send a message, or if you're okay waiting a bit (i.e. you have more important uses of that money).
I'm personally 100% okay with waiting months to years for a game to stabilize and reach what I think is a good value. I also remember pre-ordering a physical copy of a console game years ago because having it a little sooner had value for me (got it at midnight or whatever, which was only available for pre-orders), and the same applies to digital sales.