Path: ...!Xl.tags.giganews.com!local-2.nntp.ord.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 08 Feb 2025 16:26:31 +0000 From: Spalls Hurgenson 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 Message-ID: References: <20bcqjdfs1p5l88s03ujm97p1ljtqlqbat@4ax.com> <85mcqjh1nj5pmt9bqpkpnjgvc7i478jfu7@4ax.com> X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 2.0/32.652 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Lines: 44 X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-YPT5FpNenUHcAYambUmEcBsas0cThpPXZT7H6yYDlqEb0KIsVeTCG8pqDpRqxMBS5fH/Sp3gzbogDHv!Feao53LNFBSNnAkscpDmouj2DBfB/tvYwcvPZlrXnOwJxD1t98cIXxoJ21MSREsy59C/KVWF X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 Bytes: 3137 On Fri, 07 Feb 2025 13:54:46 -0600, Zaghadka 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 ;-) ]