Actually there is a free demo for The Evil Within which really surprised me because as you said they are very rare, especially for AAA games.

Well you do have about 560 demos on steam which still represents less then 10% of games steam has.

Link: http://store.steampowered.com/search/?category1=10&category2=2

Every successful videogames company develop financial ties in my opinion that put them more at risk on this matter. Not just a few of them.

The last two times I pre-ordered, it was for Totalwar : Rome 2 (Creative Assembly / SEGA) and Diablo 3 (Blizzard) for the reason you mention : I wanted to reward/commend the previous works of these companies by upfronting money with pre-orders. I regret having done so.

Those two games were huge disapointments in my experience, and while I don't regret having 'rewarded' the companies, I think having bought those games sent the wrong message. I should have made a giveaway of their previous games instead. Not buying the game (and buying the old ones instead) or buying after release at full price would have been stronger, meaningful messages.

In my opinion, the culture of pre-orders just give all the reasons in the world to hype a game and not be truthfull (colonial marines, watchdog are the examples that come to mind in that regard).

Yeah, I worded that badly - I don't think anyone attacked anybody else for preordering in this topic. There's been complaints about preorders in general, sure, but for the most part, the topic was civil. The rest of the quote stands.

Oh don't draw that comparison, kickstarter has a purpose, a practical value for the consumer, even tho it's a massive risk and should always be approached with caution. Without kickstarter, a lot of games would not even get made in the first place, which would mean a smaller market in general. I'm not saying kickstarter is good for consumer per se, but there's a point to it. There's no point to preorders.

... And they can get away with it because they see that preorder culture is fine, and they don't give a crap what group are those numbers coming from. Seriously, I see the 'support the company' argument left and right as the only advantage of preorders, but surely, if preorders stopped being a thing, you could just support a company in many other ways? First week purchases? All DLC purchases? Collector editions? There's tons of ways of doing that which are not preorders.

Because the first group won't listen. That's the whole point, when someone is exploited, he tends to refuse to come to such realization. It's the second group which needs to make the push.

Just not drawing useless comparisons would be a good start, they don't help anything :-P

You can just buy a game before you want to play it you know, I'm fairly sure you won't forget then and there's nothing to think about :-P Seriously, the issues with the system massively outweight the advantages.

Heh, and don't forget the "buy/pre order this game and get free acess to the beta".

Well, at least Steam has those "free" weekends, it gives you time to try (hell, even finish) the game. I think ps3 used to have a similar feature, it would let you download the full game and let you play for one hour then you decided if you wanted to buy or not.

I've only ever preordered 2 games in my entire life.

The first one was Turrican 3 - I was a huge fan of Turrican 1+2 and I was hyped. I wanted to have it as fast as possible. It was a mildly disappointing experience since IMO T3 is the weakest part of the series (still a good game, but lacking the greatness of esp. T2), too short, too easy and that grappling hook thing instead of the classic lighting gun (T1) or flamethrower (T2). Still I didn't really regret it - I would have bought the game anyway, so I just got it a few days earlier via mailorder.

The second one is The Witcher 3. And I did it only to make a statement and support CDPR. When the game will be released I won't be able to run it. My machine will at least need more RAM and a new graphics card. Until I have managed to upgrade I could probably buy TW3 for €20, so I can't say I did it for the discount. Well at least a have more time to beat TW2 first...

I preordered because I want to support the project - much like TW3 was a kickstarter. Some might say it isn't and I could have bought it on day 1 to support CDPR. But in reality it's not that much different:

Software developement costs money, and a AAA like TW3 costs a lot! Were talking multiple million $ here. And all that money has to be there upfront - the tools and computers must be bought, and the devs, artists and testers want to eat too. The money only comes back when the product is finished and selling - which as we know can take several years.
A project like this is a risk for even big companies - and CDPR is rather small. Because almost no company has that many funds in their account. So the project has to be funded by investors - and they want the money back with a profit (i.e. interest).
Projects on Kickstarter are from people you can't get investors (because they don't have a track record or a bad (financial) reputation), or they don't want to owe some big company or bank - stay independent. But those projects rarely reach AAA budgets.
So for CDPR there is a lot of pressure that the game has to be finished and successful.

Gothic 3 was such an incomplete mess because the devs couldn't get more time to polish it - because JoWood was nearly insolvent and couldn't get fresh money (chaotic history of mismanagement scared off investors). Also they already had made a deal with big stores - breaking it would have killed JoWood instantly. For JoWood it was a life-or-death decision - release a broken game in hopes that enough fans of the series would bring much needed money (that's what they did - and indeed they survived for some years after that) or put the last pennies into fixing the game and then let the company die.

So every preorder actually helps CDPR a little. It eases the pressure a little. More preorders means less money needed from investors and so less interest to pay back. An Investor gives x million $ and wants x million + y $ back (on day z, or pay additional fees!) and takes the risk of losing the money when CDPR should mess up badly. I invest my ~45€ and want a good stable game back. I can easily live with the risk that the game is broken or won't like it. I can live with it if the game is delayed another three months (at least I know then that CDPR has enough money to delay the game and is not forced to churn out the latest beta version).

From the TW3/CDPR example it should be clear why companies want preorders. It's not because they want your money before you can realize that the product is shit - it actually either raises their profits (by haing to pay less interest) or gives them room to polish the product more. There may be black sheep in the market, but I think most of the developer want to deliver a product they can be proud of.

Also preorders can be a good indicator of the potential the product has. Community activity is an indicator too but it's less reliable. Many people talking about a game does not necessarily mean it's going to be huge hit.

