The reason I have a problem with preordering is because it does three separate and harmful things:
1. It shifts the incentive for publishers from ensuring that they make good products that review well, get good word of mouth and sell well as a result to a glitzy marketing campaign that makes whatever promises it needs to in order to boost presales. In other words, the incentive shifts from quality to packaging.
2. It weakens the consumer's only leverage: spending power. If/when things go awry with a game, a publisher is far less likely to respond meaningfully, generously, or ethically if they already have all our money. If we want our spending power to retain any leverage for the kinds of practices we'd like to see or not see in the gaming industry, we need to keep dollars until products are complete.
3. When things go wrong (like in the case of No Man's Sky), developers are left to bridge the gap between preorder expectation and reality. This one is admittedly a bit nebulous, but the reframing from publishers taking a risk on a game they think will do well to publishers counting on a game that has presold well invariably puts more pressure on the developer. Why subject developers to even more abuse and stress? As a rule no one sets out to make a bad game -they're way too much work to waste the time- and most of the negative trends we talk about in games come from the publishing side, so why not make publishers shoulder a fairer share of the burden?
Of course, I'm not saying that people that preorder video games are bad, or that they shouldn't be aloud to, just that I think there's a pretty strong ethical argument not to. Like eating meat. I understand that it's much better for the planet if I don't...but I like hamburgers. We all pick our battles,
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