Early Access Pre-order Shit Continues

Pre-ordering games is, by objective fact, an inherently bad idea. It’s paying for something before it exists, and before there’s any information on whether it was worth existing in the first place. In 2023, pre-ordering somehow got even worse and more pricey. Now people could pay more than the standard price to play a new game a few days early. In 2024, we saw the continued deployment of this miserable tactic, one that Valve and other stores now call advanced access.

Of course, as Zack Zwiezen observed at the beginning of all this, it’s not advanced access, but a delayed release. The game’s finished! You know that, because it’s being sold to people who paid more for it before any reviews could warn them not to. It’s just being artificially held back for everyone else who wasn’t willing to pay more than the full price for a game that wasn’t done yet.

And yet, as with everything dreadful in video games (DRM, online-only single-player games, no ability to re-sell online purchases), we protest them in their infancy, and then just get used to them, like frogs in ever-more revolting boiling water. It’s now become the absolute norm that if you’re willing to fork out tens of dollars more for a game, you can be among the people to play it three days before everyone else. For…kudos? Playground fame? YouTube hits? It’s such a revoltingly cynical exploitation of FOMO.

Pre-orders have gone from offering a cheaper price in return for the risk of buying something that might not be worth getting, to a way to pay far more for something that might not be worth getting, for the reward of getting to find that out a few days early. That’s bad, people. That’s bad. – John Walker