Nuvendil said:
It's going to varry from person to person. Some want the preorder bonuses. Others just want it day 1. With Steam, for example, preordering means you can play immediately at the launch moment if you let it pre-load. Other times it's brand loyalty, which is fine to a degree so long as the above steps are taken since you want to promote companies with good merrits. But I think the guaranteed day 1 is still a major aspect of it. It's a convenience thing, even moreso if you only buy from brick and mortar stores since those actually can run out of stock at times. On a side note, I preorder very rarely both for financial reasons and because not many companies, imo, meet a standard where I can be totally confident. One time I did preoder was with Total War: Rome II. In my experience, Creative Assembly had been pretty consistent, Empire not withstanding (which I still enjoyed) and had just come off Shogun 2. All information on the game looked good, etc. Suffice it to say that I got burned. In situations like that, imo there's only one legitimate response: don't preorder from them again until they have established a pattern of quality and consistency and transperency in pre-release promotion. Which is exactly what I am doing. |
Thank you for the response. Ready for some abstract?
I am going to take a different route and extract a little Adorno. I believe some of this has to do with the idea of culture industry; being taught to buy and not to think. The idea that it feels good to be a consumer. Buy it now rather than later and you may get a little bonus. More than that, the idea that we things may not be this good later on (we might miss out on something!), so we'd better buy it right this instant. The idea of conformity; we want to be part of the elite group that owns the game before it is even released. The feeling that we were a part of it somehow. I wouldn't necessarily call it commodity fetishism, but becoming a pre-orderer is very attractive to the consumer.
#1 Amb-ass-ador
