You can’t swing a cat without hitting a pre-order program these days. Often times the pre-order details are released along side the intitial game announcement. With Square Enix’s upcoming Deus Ex game, Mankind Divided the publisher took the pre-order structure to the next level with the ability to “augment” your pre-order via a Kickstarter like tiered structure. It was a terrible idea, which Square now apparently realizes as they’ve killed the program.
The “augment your pre-order” was designed, according to the publisher, to give fans more flexibility by giving them some choice as far as what pre-order bonuses they received. This sounds pretty nice on it’s face. he problem was when they added Kickstarter like stretch goals based on the number of overall preorders. As different preorder levels were hit more pre-order material would be given out, culminating in the game being released four days early if the top tier was reached.
The backlash to this who idea was fairly severe and today Square Enix announced the pre-order plan had been cancelled. Now all of the incentive product is available to anybody who preorders the game or purchases the Day 1 edition. The game will be released on it’s original date of February 23, 2016.
This is a good thing. Pre-orders do absolutely nothing for gamers, they exist only to build hype and put extra money in a companies pocket before they release their game. As Batman: Arkham Knight proved even the most successful and top tier titles can have serious problems at launch. Trying to entice fans to pre-order is one thing, trying to draw in people who would not otherwise do so to get in on your scheme in order to “help” everybody is something else entirely.
If this plan had worked you would have seen every other publisher following suit. Killing this idea dead is better for gamers.
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