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?
Last game I preordered was World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade and I stood in line for 12 hours to make sure I was the very first to have it. Haven't preordered any game since then. They weren't distributed digitally back then, so running out of 'copies' was a real thing.
Now, I perpetually buy games that are 1-2 years old. They've been patched, they've been balanced, they're stable, and I can watch someone on Twitch beforehand to decide if it's worth purchasing.