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?
I mean, Civ is a pretty established line of games. If you are into those things you probably know you’re going to get the new one. Same for Monster Hunter, especially with this one returning to world’s formula, which was hugely popular, and having multiple betas people could have tried to before prepurchasing. I assume kingdom come deliverance is the same.
No issue preordering a game I know I’m going to get either way.
But with new games, or AAA shit, or titles I may enjoy but are not a guaranteed buy, then preordering is stupid as hell.