Of course preorders can be abused. Add a marketing department into the mix and everything goes to hell. Exclusives, day-1-DLC... you name it.

Do you have any sources on that? For stuff like preorders may keep a game longer in development to polish it up and such? Printed would be great, personal experience with work in gaming development would be ... at least quotable I guess. Because most of your argumentation is a nice catch 22 situation where a market is influenced by preorders so much that it needs preorders - in other words, without preorders, it would find other ways to solve such issues. However, that one thing has peeked my interest.

I'm a software developer myself and with big projects it's always the same. Normal devs don't have the money to haul big projects on their own. So either the customer (or a group of customers - i.e. hospitals in the need for a certain software solution) pay upfront (you could call it preorder), or the dev has to go to the bank and ask for a loan. In this case the bank wants a professional assessment on the risks and chances. Without a track record you don't have a chance to see any money. If they deem your project promising, interest rates correlate with the deemed risk.
Of course the prepaid version is better. Sometimes you have a mixed calculation. You take some of your own funds, some money from customers who definitely want the product and some loan since you think there will be more customers when the project hits the market.
An example would be a medical app for hospital tablets that later is turn (modified with little effort) into a consumer app for the app stores.

The funding of the project I'm currently working on is even more crazy, but I can't go into detail here.

But I definitely can say that the more "prepaid" projects are the easier it is to haggle for extra time to polish. The bank wants its money no matter what. But the customers are usually more interested in a good product than the exact release date. I think this is even more easy in entertainment (meaning games) than in a "professional" environment. You don't have integration plans for adding TW3 into your computer systems, do you.
And as a developer myself I always try to bargain for more time because I want my work to be as perfect as possible when I release it. Of course the moment of truth has to come eventually. And it's always too early :-)

I think it's only logical to assume that the money generated by the preorders allows CDPR to postpone the release of TW3. Without that money they would be forced to publish the game earlier to generate income.

No one should have proof regarding Witcher 3 developement status or those that have are under NDA.

What proof we can gather will be froms games that already released and the devs share their developement story

Games developement always need more time and money to make it better, look at the game of the year, Divinity Original Sins, I can only imagine how its awesomeness drive through the roof it they have more funding. Mind you they did release without some promised features because they run out of funds


http://www.lar.net/2014/09/12/thoughts-after-releasing-divinityoriginal-sin-and-what-comes-next/

In the devs own words

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I think we would’ve continued development even longer, but when I had to dash to a far away place where lived the one last bank director who still wanted to give us sufficient credit to pay a part of what we owed to another bank, it was clear that we needed to finish. I wasn’t joking when I said it was all in.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I would bring to your attention on the criticaly acclaim Shovel Knight. It only have 1% sales on GOG on their first month.
http://www.gog.com/forum/general/shovel_knight_only_1_of_total_sales_made_on_gog/page1

Do you still think people should talk about what they want instead of voting with their wallet? Sheesssh we can talk demand all we want, but in the end of the day, things are not going to change if you don't put your money where your mouth is. Between the evils of preorder you proclaim and a second bad press on the DRM free movement like this, I think I can brave the "evil" of pre-order.

And even if there are "physical goodies", a self-contained working copy of the PC game itself is usually missing, because there is still just a single-use key for a download subscription bundled with a bunch of DVDs containing encrypted rubbish.

Why should I spend 100 bucks on a game box, if the game ITSELF is missing in the box?

I've never bought DLC's for any game. I don't mind expansions, but the notion of having to pay for stuff removed and then added on back for extra $$ or stuff that wasn't finished and then add for extra $$ is wrong.

I support Gog and the witcher series because I believe in the cause for drm free and good deals.

These game companies like EA that continue to rip off people are precious.. What makes them more special is how they can manage to get away with this. It boggles my mind why people fall into the trap?

In my 30 years only one other company I've preorder from other than CD projekt and that was egosoft, many years ago for there X series. Before they joined Steam I was always supporting them because they also would release a patch that made there game drm free after a time. Egosoft was once close to there fans, then they just changed one day? Dunno what happened but they lost me. So CD Projekt is my last hope for pc gaming.. I feel over the years there is too much console nonsense ports and greedy dlc crap destroying PC Games. Well maybe not the last.. there is kickstarter...

I normally wait a few years till all expansions are out and they sell there game complete with latest patch fixes for a bargain. At least by then you know what your getting. :)

To be fair, they have released a Non-Steam .exe for Albion Prelude, so you can play it completely standalone. Didn't do such a thing for X Prelude yet, but the way I hear it they're still fixing the damn thing, so their post-release support still seems to be superb. It's a shame X Prelude turned out to be so crappy, but they did patch it up to like v 3.0 or so, might be worth it now

Yeah, unfortunately that is becoming a common trend these days specifically for PC games as console games still have the game on the disc. One of the main reasons is that AAA games are getting huge in size and can't fit even on a DVD so the only way to have the game on a physical disc is on Bluray. But most PC users don't have a Bluray drive in their computers and that is why digital downloads are more prevalent in PC gaming now.

I have games on 6 CDs. Why not put 6 DVDs instead of a bluray?

I don't know really, maybe it would be too expensive and time consuming for them to put out games like that or having so many DVDs would be prone to more errors during installation if a single one is faulty. Also nowadays most people don't like to see the "insert next disc" message on their screens it reminds them too much of the Floppy disk days.

Also the only reason you have games on 6 CDs is because DVDs weren't available back then. I have a lot of audio cassettes and CDs but that is not how I listen to music anymore. :)