• What about Early Access Games?
  • Do you feel differently about Early Access vs traditional preordering?
  • If you are open to the idea in specific circumstances, what are those?
  • How do you decide if a game qualifies?

I’m interested in the community thoughts on preordering and I’d love to have a thoughtful discussion on the matter.

Personally, I’m against preordering, except in specific situations where I want to actively support the development of a game.

I have been thinking about this because there is a game I’m considering preordering from a medium sized studio, but the reason I want to preorder is for the IP, rather than the game and it goes against my typical stance on this. The game is based on my favorite book series and part of me wants to encourage more games be made based on this series. At the same time, the book series has found commercial success and as a whole does not need my help.

I did name the specifics here because I’m hoping to encourage discussion on preordering as a whole, rather than my example, but if you want to know, I’ll drop a comment and we can have a discussion in the comment thread. :)

EDIT: thank you all for the thoughtful discussion on this! I expected most people to slam preordering, but there was some very thoughtful dialogue here and that is why I appreciate you, Lemmy!

  • rumschlumpel@feddit.orgEnglish
    91·
    14 days ago

    Definitely no preorder, I’m not buying a cat in a bag for no real benefit. Kickstarter is a bit different because the game might not be made at all if you don’t back, but in that case I’ll definitely research the people involved to get a better picture on how reliable they are and if they really need Kickstarter-style funding in the first place.

    For early access, I try to judge whether the current state of the game is already worth the price. Games like Minecraft or 7 Days To Die provided great value even before their 1.0 version.

    • rumschlumpel@feddit.orgEnglish
      2·
      14 days ago

      (continued) For your example, I’d be too worried about whether the game does the book justice to preorder. Maybe if the developer and publisher have a really good track record. But I don’t like to get invested like that, especially considering that I only play on Linux - even a really cool developer might release a game that is a bitch to get working on my system, even if their previous games worked great.