BY ALEX BARNARD
Pre-ordering has become an extremely popular activity for gamers in the recent years. In pre-ordering, consumers put down a payment for a game (ranging from $5 to the full $60 price of the game) well before it comes out in an attempt to insure that they will receive a copy on launch day. In theory this practice makes sense as a move to reserve a copy. However, it has evolved into a way for retailers to make more money, and has hurt the game industry with an assortment of ridiculous pre-ordering incentives.
Walk into a gaming specialty store like GameStop on the release of a major game without pre-ordering and you may find it incredibly difficult to end up with a copy. Whereas these retailers used to order largely anticipated games in bulk for launch day, there has been an increasing corporate demand to push pre-orders. While GameStop’s used to carry enough copies for pre-order customers and day one buyers, they now extensively cater to their loyal pre-ordering fan base. If someone went down the street to a larger retailer like Wal-Mart or Best Buy, those stores would typically have a supply of the new game to last the store for quite some time. The “need” for a pre-order has been artificially driven up by companies in an attempt to get your money sooner. As soon as the company receives part of your money for a pre-order they’ve begun to make interest off of you. The worst part is that if anyone were to forget about a pre-order or lose interest the gaming retailer would have made at least $5 off of you without actually giving you anything.
The largest issue generated by recent larger influx of pre-orders has been the development of the pre-order bonus, designed to incentivize a consumer to pre-order a game. Pre-order bonuses were originally physical items like little dorky posters or terrible t-shirts, but now pre-order bonuses often affect the actual game playing experience. In the recently released Assassins Creed 3, different retailers offer different pre-order bonuses: GameStop, Wal-Mart, and Target all offer an exclusive mission (different for each retailer) while Amazon offers an exclusive playable character. This makes it so that an Assassins Creed fan doesn’t have access to all the missions designed for the game, and in fact degrades the quality of the average gamer’s experience. Even those who pre-order can’t obtain all the bonus missions because they are locked behind certain retailer pre-ordering schemes. Rather than reward pre-orders with a “neat” physical incentive, it seems like they just punish consumers who didn’t pre-order the game from every retailer for a “full experience”.
Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 promised the “exclusive” multiplayer map “Nuketown 2025” as an incentive to anyone who pre-ordered it. This map was a remake of the fan favorite “Nuketown” map from the original
Black Ops, and locking it up as a pre-order incentive seemed like it would boost up pre-orders. Although we can’t tell exactly how many people pre-ordered the game for this “exclusive” map, it should say something that Black Ops 2 was Amazon’s most pre-ordered game of all time. The ultimate irony of this situation is that “Nuketown 2025” was actually part of every first production copy of Black Ops 2. Those who didn’t preorder the game and bought it at launch receive the same “pre-order bonus” that retailers bragged about having and television commercials told us about. This decision benefits those like me who chose not to pre-order. Many of us typically wait for review until making a decision on buying a game, due to the fact that a $60 video game purchase is rarely an impulse decision.
Pre-orders sometimes serve a purpose. Those living in the absolute middle of nowhere or want an incredibly niche game rely on them to make sure they get a copy of the game they want at launch. However, those of us who play big budget games and live in a fairly populated area should be able to find a copy of a game at launch with relative ease. Want game makers to stop locking exclusive content to retailers as pre-order bonuses? Then vote with your wallet. The more gamers who stop blindly giving money to companies in anticipation for a game the faster companies can realize that this practice in hurting gamers (not to mention the less terrible games we’d buy if we read review before dropping money on them). While the concept of pre-ordering is not terrible for a small minority of gamers, it has led to certain practices like stores ordering less or offering exclusive bonuses that have made a negative impact on the video game purchasing experience.
