If a publisher knows people will buy the game because of the quality of the marketing regardless of the quality of the actual game, they are incentivized to spend more time and effort on the marketing than releasing a quality, or sometimes even functional, game.
Big publishers (who are usually the only ones offering pre-orders) have a record of releasing unpolished, unfinished, and often broken games that may or may not ever get better, depending on if the publishers think they can continue to make money off of it.
If the market decided not to pay for garbage, we would stop getting garbage. So when you decide "I'm okay paying for garbage", they start selling me garbage. I am not okay with that.
I have a counterargument, which is that pre-orders are extremely useful data to a game developer since they can use it to help predict how much server capacity they need for day 1.
Grinding Gear Games, for example, are the makers of Path of Exile and they've said that they use the microtransaction sales of cosmetics prior to a new league launch to predict the day 1 player count of the league and that it is a surprisingly excellent predictor. That's not technically pre-orders but it's the same concept of using data prior to a launch to predict day 1 server requirements.
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u/138151337 9h ago
If a publisher knows people will buy the game because of the quality of the marketing regardless of the quality of the actual game, they are incentivized to spend more time and effort on the marketing than releasing a quality, or sometimes even functional, game.
Big publishers (who are usually the only ones offering pre-orders) have a record of releasing unpolished, unfinished, and often broken games that may or may not ever get better, depending on if the publishers think they can continue to make money off of it.
If the market decided not to pay for garbage, we would stop getting garbage. So when you decide "I'm okay paying for garbage", they start selling me garbage. I am not okay with that.