dizzy_plays: Intersting dilemma. If you know you won't be playing it for 1+ year or whatever time it takes until the first ever sale on this game then financially speaking you want to wait of course.
If you are going to play it in <6 months it seems unlike it'll get a sale until then so you'll get it at the same price.
In either case there's one more aspect: the higher the price you're going to pay the more money the devs get (and btw, if you buy it on their site, they get 100% on that sale, without the Steam/GOG cut, unfortunately they only sell Steam keys on their site) so optimizing for the game price runs counter to "helping the devs". Up to you :)
That's the weird thing about the market. Pre-ordering doesn't feel right without alot of trust, so we feel bad for not pre-ordering. We're just too afraid to be honest that even though we want to encourage the first day release, we don't actually feel it valuable enough, so we're trying to blame the game for that, when in reality we don't think it's enough, and we don't trust egosoft to deliver the experience that we've got in our individual heads. Preorders are a tremendous show of support, and, effectively, an advance on pay, which should only come with extreme trust. That's really what this comes down to, in the end. Personally, i think whomever came up with this pre-order idea is a little in over their heads, and they're pitching the game to us like they would investors, and it's probably not going to be the exact thing that we expect, which is going to set them up for bad reviews and sales. Pre-ordering will only magnify this to No Man's Sky levels, and make people hesistant towards the genre as a whole.
I think that if they can get a cool enough modding community to write decent enough mods for quests, then they properly adopted them like they did alot of mods before, they could turn the game around. However, the trick to this is short selling the game early on, then using word of mouth of "oh my god, this game's amazing, you need to try it" like minecraft did to really make the sales take off. The problem is, they typically make a really, really good space simulation, and with some really cool tools that can do alot of things, but without a reason to apply the tools, it's like me making a pokemon game where you can have ultraballs, super strong attacks and pokemon, but all the opponent trainers simply use level 5 pidgeys throughout the whole game. In X, you have to generate your own challenges and objectives, and that just isn't going to go well when people are pre-ordering.
trusteft: Here is my "problem".
I have played most of the previous X games, but not enough to be even remotely close to the end of any of them.
I plan on starting to play them from the first one one, to completion where possible, sometime in December when I move to a new place. After all these years, I plan on playing them properly and finishing them.
My question is, while I do want to support any effort to bring new games to GOG, including the latest X game, which I am sure I will like at some point, wouldn't it be silly for me to buy it now when I know I will probably not be able to play it months and months later after I have finished the previous games?
Given they'e open ended games other than their incredibly short storylines, you can't really finish them, anyway.
Honestly, i feel as if Egosoft should either start hiring writers to become The Elder Scrolls in space, or develop multiplayer. At the end of the day, we all see the potential of X, but even minecraft relies on multiplayer for that to manifest itself in a meaningful way. The lack of any tangible end goals that similar games (and i'm specifically referring to Bethesda Titles and sandbox titles like GTA and Minecraft) have is precisely why they do better. With multiplayer, it's cooperation and/or competition, while with a proper single player game it's usually to max your character, discover things, beating challenge X, or something like that. As much as i hate the concept of achievements, these games could benefit from that, even if only to simply create an objective.