Why I preorder my games
This article on Ars Technica brought about a lot of comments about why preordering videogames is a stupid idea. I’d like to defend the notion of preordering and explain a little bit about why I do it.
Preordering started with laserdiscs. There were so few printed that if you didn’t get one on release day, you were doomed to find one on usenet or eBay as early as the following day. Preordering from Ken Crane’s was something I started to do religiously and to this day I’m happy I have my copies of laserdiscs and DVDs which are long out of print.
Invariably, in the days before preordering videogames, I’d forget a game was coming out, or I’d miss the release date. Now, normally that wouldn’t be a problem but several titles in the past have become rare and if you don’t pick them up on release day, you’ll have a lot of trouble finding them.
Two perfect examples are Rez for the Playstation 2, and Tetris for the Nintendo DS. I preordered Rez thinking nothing of it. A few months later I found that not many copies of the game were shipped and it got amazing reviews. The consequences were that the game was going for over $100 on eBay at the time. The same goes for Tetris for the DS. I believe that game was discontinued and started commanding silly money on eBay as well.
A game I regretted not preordering was the collector’s edition of World Of Warcraft in 2004. Since I was such an Everquest junkie I didn’t think I’d be playing WoW at all. Come February 2005, I had to pay $175 for my copy of it.
Another aspect of preordering are the goodies that come with them. If you preorder certain games, you’ll sometimes get a beta key for them! That allows you to play the game early for free and give feedback to the developers. Sometimes you get art books, soundtracks, keychains, etc. Some of the stuff may be trash to people, but I keep some of it. I love art books, I love soundtracks. I’ve kept every one I’ve gotten over the years.
And then there’s the advantage of having the game the second it’s released. Most of the time I really don’t care, I just like to get things out of the way. For games like Final Fantasy XII and Halo 3, I just felt I had to have them in my hands the instant they came out.
So while some cynics may think of preordering as a scam, I see it as an opportunity.
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Pre-ordering will be a good idea for ‘Spore’ – which has got to be the most highly anticipated game in years, I’d say