On the bombcast recently the duders talked about the pre purchase rewards on steam and while i have certainly seen the offers in the past i have never actually ordered a game on steam before its release, often i wait until the steam sale to pick up my games but with the rewards being offered with the bureau i have finally jumped on the bandwagon and put my money on a game pre launch.

For those who don't use steam the way it works is that the game has 3 tiers of unlocks and as more people pre purchase the game the different tiers unlock rewarding everyone with the bonus, in the case of The Bureau tier 1 is a bonus dlc , tier 2 is spec ops the line and tier 3 is the entire Xcom collection including Enemy Unknown and all its DLC.

seems like a really good deal to me and since i was curious i tried to do some digging on previous pre purchase offers to find out how successful they have been, the best information i have been able to get are threads from the steam forums counting down to 100% and all of the threads seem to indicate that none have failed to meet the goal.

So go ahead duders and share your experiences with previous campaigns, have any came perilously close to the goal and failed?

I did the X-COM preorder and it went fine. All goals were met.

The Tomb Raider ones were met as well. I've never actually seen a pre-purchase rewards goal unfulfilled.

edit: Just confirmed that the Bioshock Infinite rewards were all unlocked as well.

Resident Evil: Revelations didn't make its third goal (which if I remember correctly, was the season pass for free?), but it was pretty far off. Most other games have hit their goals though, and I've always been impressed with how much is being given away. The Bureau seems to be on track to hit its third tier, but sadly I've already got all of the X-Com games I need and I already owned Spec Ops, thankfully Green Man Gaming had a good cashback/credit deal on. It really doesn't look like Lost Planet 3 will hit its goal currently, unless they see a big spike; hopefully they've got some preview stuff planned with the games press, otherwise they might be in trouble.

What I'd be really curious to know is what the actual pre-order numbers are like and how the companies decide on their tier goals. Do companies set it up in such a way that they expect to complete the third tier, are sales projections equivalent to the second tier, are they expecting just the first tier worth and everything after that exceeds expectations, etc. I'll admit, the pre-order bonuses on PC lately have been getting me to buy more games when they come out rather than later when on sale. The Bioshock Infinite pre-order was Bioshock 1, a choice from five big 2K titles (took and extra copy of Civ V for my brother), and X-Com EU, and that was with the pre-order price already being down to $45 and while getting like $8 credit on Green Man Gaming. 2K seems to be a bit better at hitting their goals than Capcom, but who knows what their projections and internal goals are really like for these games. I feel like Capcom designs their's to hit Tier 2 and then they hope for Tier 3, whereas 2K has big rewards all the way along and is aiming for the third tier from the start. Come to think of it, I don't know that a 2K game hasn't made its goal yet.

@winsord: while part of me wants to believe that the capcom stuff is simply an oversight on their own forecasts i can't shake that feeling that both resident evil and lost planet have seen less preorders simply because folks feel like they have been burnt on those two particular series and that in general the rewards are less exciting overall, being mostly in game DLC over other games.

with the bureau the developer confirmed that sales from other sources such as GMG also count towards its total goal and the fact that i dont own any of the planned rewards on PC definitely pushed me over the edge.

I bet those tier goals don't exist as solid numbers, and there would be no way that they would ever release them. No one would ever want to admit that their game didn't meet the pre-order goals they had set out. I bet that no matter what, a game that was doing poorly would still be bumped up to the second tier, if only to give the impression that a lot of people were buying it and encourage more people to purchase and hopefully meet the end goal.