It depends on Pre-Order type. For new digital games, it makes little sense.

Pre-ordering movies on the other hand - pure gold. You always wanted the movie or at least have likely seen it, it doesn't cost you anything until it ships and you take advantage of the lowest price during pre-order price fluctuations. By the same token pre-ordering remasters of games at a discount should be a safe bet. You're pretty sure the game will roughly stay as you remember it after all.

I preordered the Witcher 3. First game since Dark Souls II I preordered. I've not been disappointed with my pre-orders. I generally will only put up money for games I'm fairly sure will be a hit. Oh, I take it back, I pre-ordered Pillars of Eternity as well. Still haven't been disappointed by a pre-order game. :D

somebody needs to murder pre-order

Any form of pre-order is too early, so why are we even talking about this?

Wow, that's a very premature pre-order listing, especially since the December 31st release date is basically a retailer's way of saying, "We have no idea when this game wilo be released."

My understanding is a pre order is usually a few months out at the most from release. 1.5years is taking the piss. Except Grim Dawn had already been in progress when they put the game up on Kickstarter unless im wrong (it will be finished later this year supposedly. yes im a backer too. the alpha/beta is pretty good, but if one isnt into trying new builds i would advise not trying it out yet as story is a bit ..not there).

Right, I think early access and Indie studios deserve a bit of leeway here, but the length of some of these preorders is ridiculous. People are lending these companies money for free. And the game may not even be any good. SC2, I'm looking at you.

Usually when they don't have a release date set some online stores will give random dates like that because an actual date is not introduced in their system. And this is not only limited to stores. For example if you go to IGN and click on the Coming Soon/To Be Released/Whatever tab you will see the top games have an actual date, while everything down the list has a release date for something like 1970s and we're in 2015. It's just a database thing.

Huh, I'm not sure if sc2 is bad. But I'm certain I bought it for no good reason after it was released.
Basically I thought friends would end up playing it because they talked about doing so a lot, and then I didn't enjoy it at all.

Depends. I would not pre-order now (or even later) so they will probably not take many pre-orders but then it also doesn't hurt much to have the pre-order out already. So we know what we could pre-order in a year (if we would pre-order).

In short: I almost never pre-order but I don't mind if anyone else wants to years in advance however I think not many will do it anyway.

That's just crazy! I would never pre-order a game just like that, especially so well in advance.

Except if it was Cyberpunk 2077, of course. But other than that: no, no and no! Just no!!!

It was exceedingly boring, but worse than that it wasn't a whole game, they only gave you Terans to play with and I never found them to be particularly fun. It was so bad that it ruined my enjoyment of the original as I realized just how boring it was.

Truly a sad day for gaming.

But even if one doesn't agree with that, it was a ridiculously long wait while they sucked the life out of Warcraft with that WoW abomination.

I am usually very wary of pre-ordering. I pre-ordered The Witcher 3 - until they started to pre-sell an addon before the actual game was even out. That was too much pre-ordering for me, so I cancelled the pre-order and now I'll wait for the GOTY version in a year or two, which then hopefully contains all the content and all the patches and so on.

I don't see sense to pre-order game. Show me final product then i will buy it if interest me. In this case it's even possible that you will forget that you pre-order it and buy it again when it comes out. ;)

Well AAA is degrading, and the earlier you can realize your money went to waste, the better; and 1.5 years is probably enough time for that.