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 only pre-order Guild Wars 2 expansions, as it's my favourite game and I know that whatever I get, I'll feel that it was worth the money for the thousands of hours of fun I've got out of that game :)
But I wouldn't preorder anything else - I have a massive Steam backlog, and a few years after release I can get the properly finished, patched version of games with all the expansions for a fraction of the price (+ all the mods and community resources that had time to develop and mature). Last year I got Witcher 3 for like 90% off lol. No need to rush, there are so many older games I haven't played yet...
Btw I was a r/patientgamers member for years, I see that they also have a community on Lemmy :) https://sh.itjust.works/c/patientgamers