2014 was total dog chod. I’ve been alive since 1988, I’ve been gaming since about 1992 and I’ve never experienced a worse year for games than the one we just had. Admittedly, it may have started off quite strongly with the release of indie gems such as the ridiculous ‘Jazzpunk’ and the time-gobbling card-battler that is ‘Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft.’ But in the great lands of AAA, no hero was born. Sure, there were some decent offerings. ‘Titanfall’ was good sport for a while and ‘Smash Bros Wii-U’ may have rescued Nintendo’s pride at the 11th hour, whilst Telltale Games continued on with their various adventure seasons. But they were mere consolations in a very boring year for gamers and I think I may know why.
"Kiss me like one of your French girls, you disembodied face-of-a-man!"
To put it simply, we really need to stop pre-ordering games. Time and time again we get stung by totally unfinished, downloadable buckets of spaff and time and time again we line up to be the first to boot our wallets in the general direction of the grey-skinned liches that control the major games publishers. This year alone I was personally suckered in by ‘Watchdogs’, a game which made me wish I had literally watched some dogs instead of playing it and ‘Dragon Age: Inquisition’ which basically just pretended to be optimized for PC. Whether or not you agree with my opinion on these games, I’m sure you can think of several occasions when the fevered madness of pre-release excitement has caused you to drop money on a game that bitterly disappointed you. Once respected franchises such as Duke Nukem, Aliens and most recently Assassin’s Creed have all fallen prey to this ridiculous industry norm and it’s only going to get worse.
Aliens: Colonial Marines was certainly worthy of our collective blind faith
The issue with pre-ordering is that we place all of the power in the hands of the studios and publishers and they know it all too well. Did you just find out that the game you’ve been looking forward to acquiring is only half-finished with masses of DLC planned to complete it? Well….tough, because you’ve already paid for it. Finally get the game and it’s a totally broken mess? Well that’s too bad because you bought it a week before release and there was a review embargo on it until today. This is commonplace now. It is how things are done. Publishers have literally built their sales models around pre-orders. All the while, pushing consumers to use their own special online stores to buy the super-deluxe-hardened-brutal edition which comes with a set of novelty cheeses shaped like the game’s protagonist. It’s a total fucking free-for-all out there and we’re just accepting it.
So how would simply ceasing to pre-order games help this in any way? In fact, wouldn’t it just force studios to rely even more on the kick in the balls that is; day one DLC? Well…maybe, but it would begin to serve a different purpose. If we simply stopped pre-ordering things then DLC bundles would no longer be something you yearn for on release day. They would return to being extra playing time, extending the life of a game which you have enjoyed enough to get bored of. Remember demos? Wouldn’t it be nice if studios went back to allowing you to try before you buy, instead of just expecting you to purchase something because it looks like it might be almost identical to something you already own? Imagine a World where studios generally finish a game and then send it out to reviewers whilst allowing gamers to play a demo of it. Then, two weeks later, the game is released.
Congratulations dear reader! You just imagined 2004.
So to summarize, please stop pre-ordering games. You’re literally throwing away all of your power as a consumer for the sake of an in-game hat that only you and 2 million other pre-order cyborgs purchased.