Image alt text: An image of Steam's top 10 best-selling games at the time of posting, three of which are marked as "prepurchase"
I checked the Steam stats and noticed that in the top 10 best selling games by revenue, there's three games that aren't even out yet. If we ignore the Steam Deck and f2p games, it's three out of four games. They have also been in the top 100 for 4, 6, and 8 weeks respectively, so people just keep on buying them. I would love to know why people keep doing this, as the idea of pre-ordering is that there is a physical copy of a game available for you on release, but this is not a concern with digital items. So after so many games lately being utterly broken on release, why do people not wait until launch reviews to buy the game? If you touch a hot stove and get burned multiple times, when does one learn?
No, but I have purchased Early Access games on Steam.
What incentivizes you to pay money for early access games? Wouldn’t you rather wait until it’s done and have a better experience?
Some of them are in a fine state as-is.
I guess maybe for an adventure game or something, you want to have one playthrough and to get as complete of an experience as possible.
But for most stuff I play, like roguelikes/roguelites, that's not really an issue. For example, Nova Drift, an action roguelite, is out of Early Access now, but I played it for a long time in EA, and it was a perfectly reasonable game in that state. Same thing for Caves of Qud.
I do think that buying Early Access is only really a good idea if you're going to be okay with the developer terminating development tomorrow and still feel that you're better off having purchased the game -- incomplete or no -- than not.
Honestly, I’ve got lots of hours in Early Access games. That said, they were like $20 when I bought them in EA and as content gets added and they get closer to launch, the price goes up.
I don’t think that’s the same as pre-orders though.
The only digital game I’ve ever preordered was City Skylines 2. I was on vacation the day it came out and didn’t want to miss out on playtime and waste my PTO. Definitely worth it, and I enjoyed it and the lead up to release. (I’m on the fenced whether I enjoy it more than the first, but that’s mostly because I’ve got so many add ons for the first that the second seems like it’s missing things. But it worked well for me and I got hours and hours of playing in that day.