I hardly ever preorder, even less so in Steam. I think I did it once with Prototype 2, as I liked the first one a lot, it was already out on consoles to good reviews, and I was at the time in the UK giving me a discount over the € price (+ the preorder discount). The second one is Valkyria Chronicles, which was my favorite PS3 game but never bought as my PS3 was defective and pirating was the only way to play on it. Since I didn't buy it for PS3, I wanted to pay full price for it now that it was coming to PC.

Normally I don't care much about release dates, but since I preordered, for these 2 I cared. Prototype 2 came out during a LAN party and I wanted to show off, and VC comes out today and I'm bored so I want to play. Both of these games allowed to preload the game, so you can play it as soon as it gets unlocked by steam.

The thing is, when Prototype 2 got unlocked, I still had to make a sizable download. Can't remember how much, all I remember is it took a while. And today I was downloading VC (16.5 GB) and had left than a GB left when suddenly the download resetted, but this time the total download was 16.8 GB. Basically, in both cases the preload was essentially useless.

Now, since I am hardly ever in this situation but in all cases I've had a bad experience, I've got to ask. Is this normal, with extremely heavy first second updates for preloaded games? Is it due to day 1 patches, or is it intentional to avoid leaks? Is there even a point to preload a game?

In my experience there is always some gigs (like 2) to load even after pre-loading, It might be day 1 patch or just very heavy drm.

It's annoying but it is still a bit better than downloading 50 or something in just when it's released.

Gamersgate keys (or what ever greenman), I guess there isn't pre-loading or I'm not sure because usually they don't give keys before the game get's released.

I've preordered, and pre-loaded, maybe a dozen games on Steam. Only one had a sizable release-day download. It sounds to me like you just had bad luck with your choices needing large 0-day patches; though of course it's possible that the reverse is true. A dozen data points does not a representative sample make.

Regardless, I'd say that it seems most likely that AAA games from the big publishers are more likely to require heavy first day downloading. But regardless, of course there's a point to preloading. You'd have to download all the content anyway, right? May as well get half of it or more taken care of early so there's less time to wait on release day. If you have to consider monthly caps, then you could even be in a situation where you can split downloads across months and avoid throttling/more charges. I don't know what your ISP is like; that might not be a concern for you.