#preordering games

Preorders were originally a pretty good way of predicting overall unit sales - the correlation was pretty good. When the publishers figured that out, they tried to juice the preorder numbers in hopes that it would juice the total sales numbers - this was happening sometime in the late 2000s and early 2010s. This was back when you got all kinds of special preorder bonuses and some stores made games unavailable at launch unless you preordered. Because they artificially juiced the preorder numbers, the actual correlation broke and the predictive quality of preorders basically vanished. This is also why pushing hard on preorders doesn't happen anymore.

That said, preorders and pre-loading really doesn't much affect us here in the trenches. We have our final ship date (which is set before the preload date), which results in our pencils-down "gold master" equivalent - the final digitally signed install package for the game. This package is what we submitted to cert and got approved for whatever platforms we're shipping on. This package is also what gets preloaded to players alongside a lock that shouldn't be opened until the time of release. By then, the package has been ready for distribution for weeks (in order to make sure we had time to go back and fix any cert-blocking issues) and we're usually already either working on the next content updates or moved on to another project entirely.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on BlueSky

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Up until around 2014, preorder numbers were strongly correlated with financial success. They were used as the main metric for determining an upcoming game's chance of hitting its goals. Unfortunately, this caused a common feedback cycle problem with key performance indicators - the more you optimize for the metric itself, the less that metric continues to correlate to what you actually want to know. Publishers and retailers pushed various tactics to pressure customers to preorder, which did result in more preorders. However, the artificially-juiced preorder numbers didn't correlate as strongly with the success of the games. As lifestyle games grew into the biggest chunk of the market, preorder importance fell even more because it was the lifestyle game populations that were most strongly correlated with financial success.

The quality element you mention has nothing to do with preorders. Most games have two to four years of total development time before they ship. Preorders for those games often aren't available until a few months before the release date. By the time the preorders numbers actually come in, we're nearly finished with the development process. The timing doesn't line up at all, there is no way we can cheap out on quality in the last few months of development when the majority of that work is already complete.

As for whether I think players should preorder... I'll tell you what I do personally when it comes to purchasing games. I don't care much for preorder bonuses in general - they are almost always very small and won't affect the overall gameplay in any significant way. Preorder bonuses are generally limited to cosmetics at best, and the gameplay itself matters much more to me than having a particular outfit or weapon skin. There are some games I will preorder because I really like the game or franchise and I am concerned that the publisher has limited print runs of that game (Atlus, for example, is famous for having small print runs). Aside from that, I usually wait to see how the game does at launch before buying in. I don't feel much pressure to get in on day 1. Waiting a week or two won't kill me, and I've got plenty of other games to play and things to do in the meantime.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Despite the steady growth of digital sales, buying physical boxed copies remain the largest percentage of purchases. The concerns about selling in vs selling through are still very real for anyone who sells a physical copy of the game. Digital distribution is growing super fast, but we can’t ignore the 70%+ revenue we get from physical sales.

For digital distribution platforms like Steam, Origin, GOG, etc. then yes - they usually purchase a bulk block of keys and resupply on demand. Preorder information is more of a marketing/forecasting tool for them than it is a real incentive. This is why retailer-exclusive preorder bonuses tend to come from retailers that sell physical copies.

That said, it can get a little murky because a lot of these look very similar on the consumer end when they aren’t on our end. A bundled preorder bonus that’s common to all versions, for example, is often the publisher’s attempt to encourage new game sales over used. Sometimes publishers will add additional content (and physical toys) for the collector’s edition if they think enough players will be interested in spending a little more. Developers will also sometimes create special exclusive in-game Steam-branded content as part of a requirement for being featured during a Steam event like a Steam sale. There’s a lot of potential reasons why there’s bonus and/or preorder content attached to a new title, and it’s important to recognize exactly what’s different about the content in order to figure out why it’s there.

The FANTa Project has chosen its concept! We’re making a Skyrim Dungeon!

[What is the FANTa project?]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Preordering doesn’t actually do much at all for developers or publishers other than provide us marketing data as one of many possible general interest gauges in a title. Publishers don’t usually sell physical games directly to players, they sell them to distributors who sell them to retailers, or to the retailers directly. Because of this, preorders are actually far more valuable to retailers.

Remember, retailers need to spend money to order boxed products or software keys to sell, and any unsold but paid-for products tie up the retailer’s operating funds until they are sold. Preorders are primarily a vehicle for these retailers to gauge interest in a product (and therefore how many copies of a product to order). It’s an important part of their business model, which is why some retailers will pay game publishers for some small bits of exclusive preorder bonus content as an incentive to get players to preorder from them.

