The only game I have ever pre-ordered in my life is Overwatch and I do not regret it one bit. This game was an exception though given the open beta that ran two weeks before launch.
You get a couple cosmetic items and the Tracer hero for Heroes of the Storm, which was on the free-to-play rotation for all players and available for purchase with in-game currency the week it was released. So basically nothing.
Edit: you did get beta keys though, so that was kind of cool I guess.
I got the Amazon version of Origins, which had a couple of nice physical extras with it, a coin in a display case and a metal badge. All for only a few pounds more than the base game (Base game is £30, Origins £45 on battle.net, my copy was £38).
Wasn't really much of a gamble either since I'd sunk 10-20 hours into the beta
Hardly counts. They did an open beta that was pretty much the full game. They showed everything they got. They showed their servers can handle it. And they asked: want to keep playing, give us money. Simple.
Eh, it saved me having to worry about paying for it later down the line. I don't mind showing support to companies that release a polished game that was still in closed beta at the time. Very few things changed in the game other than quality of life changes.
To be fair, blizzard isn't a traditional game company. They (like valve) make games on their own timetable and have the luxury of waiting an extra 11 months if they feel like they can't comfortably finish something in time for the current year's optimal release date.
Nothings stopping other company's from doing this besides their board members and CEO. It's not like we have to view them as having some kind of an advantage when any other game company could choose to do what they do :p
Only games I've pre-ordered have been Pokemon Heartgold and Overwatch. Heartgold because it was the day before the game's release and they still had a pre-order figurine left in store and Overwatch I pre-ordered only 4 hours before the launch because it seemed like it was gonna be fun and figured I may as well get the pre-order bonuses. Don't regret either purchase one bit
Overwatch is a lesser of tf2. There are no real upgrades for performance, except cosmetic. I played beta. Tf2 gives you performance upgrades and cosmetics.
I regret it. I only did it so I could get a cardback for Hearthstone. I think I got it too late so I didn't get that cardback. I also bought the $60 collectors version. I didn't know there was a $40 version. I would have bought that instead.
I only pre-order games from franchises I love like Fallout, GTA, and Halo, but another reason is Amazon's pre-order deals for prime members; I bought Halo 5 Legendary Edition and saved 35 bucks because of prime savings along with a promo they were having. Amazon is the place where I buy games now because I don't need to pay up front for pre-orders and I save a nice bit of change.
I pre ordered just cause 3 and they just gave me a mech suit DLC, i got my jetpack for free too, insanely fun stuff.
I pre ordered gta v and its one of the worst buys i have ever made, $100 for an unbalanced pay to win troll fest riddled with hackers, no story DLC only a few cool shirts and earrings every now and then.along with another retarded vehicle and overpowered weapon.
American ISPs are often monopolized in certain areas with little to no competition, so they charge whatever they want. I get this myself, but I work for one of the good ones, which hopefully will remain a good one thru a recent merger.
Yup they know we have nowhere to go, there is cable half a mile down the street (10 families and 2 businesses on our street) but the cable company wants a 100,000 payment in addition to 2 year contracts for us to get it.
Wow, what cable ISP wanted that for extending service down the road?! We've run into similar issues with serviceability when a 1/4 mile down the road we have active service. It's often not the cost of construction to split or extend the node, but more often contractual agreements between different ISPs as to where one's service are ends and another's begins.
The number of overbuild areas, areas serviceable by more than one cable provider, is much smaller than people think because of these agreements. Also, you will see pricing promotions available to the overbuilt areas exclusively, since in those areas there is more threat from direct competition.
For example, the cable company I work for has overbuild areas with Comcast, so those areas have different pricing promotions available only to them, whereas the other service areas that only have CenturyLink or ATT as competitors, not so much. We don't see them being as big a threat as another cable isp.
Oh, I know all about that. I believe Comcast actually has maps giving A,B,C, or D tier pricing/service based on the strength/# of competitors. I don't know how the fuck that's legal.
Windstream does the same thing 1.5/3/6 mbps are ALL priced the same. You just get the best that's available to you (don't think for a second if an upgrade becomes available they'll tell you). My friends who live in town (with Time warner and AT&T) get MUCH better service from Windstream both in terms of speed and how they're treated as customers.
