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PoV: Pre-Order Bonuses and Review-Proof Games
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I was talking to a friend the other night about some of the upcoming titles this holiday season and their relatively ridiculous pre-order bonus schemes, and he pointed out something that I hadn’t yet considered regarding the motivation for competitive pre-order bonuses. While I originally thought that the different bonuses were offered by different retailers in order to sway gamers from one location to the other, my friend noted that from the developer/publisher point of view, it doesn’t really matter where you buy your game.
Take Arkham City, for example: GameStop had challenge maps, Best Buy had Robin DLC, Amazon had a digital-only collector’s book and Toys R Us had an action figure. No matter where you ended up buying the game, Rocksteady still received a significant chunk of your money. As gamers interested in the title, our role has been switched from finding good games to buy to finding the best pre-order value. At some point, we stopped waiting to see what the industry or critics would say about a game and started buying on faith, usually based on previous experiences.
This pre-order mania has created games that are, in essence, review-proof. If you pre-ordered Skyrim, Battlefield 3, Skyward Sword, Modern Warfare 3, Uncharted 3 and Arkham City (all sequels!), then it’s not really going to matter what anyone in the gaming press has to say about the title. Your money is already spent, and you’re already invested in the experience. When several retailers offer competing pre-order deals, it only helps the game publisher cement its separation from the review process – after all, if you want that exclusive content, you’ll have to buy the game long before you can read a comprehensive review.
Of course, it’s worth noting that when all the big titles are sequels, gamers have a generally good idea of what to expect. We’re also lavished with demos and betas, so perhaps the review process has simply shifted to the perception and experiences of gamers rather than the select few people that receive advance review copies.
What do you think? Are pre-order bonuses helping to protect games from critical reviews? Is it fair that some locations have exclusive content that other gamers won’t be able to access?
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Comments
For the stores and developers it's mostly a win-win.
I don't think pre-orders are really good anymore, I mean you don't really get more than DLC that was removed before release.
"Your money is already spent, and you’re already invested in the experience."
I'm sure you can cancel pre-orders.
Also reviews usually appear before release allowing time to cancel.
I'm not a big fan of reviews though as normally they go by hype as well, and you can miss some real gems, demos are best(not betas) for judging most games' worth.
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whole the game is $40 the,
$15 to the console maker for packaging and play license
$10-20 go to the publisher (or more)
they get a max of $15 but with the early sales mostly going to the publishers pockets (and its bat man so the license will be alot more than 1st party IP)so they will make close to $5 per copy sold on the consoles and then they have to cover the dev costs and that will leave them with little to no profit to put into their next game, so they will have to go with a publisher for a loan and get nothing again.
and they f*cked the pc games with a delay but if u look at that its $50 digital whole sale then the distributor takes 15-20% so thats like $10 and that leaves $40 for the publisher and dev (alot more than the $25 a console game gets back)but they did liscense it with GFWL and securom and that should be about $5
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so if u can sell 2 million games thats atleast 10million in one week.
what i dont get is why any1 makes on disk console games and dose not just make independent pc and download console games as u keep a much larger % of what they sell so the games can be cheaper and then u also sell more games, but then we would not get the graphic quality we have now (not that the "nextgen" consoles can even push HD with the 256MB of vram in a 3d environment.
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what gamer buys a game on preorder and doesn't open it though (i know holiday gifts, but not counting that)
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In general I like preorder bonuses when they are either collectable physical items or early/free access to DLC. The trend of vendor exclusive pre-order only DLC is very annoying to me and has actually put me off buying games I was on the fence about. I don't want to support that trend as I think it is insulting to the paying customer and detrimental to the industry.
I don't like exclusive DLC. All in game content should at least be offered to everyone who bought the game. Make the pre-order DLC a paid option for everyone else. Not only would that make customers like me happy I'm sure it would make the publishers some extra money.
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