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From: Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Subject: Re: I don't understand pre-orders. Do you preorder?
Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2025 11:26:30 -0500
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On Fri, 07 Feb 2025 13:54:46 -0600, Zaghadka <zaghadka@hotmail.com>
wrote:

>>
>An interesting analysis. I take it from your reply that you essentially
>never pre-order. If you ever have, why, and what did you get out of it?

I pre-ordered exactly once in my life. I can't remember the game, but
I more or less did it on a whim; at the time, most of my purchases
were from a small brick-n-mortar store (this being back in the Age Of
Video Games That Are Released On Physical Media), and --as it was a
fairly popular title-- I figured probably would be out of stock for a
few weeks because everyone else would have rushed in to buy it before
me. And since it was a game I too had some interest in playing, when
the clerk asked me if I wanted to pre-order, I said, what the heck,
why not. 

As it turned out, when I finally got around to reclaiming the game on
Day 1, they had so many extra copies I needn't have bothered. ;-)

Still, I wasn't really that upset. The pre-order wasn't really that
important; even had I not gotten the game on launch, I'd just have
waited a few weeks, or gone somewhere else to acquire my copy if I
really wanted to play it immediately. Mostly, I did the pre-order on a
lark, and because I'd never done one before.

My overall impression of the procedure was annoyance, though, since I
had to keep the damn receipt as proof of purchase, and I am normally
AWFUL in preserving receipts.

So, yeah, my general opinion of the whole pre-order thing has been
that it's a bunch of nonsense that offers precious little benefit to
the customer. With the transformation of the market to digital sales,
what little benefit has all but evaporated, as I see it. It's a sales
tactic almost entirely designed to bolster the publisher's bottom
line. 



    [I did some digging into my old Usenet comments; it turns out 
     the game in question was "Grand Theft Auto 4". So that's one 
     mystery sorted ;-) ]