Agreed.

Pre-order bonuses are fine, pre-order exclusives are not.

For what it's worth I say this as someone who has the DLC already.

I think people who pre-ordered (I did not) should keep this bonus just for them. That would be unfair for them to give or sell to everyone.

The Bonus is that they saved money.

Unfortunately I forgot to pre-order Cult of the Lambs. I paid the same price as the cutomers who pre ordered the game. Then why shouldn't I be able to buy the Pre Order DLC?

The DLC would bring additional money to the developers.

Game developers who are not convinced of their product need exclusive DLC's to sell a product as often as possible before the release. After the release, these titles aren't sold because of the bad ratings.

I don't think Cult of the Lambs needs that.

There are two ideas in what you wrote.

First, you say that pre-order bonuses help developers to sell more copies. With that, I agree, and I don't really like FOMO-inducing ("Fear of missing out") promo.

Then, you say that people who pre-ordered got a "bonus" for free, and you and I could pay for it. Well... I would be really disappointed if the maker of No Man's Sky was to start selling the pre-order bonus I got back in 2016. (Even though anybody can unlock the bonus with light hack IIRC.)

I don't know if I'm the weird one, but personally I think people who need to have other people's experience of a single player game be worse for them to fully enjoy their own experience with it, probably would benefit from some self-reflection. However, we are both playing a game about cult behavior, so maybe I should think of my glass house.

I don't know... It's not about punishing people.

Anyway, it's hypothetical, because I never saw a time-EXCLUSIVE bonus being handed over or sold to late-comers before.

It depends on what you paid for. If you paid/pre-order for something that is clearly described as being time-exclusive and NEVER to be made available by any mean EVER, then I think you are right to be angry.

If you paid for something that was *vaguely* advertised as being a free bonus, then you are probably angry for no reason.

Once again, I did not pre-order CotL.

Also, there are REAL reasons for us to be angry, and pre-order bonuses are not in my own list. ^^

I wholly agree that this is the least of our worries.

I'm just posing the question of what does someone gain or lose based on it being sold to people who have no connection to their gameplay experience, other than a perception of whether acting on an impulse from the fear of missing out was rewarded or not?

The goal of my question isn't specifically to try to make someone angry, but rather try to reframe the question from: "Should they sell something advertised as not to be sold to other people," to, "should they use unnecessary anxiety to try to artificially drive-up sales sight unseen. That way they have the sale done before word of mouth can slow them down from something like these bugs you justifiably point out are the bigger reason to be irritated. Which having made the sales before the bugs became public knowledge reduced the pressure to make sure that the game came out in a polished state instead of us all waiting for game breaking bugs to be fixed while we look at our little Cthulhus freezing in place along with everything else every 10 seconds?"

With all the things to stress out in the world over, even outside of video games, should we put up with them adding more anxieties for us just so they can make a quicker buck?

"should they use unnecessary anxiety to try to artificially drive-up sales"

No. They shouldn't. ^^

I don't like these types of things, even though I don't really care about the skin.

I also think that this is very ironic how much they hyped the pre-order when we now know in which state the game shipped.

I agree with that.

As for the game itself, I should stop thinking about it. I've been playing old PC games instead. I'm waiting for a better CotL patch.

This is bad, because I keep reading about bugs on Steam while I wait for the patch on GOG. By the time they fix all the obvious bugs on GOG (I say "obvious", because every game has non-obvious bugs), I might have lost hope and/or interest into this game.

I preordered Cult of the Lamb months before the release...
And I preordered for the same reason I preorder all the game I think (for me) they deserve my preorder : to help devs to make the best of the remaining time before release, to add content if possible and to purge bugs, and encourage them to follow their shown vision. (their, not mine)

And about this 'if there is no bonus, nobody will preorder" :

If there is a "bonus", I have to take it with the preorder (and sometime I would prefere not, really), but about Cult of the Lamb, I don't even use it (and find it pretty out of topic, and not very interresting)

And if there is no bonus preorder ? well... I preorder anyway because I don't care bonus preorder 99% of the times...

And about the choice for devs to make a bonus exclusive, temporary exclusive, or just free for preorders and payable for the rest... the answer is in the question : it's their *choice*. And it was not a secret.
This skin is not even useful to have the 100% skins achievement for thoose who worry about that.

Over the last 30 years I have bought so many games a few days after release and missing preorder bonuses... and I don't care... I can't say how much I don't care (and I often found them so sueeless and/or ugly, out of topic, out of context, out of creativity...)
Because I buy games for what they are in their vanilla states, and most of the times bonuses are clearly not meant to be in the base game / fluff / universe / mood...

All of this to say : no, not everyone preordering games does it "for the preorder bonuses".
This over-hasty statement tells more about who said it than the supposed targets.

PS :And the one claiming that a totally optionnal (and useless) privilege is "taking" something from the one who don't have it, here lies a very inefficient and twisted logical behind this way of thinking... (I would say 100 times yes about Class conflict, but certainly not here...)
You can say and argue about an unfair dev's decision, yes, but certainly not that this is taking anything from those who didn't preordered. ("making their game worse" implying something is taken from them).
So I wont even speak about that "need to make other's game worse to enjoy mine" part... (which is pretty much doing what's criticised)

Absolutely. If other people could enjoy the DLC as well, the preorder guys would not lose their DLC, they would not lose anything, except maybe bragging rights. But what kind of enjoyment is this: only to be happy about something you have, because others can't have it as well? That's actually really dark.
Is this DLC only made to be rare? Makes no sense to me.