The official Steam page for Deep Silver and Starbreeze’s PAYDAY 3 game has been updated to show the use of this ever-controversial third-party DRM.
Why are we still preordering AAA digital video games from multi-million dollar corporations?There is no incentive to preorder AAA video games anymore - long gone are the days of midnight launches for physical games.
- Cyberpunk 2077
- Returnal
- Forsaken
- The Lord of the Rings: Gollum
- Fallout 76
- Grand Theft Auto: Definitive Edition
- The Last of Us Part 1
- No Man’s Sky
- Etc. ad nauseum
All of these games came with a half-assed apology from the publisher and how “this wasn’t their intention”. Yes, it was absolutely their intention. They released a knowingly broken game and charged us full price for it. They already got our money and laughed because they know we’re too stupid to do anything about it and that they’ve trained us well with “fear of missing out”.
How many times do us gamers need to get burned by video game publishers until we learn our lesson?
Stop rewarding and encouraging their predatory behavior. Opt out of this abusive practice by not preordering and voting with your wallet. Let them earn your money, so “they can feel a sense of pride and accomplishment”.
Yes, and yes. It lacks a lot of features, the performance is terrible and it has a tonne of bugs. It’s like taking KSP and swapping the times when it glitches when the times it doesn’t. That’s how bad it is.
What was broken in Returnal on launch? Unless you mean the pc relaunch, I didn’t pay attention to that.
Pc had issues when it came to that platform, things like crashing and inability to launch the game. But that’s nothing compared to its debut on PS5. When it came to PS5, sometimes you’d lose your save file.
All those problems eventually got patched. When games get patched and they’re stable, that’s when it’s time to buy (especially because you’ll get a “definitive edition” for less money than the sorry state at launch). I like being a patient gamer when it comes to AAA games.
What’s the risk when I can just return it if the game is shit after playing it for almost 2 hours?
Two hours is a laughably short amount of time to figure out if a game sucks usually.
It really depends. There are some fan-fucking-tastic games that I did preorder, like FFXVI, Metro Exodus, SF6, TLOU:2 (I didn’t like the story, gameplay + graphics saved it for me), Zelda: TOTK, Elden Ring… the list goes on.
I preordered Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, a physical Switch cartridge. I took a gamble with that but I decided to risk it since: Nintendo has a stellar track record of creating almost perfectly optimized first-party games throughout their entire history, and Zelda’s been in development for over 5 years. That was the exception I made, and I guess I got lucky. One day Nintendo might sully their track record. That’s probably when I’ll stop preordering physical Zelda games if they ever lose my trust.
When you preorder these other games, you certainly have to calculate that risk. Cyberpunk 2077 was made by a developer with a wonderful track record of producing fantastic video games. A lot of people trusted them and preordered, and those with lower hardware that met minimum requirements got burned while those that had superior hardware were fine. A gamble that didn’t pay off too well at launch when people trusted a stellar publisher and developer.
Regardless of the game, it doesn’t make sense to preorder digital titles. There will always be ones that knock it out of the park, but if they do release a wonderful game, certainly buy it but don’t preorder it. Reward them with your money only after they prove they’ve released a good game that’s worth it’s cost. Else, we continue this cycle and publishers will continue to repeat the same behavior without consequence.
