And what value exactly is that? Were you expecting a shortage of digital copies of a game?

I care more about GOG remaining a viable business that can actually get games from big publishers than some utopian belief that merely by boycotting things we can cause the entire game industry to do what a small number of niche gamers on a niche gaming site want, or any thoughts they might have that GOG has a bargaining shoulder big enough to lean on anyone in the industry at all except perhaps small indie devs that need money to buy Kraft Dinner to survive long enough for another day of coding.

Don't get me wrong, I applaud the effort of people to stand up for things they believe in. Unfortunately a lot of such efforts are short-sighted as to the bigger picture costs of what they hope to achieve and have complete lack of compromise on issues concerning personal values. Sometimes we do very much have to compromise some of our values in order to not lose all of them, that's just a fact of life.

So while I dislike the ugly side of pre-order DLC that people are upset about and feel very similarly about the practice, I don't believe in doing things that I think are shooting myself in the foot in order to put an end to the practice, especially if I think the entire populace of people who feel that way are too small to make any noticeable difference in the eyes of the publishers who are the ones who make these decisions in the first place.

I'm not sure any argument someone could put forth could really convince me to change my mind other than one single argument, and that is someone showing me direct physical proof that boycotting something like this has resulted in a publisher directly changing their mind to do this behaviour on at least one major game. I'm of the belief that that has not ever happened, nor that it will ever happen. The reason I believe so is that the reason they do these kind of incentives is because the huge number of people that this business model tactic works on that really boosts sales is very profitable, and if that is the case they really have no major incentive to change the practice. No matter how many people one can reach with some grass roots boycott, I believe it would be at best several orders of magnitude smaller than any company is to ever notice or care about it.

If people boycotting a game that does this are successful and I'm wrong about that then I'll definitely pat them on the back for shining through in light of my skepticism of such a tactic working however.

Except that is a fabricated example that is not actually happening and thus irrelevant because it doesn't exist. If and when the situation you mention ever happens, then that will be a valid topic for debate, but this thread is not about that, it is specifically about pre-order DLC. Lumping an opinion about one topic as if it equally then must apply to some fabricated example doesn't do anything useful, because it doesn't equally apply to every fabricated example one can come up with, and none of them matter a grain of salt unless the actual hypothetical made up example is actually something happening, which in this case it is not.


I completely agree with you on that note. If a game comes with pre-order DLC that is material to the game to me personally and I have no way to get it after the game is released, whether I knew about it beforehand or not I probably wont buy the game either. Does that mean I am boycotting it? Personal boycott perhaps but I guess it depends on one's viewpoint, but in my case I'd just be not buying something that doesn't give me what I want on an individual case by case basis. Although I wouldn't be launching or joining a campaign to try to convince the rest of the world to do it because I don't think such things result in any actual positive result most of the time. I could be wrong on that, but that's how I feel.

I just feel that if people's goal is to convince GOG as a company that they shouldn't sell games that have pre-order DLC, and they shouldn't sell games that X, Y or Z, or M, N, O or P, that GOG then gets a reputation in the gaming industry for catering to niche gamer extremism and is difficult to work with, and the door closes on being able to work with a lot of publishers.

There are a lot of anti-consumer practices used in the gaming industry that I dislike and would like to see stop, but I refuse to take an all-or-nothing minority viewpoint about these things because I believe that such viewpoints always end with one result if they get their way, and that is "nothing".

Instead of being anti-something like this, I prefer to be pro-the-opposite. I'd rather encourage people to buy games that do NOT have pre-order DLC than launch a campaign to tell people to not buy games that do have it. I think it was Mother Teresa who was asked by someone if she would become part of their anti-war rally or something like that, and she said something like "no, but if you decide to have a pro-peace rally sometime, give me a call". I'm paraphrasing of course, but I generally believe in that philosophy for the most part, however I do recognize than the opposing one can sometimes work also. It's a matter of individually positioning one's self on which of the two ideals one believes is best in the bigger picture of things overall.

That's why I'm a big fan of CDPR and I actively promoted their games with friends and in forums etc. online for example. It helps to promote their business model which I think is pro-consumer. I personally avoid buying games from companies that I believe have crossed a certain anti-consumer threshhold, and I do inform people for example of games that have Denuvo on them if they might be unaware of it, but I don't tell them what they should do. I think people should be given the information if they want it or are open to hear it, but that they should then be left to decide for themselves even if I disagree with their decision and think they are making a bad choice both for themselves and the industry as a whole.

I do use Wordpress so hypothetically I could do that. I'd probably want to rewrite certain things with more polish for a long-term general opinion or blog type articles though. Not sure there's a big enough audience to make it worth the time and effort mind you. :)

Boycotting aside, what do you think ultimately happens to societies that cater to the lowest common denominator?

