Patience pays off.

Have you pre-ordered a game recently? I mean for your PC or console. If so, why?

If that question baffles you, let me explain. You see there's a very good reason why you really shouldn't pre-order, at least not without good cause.

Gather around children and listen to my tale of the Before Time.

A long time ago, little boys and girls had to go to the game store when they wanted to buy a game. This was long before Steam, Gog.com, Origin and their kind, descended from the heavens. You had to scrape together your money, head down to the shop, pay the man and then carry home your chosen game.

OK, I'll stop with the melodrama, you get the point. But to secure your game on release day, you had to pre-order it, otherwise there was no guarantee that they would have enough physical copies in the store, and you might be left without yours.

This is how the pre-order craze began. Obviously it didn't take long before unscrupulous store managers began taking more pre-orders than they could supply, and then blaming the suppliers. Of course he would eventually honor your pre-order, but only after a few weeks.

So why would the dirty manager do this? To make more money, of course. In order to curb pre-orders that were made as a joke or in vain, the shops charged a small percentage of the games cost in advance. Typically in the line of 10%. This was not on top of the game's price, but a down payment. Fair enough.

Let's jump forward to the present. Who buys their games at a shop anymore? I sure don't and as far as I'm aware I don't even know anyone who does. (Yes, some people out there do, I know). It's all electronic now. I love Steam, that's not my problem. My problem is digital pre-orders! The shady store manager may be out of business, but a more insidious threat has slithered out of the shadows.

We now live in an era when limited supplies are extinct. Steam etc. will never run out of copies, on release day or even three years later. Naturally the studios and publishers know this, so they need another reason for you to pay in advance.

So what do they do? They add an extra skin/outfit or weapon/car to the game to entice you in. Outfits do nothing special, but weapons might. In these cases it means that they are either selling you a useless weapon or their selling everyone else an unfinished game. Not cool.

Of course they might give you a head start, i.e. early access. In the case of MMO's this might have a slight effect, but in single player games it means Nothing. At. All.

The final common option, is a discount, and I have to admit that I've done this. I have pre-ordered a couple of games for a lovely 15-20% reduction in price. This is really the only good reason to pre-order a single player game. At least it diminishes the risk.

So why am I preaching against pre-orders like this?

Simple. They encourage the studios and publishers to cheat us. It allows them to make shoddy products and still reap a hefty profit for games that deserve to be abandoned in the 3 for $5 bin.

Because you see, they know that once you pay for the whole game in advance they can afford to ignore you. They have your money. You are now useless to them, until the time comes for you to be suckered in by a new fancy trailer that might not even be a part of the game!

A great example is Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Quote: "It's rare, in all my years, to see a demo so unrepresentative of the finished product. Even worse, I've never seen a demo that looks so much BETTER than the finished product," Jim said. "The 'work in progress' warning attached to demos is to warn you the product doesn't look that rough. This may be the first game I've covered where it meant the opposite. Gearbox's definitely on the hook for dishonesty -- if not to us, then definitely to Sega."

You can read the whole article here.

This is a prime example of the kind of bullshit developers can get away with only because of pre-orders. To make it worse, the game press can't even bust them on it due to brutal NDA's that no one can break without killing their careers. If they even know in advance, which they often do not.

Let's face it people. It's our fault. If we can't wait a couple of weeks in order to see the final product for what it is, we only have ourselves to blame when they rip us off!

Patiently yours until next week!

P.S. This post was inspired by this eye opening video. Check it out.