This is a purchasing question that hopefully leads me to some advice but in your experience, do you think it's better to purchase/pre-order a game from the company itself or a gaming store such as Epic or Steam?

I'd go with a gaming store. They are more likely to offer discounts and they also have refund policies.

Never, ever preorder.

That said... if it's indie, I prefer to buy it directly from the source without middle men - if it's at all possible. That way the developers getthe entire sum.
If it's not indie, the less money a corporation gets the better... although in this case it's probably a corporation sharing profits with another corporation holding the store. That said, I agree with Grargar, stores are usually the safer way in case some problems arise.

When developers studio directly and irrevocably sells a complete, full-featured, regularly updated, DRM-free and regional free version, I choose to purchase this one.

Otherwise, I would buy game from DRM-free store. Especially, if their offer is better.

@OP - In reality there is no right or wrong way, just personal choices and preferences and what risks you are happy to take.

For instance, you only mention Epic and Steam and not GOG. For me personally, it is a rare day I buy from Epic or Steam, as DRM-Free is very important to me.

As has been said, a store is good for refunds usually. They can also be good to some degree if the game company website closes shop or goes bankrupt etc ... certainly in relation to forum support or even store support.

Stores can certainly sell games at a discount you may never get at the game company site. and while they may provide a DRM-Free version to GOG etc, that may not be the case on their own site.

There are a few variables at play, including the company longevity and reputation. Pre-order is certainly a risk with games especially. And wanting to support a developer or publisher, while sounding nice on the surface, can be very risky. I think the best way to support them is after they give you a great final product and show their dedication to supporting it, and showing respect for their customers.

So buying from a store sounds to be better and safer than buying directly from the company itself. But why the negativity against pre-orders? I mean you're still getting the same game when it gets released but with additional content. I think the only downfall of pre-order would be if you aren't allowed to return it.

There really isn't a need to be pre-ordering games. Digital stores like GOG, Epic and Steam technically have as many copies as people want to buy. It's not like when games only existed in a physical media format, and specific developers were notorious for their low print runs to the extent that you absolutely had to pre-order anything they released or you wouldn't get it.

Because when a publisher gets paid in advance no matter how good or bad the release, then it disincentivises them giving the developer enough time / money to properly polish / bug-test it for release day. "Release too early in a buggy state then patch later using pre-orderers / day one buyers as unpaid beta testers in place of proper QA" has not been a healthy trend for the industry. The only time pre-orders were actually needed were +20 years ago with physical box copies eg, when a CD-ROM game got released on a school day and you phoned the local store to reserve a copy in case it sold out by the time school ended. "Reserving" infinitely replicable digital bits in case they run out makes no equivalent sense.

Yep for physical copies. Also some stores used it as a measurement on top of how many extra copies to have other than the preorders to have in store, which wouldn't be too many more. Agreed. Preorders should only be used on say really big releases of games that might be very popular to ensure you got a copy.

But this isn't for a digital store. A digital store has no limits on how many they can sell, because there's no cost in manufacturing (other than how much space it takes on one of their servers). In my mind if you preorder you are an idiot and just asking to get ripped off.

"Yes sir, i would like to pay $500 for the item behind door number #1... no clue what it is! But it must be worth $500!"

While I am in general agreeance with not bothering with Pre-orders, hell I won't even pay AAA or AA prices on release, I have seen where there is sometimes a benefit that some would appreciate.

Sometimes when you pre-order you might gain a limited DLC for instance, that might not be available to others for years. Then we have what happened with Cyberpunk 2077, where you could download the whole game before the big rush, and then just got an activation code on release day, instead of battling with server issues trying to download. I'm sure I have seen other benefits (bonus game etc), though I have never taken advantage of them myself.

And if you do your homework and go by reputable reviews from those who got to play a pre-release of a game, then you are not likely to be taking a risk with quality.

Everyone has given me a lot to think about but I sort of figured that most people who pre-order games do so to get the extra items that are being offered such as the Wolf school jacket, Galaxy t-shirt, Wolf school t-shirt, Black unicorn, and Shupe the troll plushy that came in Cyberpunk 2077.

A pre-order I found strange is the newly announced God of War: Ragnarok's Collector's Edition. It's this whole boxset full of stuff but it doesn't come with the game itself. It just comes with an activation code. You figure if it's for the console, a game disc could also be included.

If you buy direct from the company. They take full cut. However if you buy games from and they decided to shut down their site you will lose access to said game.

In GOG, Steam & EGS case. They take 12%-30% cut from Pubs/Devs. The game will be in your libraries until they shut down.

I'm a little late to the party, but I'll chime in anyway:

I probably own a total of four or five games that I bought from some devs themselves / not via a storefront.

Reasons why I did it:
- the games were offered as DRM-free downloads
- in at least two cases, the games weren't officially released yet - meaning: you couldn't buy them anywhere else.

Reasons why I usually prefer buying from stores (GOG):
- well, the obvious first: DRM-free
- no need to create some extra account only to buy one game
- updates get delievered via the store, meaning: I (usually) don't have to actively look if they are available. (*)
- higher probability of an established store to stay in business, in comparison to some (indie) dev's "store", meaning: my files will (probably) stay longer available for me to download

(*) GOG is a little lacking in that regard, at least if - like me - you restrict yourself to the offline installers

One question. Could another reason as to why pre-order is bad is because it kind of signals the bad development of the game? I've read somewhere that game developers use the revenue earned from pre-orders to actually finance the game currently being pre-ordered, so it's as if the game was still far from being finished, let alone polished, and that without the pre-order the game might've turned out much worse (even if it's already bad on the release date). This is why I think pre-order might hint that the development of the game is currently having problem in terms of its budgeting or something like that.

Although I don't think that applies to games under big game publishers, since I'm sure many of those big game publishers would at least have a sufficient level of capital to fund the game developers under them. If anything, it's probably that the big game publishers are simply being greedy, and care more about how much money can they milk from their IPs than the actual quality of their games. But yeah, I also agree with your point as pre-order makes game developers more accustomed to releasing unfinished games.