Pre-order numbers in Europe declining

[IdortMasterRace]

Preordering all games is bad.

 

Fixed.

[IdortMasterRace]

Only games I've pre-ordered this year are GTA V and The Witcher 3. 

 

That makes you just as bad. Especially a game like GTAV that we had no idea whether it'd be an acceptable product or not.

 

I've also heard Witcher 3 is horrible downgraded, even on PC. No idea why you'd pre-order it.

[Berk]

This is a good start, I hope the numbers drop even more dramatically than this.

Pre ordering was always a risk because the game might end up no fun, but on consoles at least you used to be able to trust that it would be a finished product. Nowadays preordering is terrible for all of us with almost everything new being released broken and only fixed in later patches.
 

[Sakkura]

Fixed.

 

I have to disagree. We wouldn't have the best game of 2015 if it wasn't for Kickstarter, which is essentially a riskier type of preordering.

[euniqe]

Only reason I pre-ordered GTA V is because it had been out for almost two freaking years so I had a very good idea of what to expect on the pc version.

 

Other than that, I totally agree - pre-ordering without prior knowledge of what the game is actually like is just silly.

[Humbug]

I have to disagree. We wouldn't have the best game of 2015 if it wasn't for Kickstarter, which is essentially a riskier type of preordering.

This is a totally different argument. Providing financial help to developers to help them make the game. You can argue against this too and there are many pitfalls but that's a totally different conversation; the pros and cons of kickstarter.

What we are talking about here is preordering and this mostly occurs within the last months before the game is released when the bulk of development work had already been created. Furthermore these devs like rockstar, CDprojekt red, ubisoft etc can and do afford to complete development before starting to sell.

Pre-ordering PC games originated in the darker times of physical discs where we continuously struggled with limited supply and shelf space. But now; Origin, Steam and GOG do not run out of copies.

By waiting to see more information about whether a game is good and well optimized before giving money to the devs you are contributing to the overall upliftment of the PC gaming ecosystem.

In some cases after launch you realize that you are better of waiting for game patches and more GPU driver updates. Ubisoft games are a prime example. By giving them money only once they fix the game you are encouraging good practice from them. And more devs in turn will ensure that they don't launch prematurely in future.