Image alt text: An image of Steam’s top 10 best-selling games at the time of posting, three of which are marked as “prepurchase”
I checked the Steam stats and noticed that in the top 10 best selling games by revenue, there’s three games that aren’t even out yet. If we ignore the Steam Deck and f2p games, it’s three out of four games. They have also been in the top 100 for 4, 6, and 8 weeks respectively, so people just keep on buying them. I would love to know why people keep doing this, as the idea of pre-ordering is that there is a physical copy of a game available for you on release, but this is not a concern with digital items. So after so many games lately being utterly broken on release, why do people not wait until launch reviews to buy the game? If you touch a hot stove and get burned multiple times, when does one learn?
The problem is that virtually every series has some point where it has bad releases, or we’d just have enormous, permanently-running game series.
I can think of an extremely few very-long-running series that I have a pretty consistently solid opinion of what I’ve seen, like The Legend of Zelda, but even there, there were what I’d call lemons, like the second game in the series. I am out of date on Final Fantasy, but as I recall, at least when it launched, Final Fantasy XIII was…not good.
But the vast majority of series, even those that have managed to get five or six releases, which is a long time to have a successful series of games, wind up coming out with worse releases at some point. I mean, teams change, expectations change, people take technical or design or business risks that don’t pan out.
It’s especially frustrating when a game is fairly unique. I loved Kerbal Space Program, and there isn’t much else like it, but the attempt to develop a sequel really did not go well.
And even where series keep going, some people don’t like them even if they liked earlier games. I personally like Starfield quite a bit, consider it to definitely be worth the price. But a lot of people who did like earlier Bethesda games did not like Starfield.
Honestly, I kind of prefer the Paradox model to the “series” approach, in an era of digital distribution. I play a game, and keep buying DLC as long as I like the game. They do smaller releases that incrementally expand the game. Reduces risks for the player as well as the publisher. That doesn’t work for every genre, can’t do an adventure game like that, but it does work for games that are very replayable.