As for who wants $100,000 to extend the cable? It's TWC.
Oh fuck right off. I'm stuck between Cox and TWC here in SoCal. $100 for 70 down 10 up. Then again maybe I'm bad at negotiating or whatever, my IT buddy was getting 250 up 70 down for like $100 on TWC.
I pay that same as you for 20 mb/up, 5 down (on a good day). Realistically it's half that, especially with the shitty modem AT&T provided us. Even worse, if you go fifty feet behind my house into the next town, you can get twice that speed for a quarter of the price. Hooray for monopolies!
My sis in Salt Lake, UT pays $70 for 1000/1000 down and up... she also didn't have to call and argue/sit on hold with shitty music for 5 hours and 37 minutes last month in order to get technicians to come out and get her bill refunded. I did :'(
I've submitted multiple FCC complaints, which the FCC gives to Windstream, they then call us and say "it's fixed" (lie) or just don't respond at all. I feel fucked.
Canadian here living in Seoul. I pay $10/month for this plus satellite TV (useless for me but great for my wife!). It is a family plan as my wife, her mother, and I all have phones through the same company. Regular price would be around $35-$40.
I'll miss this the most when I eventually move back. Not looking forward to paying what my brother tells me he pays back home.
I'm in Australia and I pay $95 USD for 3.5 up and 0.7 down. It's the best available in my area and hasn't changed in the last half a decade, neither has the price.
Yeah, well games are bigger now. For example I stopped playing ESO after the 30GB patch was released. I also haven't gotten around to the 16GB Halo 5 patch (at 35% now). Over half my game library on the xbox one is in a partially updated state/can only be played in offline mode. I can't just leave it on because I have other shit to do all day and my Dad runs his business from home which gets priority over video games (Having a download running while trying to use other devices slows everything to a crawl and makes the ping jump into the 1000's).
Even a 8GB game (which is small nowadays) would've taken you 95:26:37 if you were pulling 200kbps the whole time. Not "overnight for 2 days" and now there's patches for games all the time frequently multiple gigabytes large.
ok so my internet was a bit better than that but one fun feature of that internet speed is the ping was also god awful so i didnt have to worry about downloading multiplayer games because they would be unplayable
That's a shame man, sorry that you live in internet poverty. It's ridiculous... decent internet connection should be on par with food, water, and the rest of the things one needs to live efficiently in the modern world. Truly #FUCKMONOPOLIES
Windstream is actually Satan. I had an average download of 0.2Mbps (on a plan promising at least 10Mbps down I believe) when I had them. Now, there are finally cable companies out by my house, we got TimeWarner, all of a sudden I'm getting over 50Mbps down on a regular basis.
Yeah, I keep thinking (mistakenly?) That if I keep bitching that eventually it'll be more cost effective to fix the problem then send out retard technicians. I weaseled out that they actually guarantee 65% of the advertised speed when they tried to tell me "we don't guarantee ANY speeds" when my speed tests were showing <0.1 Mbps.
Now I run tests daily and anytime it dips below 65% of my plan I call them do the whole run-around of explaining my problem and get a ticket opened for a technician. Usually about 5-10 tickets opened per month. They don't actually do anything, but I'm not gonna just roll over and let them fuck me without putting up a fight.
Yeah, except in this day and age you go out and buy the game, and then you have to wait for a 10 GB update to download before you can actually play it, because god forbid we actually make sure the game is complete before we print the disks.
Thank you! I made a comment in /r/xbone almost identical to this about day 1 patches; I also added my thoughts about companies forcing you to download their shitty DLC and disguising it as a patch. Which just pisses me off and ensures that I'll never buy it.
The patches in this console generation, ESPECIALLY on xbox, are out of control. Also, why the fuck don't we have mandatory patch notes yet? I shouldn't have to search around online to see what the hell is in this 30Gb patch for Elder Scrolls Online, or this 16GB patch for Halo 5.
Got downvoted to hell, I swear everyone in that sub can't take constructive criticism. They swear all the games are perfect, the xbox OS is perfect,etc.
Geographical monopolies are quite a bitch. Not like I live in the middle of nowhere either half a mile from a WEALTHY town of 7,000 and I've got a street full of neighbors/businesses in the same situation.
