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?
No, I do not pre-order games. I have joined some early access campaigns for games I was very interested in, like Kerbal Space Program and Satisfactory, but...generally "pre-order" is something the BIG studios that are all owned by Microsoft now do, they don't need the funding to get the game done. Meanwhile, Subnautica wouldn't have made it to 1.0 without their early access campaign.
Especially now that games are often distributed via internet download rather than physical disc or cartridge, it's not a matter of making sure you can get a copy. The last game I pre-ordered was Majora's Mask.