It's not fabricated. GOG does have a policy of rejecting games with DRM and is actively enforcing it. It is something that is happening and exists.

My point was only that making general blanket statements "if you don't like it, don't buy it" should never be used to argue for or against anything. Yet they crop out often here whenever someone complains about something (for example it happened a lot when people complained about GOG introducing in-development games).

Even if it doesn't work... so what? There are so many games to buy, most people have long wishlists and extensive backlogs, the market is overflowing, not pre-ordering something is hardly a great sacrifice. Quite the contrary in fact. Most people don't have the time to play eveyrthing they'd want and the money to buy everything, so doesn't it make sense to apply some logic to making the choice of what to spend those money and time on, and buy finished games instead of falling for transparent marketing ploys that hurt overall quality of games released? Even if it doesn't affect the big picture, it doesn't adversly affect us either. It's a choice we'd have to make anyway based on some criteria.

deleted

There's probably a fallacy which says exactly this. The mirror-universe argument is "if the devs are telling people to risk their money for X because it will enhance their experience, it will enhance the experience". And yes, it is thought as adding value to the game -- it's supposed to be the last scoop of ice-cream that'd tip the scale from "eh I'll wait for the letsplays" to "shut up and take my money".

The preorder price is in fact "more" than the average price of sale. Suppose I have a 5% chance of buying a game on preorder just like that and a 95% chance of buying a game on a 50% sale; but a preorder exclusive flips it to 90% chance of a full-priced preorder and 10% chance of a boycott -- that's a 40% surcharge right there.

It's not free - you're paying a surcharge *and* running a risk of buying a bad game.

Again, same argument: if they thought it didn't make the game better, they wouldn't offer it as an incentive.
(But also, most games with preorder exclusives run on "more is better" by design. More maps, more factions, more possible character traits, etc.)

An exhaustive list of devs I'd trust to cut content:
Andrew Plotkin
Andrew Walters
D-pad Studio

It's usually the publisher making the decision to withhold "exclusive" content, and the way math works, the publisher doesn't care. They're not going to renegotiate agreements for the sake of a handful of copies. But even when the game is self-published and they know they're "wrong" (as in, they know the content is meaningful and there's demand for it - e.g. the preorder campaign for Age of Wonders 3), it still basically never happens.

On GOG,
Celestian Tales put kickstarter exclusives up for sale,
Sunless Sea added some of (but not all) the kickstarter-exclusive content for free, and
Ethan Carter bundled up the actual preorder exclusives as extras at the re-release (partially because the dev (a) is Polish (b) is a decent person (c) got schooled in the preorder thread back in 2014 when people on the forum didn't let this shit slide).

Have you heard about the new Elder Scrolls?!???

They are calling it Oblivion and it's gonna be great!

I can understand it being called oblivion, that's where all online only products end up, but how do you know it will be great? From history we can say the story missions would be very shallow and last around half an hour. The engine would be good, but will require thousands of mods to make it playable :op

Youtube - Jim Sterling: Content Divided: Death To Pre-Order Culture (The Jimquisition)
Jim Sterling has summed it all up pretty well in his rant about "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided".

Thank god for him.

Unlike many pervasive industry-wide practices (like Eulas, know anybody who reads that brick of legalese and understands it? No? Know that they are considered legally binding contracts in many courts? Know that traditionally, in law, a contract is supposed to be a binding engagement that is not entered lightly and that both parties are supposed to fully comprehend as it would be utter non-sense for any concerned party to give their word on something they don't fully understand?), this one is pretty clear and really a customer choice.

Games are available pre-order because people choose to pre-order them rather than wait (the game will still be available on release, people literally choose not to wait knowing full well what they are getting into).

If GOG doesn't jump on the wagon, the pre-order crowd will just buy them elsewhere and GOG will lose those sales.

Wasn't Executer the name of the main alien dude in "This Island Earth"?

No wait, that was Exeter.

Talking of Strafe, I’m wondering how many people noticed the real meaning of the name of this exclusive preorder gun:

VV-1N

Yeah, exaclty. That means: WIN

Take a look on YouTube; it’s a joke gun you can choose at the beginning that most probably simply kills everyone in a level, like a BFG on steroids.
From a gaming perspective it’s utterly useless, which I find hilarious. I’d love to see how many people preorder the game expecting something awesome, just to notice in about a week that all they got is a useless weapon.

I mean, it is an awesome idea by Pixel Titan, but for a different reason. It might teach some buyers a lesson about hype trains and pre-order madness without doing any real harm.

Edit: typo