When people are giving over 3 million dollars to kickstarters that aren't even a trailer and little more than a concept, why not offer this option? At least they went out of there way to make a trailer.
This isn't crowd-funding. Crowd-funding (especially Kickstarter) is based on "we need to raise funds to do this thing and without these funds this thing will not exist". In fact, that is a requirement with Kickstarter. This is just a marketing gimmick to generate discounted pre-orders and get websites to spread the advertising to their audiences. This is not fund-raising for a game that wouldn't otherwise exist. This is taking discounted pre-orders for a game that is already in progress and has a release window. At most, it capitalizes on any fans who have enjoyed their previous games (since, if you don't have a history with the developer's product, why would you have any interest in buying their next one without even knowing what it is?).
As for actual crowd-funding, I think you'll find that projects asking for (or getting) millions have a hell of a lot more than "a concept".
Initially, I find this marketing gimmick kind of gross. However, it's not like they're holding anything back from the rest of people who want to (sanely) wait until the 28th to find out what the game is even about. The only difference is those who say "fuck yeah, I loved your last game and I'll take a chance" get it for a discount. For the rest of us, we can just wait until later. And if the game turns out to not be so hot, we'll get it for a lot less than 50% on Steam a couple months after launch, anyway.
I mean, think about it -- if CDProjekt RED said "we're working on a game that will be released by the end of the year and though we're not going to give you any information about it at all until March 1st, we'll let you pre-order it for $30, instead of $60, if you order before March 1st" -- a ton of us would go along with it, based on their prior record.
Anyway, that doesn't really justify the whole "pre-order" abuse thing, across the board, these days . . . but in context, it's not particularly egregious, to me.
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