Why pre-order digital products? I don't get it. Please educate me.

It LITERALLY makes zero sense. And I do mean literally.

It's not like they're gonna run out of them or have limited stock.

Especially pre-ordering/pre-purchasing games is stupid af. You're essentially paying for a half created or unfinished product, for what exactly?? First access?? Really??

rising capital for dev bonuses, so they can actually finish it ;)

There is no benefit. That’s why games usually offer exclusive perks like skins.

All of the advantages are on the side of the producer, not the consumer

Ok cool, so I'm not the only person who thinks this is a silly thing people do :D

I wait as long as 5 years to be disappointed (purchase) a game now. When I didn't I usually got burned.

But the Special perksies!! Don’t you want them? With the súper citizen ultra premium emperor pack you can show everyone youre stupid enough to pay horrendous amounts of Money and not get the product at the same time!!

@Chewbanacas "súper" I thought there was a speck on my screen... Tried to clean it off. lol

from the business perspective it allows them to convince you to buy the product on a bigger timeline than just the launch

so they have a bigger window to have a successful sale, which means they don't hype you up and have to hope you're still hyped for launch enough to buy it, they can just have you buy it any time before launch (and launch is peak hype)

the whole reason people say "don't be negative" is cuz they wanna sell you something and they can't if you aren't high off positive feelings, so they have to attack your mindset until you feel bad enough to change it. came up in a convo yesterday. toxic positivity allows you to sell more shit, psychologically

why for you? well I like getting chores done early but the populace is actually more into procrastination. getting chores done early in a dishonest society gets you pretty fucked all around

@SidTheITGuy

In the case of massively multiplayer games, it makes all the sense in the world if prepurchase includes early access.

No matter if it's just one day. That allows them to essentially split the user base and thus avoid many potential hardware issues due to saturation during launch.

@CoreFusionX but chaos in MMOs is actually fun

instead of a bore-fest

now you don't even go to a town to try to find party members. they have stupid NPCs that show you a lobby menu. it's damned sad

and everybody is doing meta instead of experimenting. oh you're a healer and went dps? fuck you we go back to the lobby. before you could prove yourself, and you had actual friends that appreciated your ingenuity. you'd become server famous due to skill. now nobody knows anyone and they're just a little rat in the saddest pavlovian maze that can be devised

users generate infinite content. what do game companies do? make sure users can't generate any content! STICK TO OUR GUARDRAILS BITCH, IT'S OUR PRODUCT. Before what made video games the sensation they were is because people got obsessed building on the original content. the more fascism we get the more the corporations disallow actual value in the economy by running to daddy government

@jestdotty

Can't have chaos when nothing works.

@Demolishun gotcha huehuehue

I get extra stuff in video games, and I preload the game. And if I have an issue I return it anyway.

If you have a very slow Internet connection, or you are planning to travel somewhere with worse Internet, preordering makes sense because it allows you to download the game in advance, and then it’s decrypted on release.

@novasurp For games it makes sense, but for online courses or ebooks or something like that I still don't get it.

@dissolvedgirl For books, the purpose is to support the author by putting them on the bestseller list before it comes out. Bookstores use preorder counts to determine how many physical copies to stock at release.

@novasurp Ah, thanks for explaining. Makes sense! Still doesn't really give me any benefit besides maybe having a physical book in my hands before everyone else, which doesn't interest me personally.