On Pre-order Bonuses

Ah, yes, the pre-order bonus. There was a time when you'd get something tangible when you pre-ordered AAA titles. I still wear my Quake 4 t-shirt when I'm just going to be gaming at home, despite how raggedy it has become. I still have some old school video game maps that I pin on the wall decoration. Yessir, those relics are from the good ol' days.

That time has now passed. Instead, generally speaking, we get some sort of in-game advantage when we pre-order. It might be platform/vendor dependent, or it might be left up to our choice. The thing that remains consistent is that we no longer are offered any costly tangibles.

Why produce something physically, when you can just add some extra digital content to your game? And so we have a new era of pre-order bonuses, almost exclusively digital in nature. Companies have come up with various strategies to drive up pre-release sales, so let's examine some:

Going the item route really irritates me; too often it feels like it pollutes the intended experience of starting a new character, and these items tend to be decently powerful. Nothing quite like a game where it takes a quarter of a play-through before you find an upgrade to your starting weapon.

A slightly different bonus is to include extra content. Bonus missions, bonus maps, additional characters (or civilizations, in the case of Civ 5), maybe a different color for everyone's default armor. It ranges from "do people really pay extra for this?" when it is merely graphical skins, to a sort of slow-burning anger that I have to jump through hoops to make sure I get the "complete" game.

And of course, these "exclusive" preorder bonuses are never exclusive. They're just ready-made DLC, all they need is to be aged; wait six months and then presto, you have extra profit-flow.

I understand where it all comes from, at least in a vague sense. I know that the projections for overall demand (and profits) are all based on pre-orders, so they do whatever they can to hype the game and lure people in to an early commitment.

That said, I really think that the smartest way to do that is one I often see utilized by Steam; namely, to offer a 10% discount if you pay in full before the game is released. A slightly risky move, you might say, but then again you're free to wait until the game comes out and first impressions are generated. Meanwhile, someone who is a diehard fan and will buy the game regardless of its reviews can get a slight reward for their loyalty, and none of us have to deal with bullshit DLC.