Biscuit, Sterling, etc. are a lot like Rush Limbaugh. There’s a very particular segment of the population that really listen to them and care what they have to say. Most people outside of their audiences don’t care. While their audiences might not be that tiny, what Sterling or Biscuit say has very little bearing on the actual process, and are often not particularly informed.

Regarding preorders for games leading to lousy releases, the best counterargument is just to look at the numbers. Troubled launches are nothing new - there have been buggy and troubled game launches ever since big game launches have been a thing. However, the majority of AAA game launches go just fine. Here’s a list of AAA games that launched in 2014:

Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2

Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare

Southpark: The Stick of Truth

Dark Souls II

Elder Scrolls Online

Titanfall

Hearthstone

Metal Gear Solid 5: Ground Zeroes

Infamous: Second Son

Mario Kart 8

Firefall

Madden 15

The Sims 4

Destiny

ArcheAge

FIFA 15

Disney Infinity 2.0 - Marvel Heroes

Hyrule Warriors

NBA2k15

Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel

Sunset Overdrive

Watch_Dogs

WWE2k15

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

Assassin’s Creed Unity

Dragon Age: Inquisition

Far Cry 4

Little Big Planet 3

Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor

Smash Bros

How many of them had preorders available? I’d be willing to bet that all of them did. How many of them had troubled launches? Remember, we’re not talking about whether they are bad games, or whether they personally liked them. We’re just talking troubled launches here. Which ones of these had some kind of controversy?

Titanfall had some rough launches in parts of the world - they had to delay the X360 version, the Australian launch had connectivity problems since they had to use Singapore’s servers, and the South African release was cancelled because of no nearby Microsoft data center.

The Sims 4 had some weird animation issues at launch that were quickly corrected

Destiny had connectivity problems at launch that were rapidly addressed via a patch

Shadow of Mordor had that kerfuffle about how reviewers could only receive review copies of the game if they agreed to a restrictive contract

Watch_Dogs had a bad PC launch. The other platforms were fine.

Assassin’s Creed Unity had several launch issues

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare had a data problem with their preload that held up some folks on launch day

If you look at the AAA games that were released in 2014, the issues that were around at launch really weren’t that big a deal, and they were all ironed out fairly quickly. In addition, if you compare the number of AAA games with the number of games that had even something potentially bothersome that would need to be patched, you’ve got something like seven potential negatives out of 31 total releases, and almost all of them were resolved fairly quickly. Games like Arkham Knight’s troubled PC launch tend to be the exception, not the rule. 

Eh… kinda? The implication, as far as I understand it, is that preordering games tacitly endorses and condones bad launches to the publishers because it shows that players are willing to buy them even if they are in a bad state. In effect, prevailing opinion would have you believe the publishers are using the preorder bonuses to get people to ignore the possible issues at launch. I mean, it’s possible, right? They could just dangle the sales items to try to placate you and get you to forget the launch issues from previous games.

But that doesn’t really work out in practice. I mean... take a look at Arkham City’s launch. Yes, the PC version of the game has a lot of problems. But there’s also the PS4 and the Xbone versions that launched without even a ripple. How does this compare to the launch of, say, Assassin’s Creed Unity across all platforms? Are they of similar scope and level? Should Warner Bros. Games have offered bigger preorder bonuses to the PC purchasers compared to the console players? 

Troubled releases typically have deep-seated system-wide problems with the core game itself and have almost nothing to do with the development of preorder content. The types of content is developed by different departments and different people, and any influence by marketing is almost always after the fact. Marketing can drive development of things like demos at trade shows and conventions, as well as things for executives and internal publisher exhibitions, but preorder content happens so late in the development cycle that it simply can’t affect anything else.

Preorder bonuses are typically extremely tiny - they almost always use existing systems and often only require an artist or two and maybe a designer a little bit of time to produce the content. If you look at any game with a preorder bonus, the bonus content is something like a weapon, a skin, or something else cosmetic that has practically zero long-term gameplay effect. An additional weapon can take less than a single day to create with zero programmer time needed. 

Assassin’s Creed: Unity’s troubled launch had all sorts of technical issues like texturing, performance, and so on - these are all issues handled by the rendering and engine programmers who almost never touch the content side of things. Do you really think that the artists involved with modeling, texturing, and skinning these preorder weapons are responsible for the way that the rendering pipeline displays the textures of a model’s face? That sort of thing is all handled by graphics programmers, none of whom worked on preorder weapons. The easiest way to separate the responsibility of artists (individual content) and programmers (entire systems) is to look at the how often a problem pops up. If it’s one thing that’s messed up, it’s most likely the artist’s fault. If it’s all things of a specific type that are messed up, it’s probably the programmer’s fault.