Wanna know which game I last broke my "no pre-orders" rule for?

No Man's Sky. The game that was a tech demo for the first year or so after release. It's become a hell of a game since then, but it taught me a valuable lesson and I haven't bought a game since then.

It's kinda the natural progression of late stage hypercapitalism though. Used to be that you spent all your money up front, then your sales recouped your investment and hopefully generated you a profit. Once game companies figured out OTA patches they realized that they can push a lot of QA back until after release and use pre-orders and day 1 sales to fund it. Then with DLC they realized that they can sell the untested skeleton of a game up front and use presales and early sales to fund development. The natural progression seems to be the Star Citizen model, where you get huge chunks of your sales up front and use that to determine what you'll develop and when (if ever) you'll release it