Image alt text: An image of Steam’s top 10 best-selling games at the time of posting, three of which are marked as “prepurchase”
I checked the Steam stats and noticed that in the top 10 best selling games by revenue, there’s three games that aren’t even out yet. If we ignore the Steam Deck and f2p games, it’s three out of four games. They have also been in the top 100 for 4, 6, and 8 weeks respectively, so people just keep on buying them. I would love to know why people keep doing this, as the idea of pre-ordering is that there is a physical copy of a game available for you on release, but this is not a concern with digital items. So after so many games lately being utterly broken on release, why do people not wait until launch reviews to buy the game? If you touch a hot stove and get burned multiple times, when does one learn?
I agree it was impossible in the computer space, but I feel like publications of the time reflected that in the computer space. I forget the name of the publication, but I used to get an Atari ST magazine that came with a demo disk every issue in a bag with the magazine, and its focus was less “here’s what to buy” but you actually got demos of most games they covered, and it was more like, “here’s what’s going on in Atari ST stuff” idk that they even had numerical ratings. I also don’t remember there being a print media space around DOS games in the same way to begin with. On the other side, console gaming magazines were like “THIS IS THE HOT SHIT BUY IT NOW 5/5!!!” And then the game was a scam.