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?
There are lots of practical reasons TO preorder something, thought it’s not always all of those things. And you can both preorder something and “Wait for reviews” because the vast majority of the time, reviews release before a game releases.
For example, Civ 7 comes out on the 11th, if you pre order you get the benefit of getting to play it on the 6th, and the reviews for it all released today, the 3rd. That means I’ll know today if the game sucks and I can just… cancel my preorder if I wanted to. Then in a couple days I get to play the game early, so in case the reviews were all paid for I get to see for myself if I don’t like the game, and if I don’t like it, I can cancel my pre order.
In case I don’t cancel my pre order, I also save $10 on Civ packs I would otherwise be paying for. If I waited for release day to buy it, I’d lose out on the benefits of pre ordering, but gain nothing.
None of those reasons sound especially practical to me, but I may be in the minority. I’d rather wait and see that the game is stable and if I really want the extra content I’ll get it later (I’m patient).
I worry that pre ordering may send a message to publishers that a game doesn’t need to be good or even finished
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.