One of the most common questions we’ve received over the past few months is some variation on this: “Why isn’t [game I want to pre-order] available on Amazon?” Now that Amazon has ended its 20% pre-order discount policy, that question may no longer be relevant.
This afternoon, developer Insomniac Games announced that the upcoming Spider-Man is back on sale at Amazon, after months of being MIA from the popular online retailer. The news comes the day that Amazon officially put an end to its 20% pre-order discount for video games, which had been in place for two and a half years.
For the bulk of 2018, a number of big games from massive publishers, including but not limited to Sony and EA, have been unavailable to pre-order or buy directly from Amazon. As with Nintendo a few years ago, it appeared that there was a rift in the relationships between Amazon and these publishers, but nobody would explain why. Now, perhaps, things will start to go back to normal.
Games analyst Mat Piscatella predicted as much last week. “On August 29th, I’m guessing a whole bunch of games not currently available for per-order suddenly will be,” he wrote on Twitter, when Amazon announced that it was putting an end to the 20% pre-order discount. (He was off by just a day.)
It’s unclear whether the call to open up pre-orders of Spider-Man came from Sony or Amazon, but Piscatella surmised Amazon was eating the cost of that discount. Some games still remain unavailable for pre-order on Amazon, however, including Days Gone, Battlefield V, and Red Dead Redemption 2.