Poll of the Day > Stop pre-ordering games!

(+) Yeah! (+)

If the numbers of pre-orders go down, surely publishers will wait and release games in a finished, bug-free state!

/s

starfield is Bethesdas least buggiest game to date and made six digits off of preorders alone

I haven't pre-ordered a game since 2018 at the latest.
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/user_image/6/1/3/AABhrNAADn1t.jpg

I havent preordered a game since like 2009

I buy very few games at launch, and the ones I do are usually just localizations. #weeblife

I've preordered DLC recently

I guess that's even worse

Reddit on, fellow Redditors!!!!

The new pokemon dlc is $35 and it seems like tons of people are just gobbling it up, despite the amount of complaining I've seen about Scarlet/Violet. It's insane to me. Not only are you buying something before it's out. It's something that has 0 scarcity and you'll be able to buy it in the future when it's out and can see if it's any good or not. Then there's the fucking price of $35, which is crazy to me. I'm not sure if Steam has just highly skewed my value for games, but that same amount can get me a whole lot of entertainment on there. I have a hard time seeing dlc as worth the money normally, but Nintendo's pricing on dlc and their lack of discounts in general make theirs easy to skip.

I usually only preorder if I get something for it, or its like special or something But not all games

dragon504 posted...

I have a hard time seeing dlc as worth the money normally, but Nintendo's pricing on dlc and their lack of discounts in general make theirs easy to skip.

Im the opposite. If I like the game, DLC is usually worth it to me And especially Nintendos Like the $25 to double the courses MK8D And I think octo-exapansion only cost $20, IIRC

dragon504 posted...

The new pokemon dlc is $35 and it seems like tons of people are just gobbling it up, despite the amount of complaining I've seen about Scarlet/Violet. It's insane to me. Not only are you buying something before it's out. It's something that has 0 scarcity and you'll be able to buy it in the future when it's out and can see if it's any good or not. Then there's the fucking price of $35, which is crazy to me. I'm not sure if Steam has just highly skewed my value for games, but that same amount can get me a whole lot of entertainment on there. I have a hard time seeing dlc as worth the money normally, but Nintendo's pricing on dlc and their lack of discounts in general make theirs easy to skip.

it's pokemon

it doesn't matter what it is or how much it is

people are going to go out of their way to buy it

you have to understand that the people who complain about the state of the games are in the minority of the minority. they are practically nonexistent, the amount of people buying the games and merchandise far outweigh the people saying to not do that

for every one of you, 5000 people just bought the dlc

Shrek posted...

it's pokemon

it doesn't matter what it is or how much it is

people are going to go out of their way to buy it

you have to understand that the people who complain about the state of the games are in the minority of the minority. they are practically nonexistent, the amount of people buying the games and merchandise far outweigh the people saying to not do that

for every one of you, 5000 people just bought the dlc

Yeah, I imagine I'd be quite dismayed to learn how many people bought both game copies + dlc.

I made my first ever pre-order this year: Marble It Up! Ultra

I might even pre-order Hot Wheels Unleashed 2: Turbocharged as well.

dragon504 posted...

I have a hard time seeing dlc as worth the money normally, but Nintendo's pricing on dlc and their lack of discounts in general make theirs easy to skip.

They do it because people buy it.

And not only do they buy it, they actively feed terrible business practices.

As an example, Nintendo released Super Mario Run as one of their inaugural smartphone games. It was an all-in-one game - no microtransactions, no DLC, no lootboxes, just a solid smartphone game that had a free demo version that you could try before buying the full game for $10.

Despite tens of millions of downloads (prompting a spike in Nintendo's sales price, as investors thought the downloads would translate to sales), positive reviews, and the fact that that $10 bought you the full game, with no need to ever spend a penny more, people balked at the price and the game was considered a commercial disappointment, missing Nintendo's sales metrics. Fewer than 10% of those who downloaded bought the full game, and the disappointing performance undid all of the stock gains the initial surge of downloads had created and then some.

Nintendo learned from their "mistakes" and their next game, Fire Emblem Heroes, was a freemium game loaded with microtransactions. It was downloaded roughly 10x less than Super Mario Run and being on sale for two months less, it earned more money by fiscal year end and eventually became Nintendo's top-grossing mobile game (notably, second place goes to the equally microtransaction-heavy Mario Kart Tour). I mean, wrap your head around that - the average Fire Emblem Heroes player was spending more than 10x as much on their game as the average Super Mario Run player. That's insane.

But it's the same story all across the industry. EA now earns more than half (!!) of their revenue from lootboxes and microtransactions earning billions (yes, with both a "b" and an "s") from them every year (for a sense of how lucrative this market is, their microtransaction/loot box revenue in fiscal 2018 was $2.03 billion; in fiscal 2023 (which ended in March), it was $4.28 billion.

No one in this industry has any incentive to stop what they're doing, because enough consumers feed into these bad practices to make it worth their while.

No