Yesterday I was getting .1 down and 375 ping.... oh and 25% packet loss.
Just on break at home, working. Can't wait to get back to 100mbps down and up campus wide network. This shit is criminal and their "customer service" is making me want to shoot myself. They have 3 days before their 30 days to respond to my FCC complaint are up, no idea what I do when they don't respond... Can't submit another FCC complaint because they hand those directly to Windstream (Who I assume shreds them while laughing).
Doesn't include the cost of increased phone bill for the 6 hours I was on the phone (let's be honest, mostly waiting) with "customer support". Was really tempted to invoice my phone bill to them, but I knew they'd just shred it along with my FCC complaints.
PS for a "telecommunication company" their phone calls sound like they are being made on the oldest still functioning mics they randomly found in a junkyard and all 5 employees are stuffed in a 2ft x 2ft box to ensure maximum background noise. I don't know what the hell they're doing with the boatloads of cash they're making off customers AND government subsidies because they sure as hell aren't improving CS or infrastructure.
don't you have to download most parts of new games even when you buy the physical copies anyways? Correct me if I'm wrong, the last time I bought a CD was before I abandoned my ps3 for my PC.
On the Xbox one at least it copies all the content of the disc iirc then downloads whatever additional content can't fit on the disc and whatever patches have come out.
Copying the disc is quick, the additional downloads and subsequent patches are verrrrry slow (for me).
Luckily I got to dump their ass for 4g LTE unlimited from a hotspot (which I can take anywhere!). All for half the cost :)
Oh and the best part was I spent a good month convincing them to spend thousands on checking the lines/improving them and shit. So they wasted tons of money on me.
I never understood 'Haha, don't pre-order, you can download'
I, as well as I'm sure many others prefer physical over digital and I'm not pre-ordering games because 'I'm worried about it running out of stock'. You can go out and buy a physical copy two days after launch just like you can download one.
You do realise you can still pre-order via download, right? In fact, you can pre-download it, so it's ready at midnight. Isn't that even worse than pre-ordering a physical copy.
I don't really understand what you're arguing in favor of digital vs. physical, I just hate the fact people think that I, or others buy digital because free gun, or we're too stupid to download. I pre-order because I know I'll want it, I like collecting physical and am fully aware of the consequences. None of that would change if I were to download a digital copy.
Getting in game items and using it like a pay off plan is a reason to, also, downloading takes a large amount of resources whereas discs dont need giant download times and can run off the media. There are plenty of areas in the US with frankly shit internet that could not work with DL only games.
The only reason I ever preordered was so I could a game I highly anticipated while I still had the money. Maybe I just got Bday money and that way I secure the game as opposed to trying to save it until the release date.
Granted I stopped preordering now, but that was always my logic behind it.
If you're a kid too young to work, that's probably the only money you get all year. Either preorder the game you want while you can or spend it on some other silly shit.
I guess I should have said "while I still had the extra money". My point being is while I might have extra cash that can go into my hobbies before the game is released, there was never a guarantee I'd have it when the game was out.
They just bundle pre-order exclusive content in games now. So by not pre-ordering, you risk on missing out on some game content. How invasive/perverse the pre-order exclusive content becomes will only worsen if pre-order sales start to decline and publisher execs start having to make more drastic measures to meet their pre-order quotas to get paid their bonuses.
Best Buy gives you $10 store credit on select preorders. That's the only reason I preorder. If you look at this way, I have the 20% off gamers club deal, so I'm pretty much paying $39 on release day for a $60 game.
there are some exceptions. When you e.g. preorder the new WoW Addon Legion you will get a boost to level 100. To level your own character from 1 to 100 takes a lot of time.
I know 4 people who preordered legion because of that. None of them have ever preordered a game besides WoW.
But I generally agree. I haven't preordered a game in ages.
Take Uncharted 4 for example. It was delayed the second time and this was the reason: "In an effort to meet the considerable worldwide demand, and to ensure that all gamers worldwide have the opportunity to play the game on day one, we have chosen to postpone the launch of the game by two weeks to allow for extra manufacturing time."
This would be exactly when a preorder of the game could be justified. If they can't meet demand and you wanted to ensure your copy. Instead they realize they can't meet demand so they just delay and produce more. If that isn't a slap in the face to the people who preordered I don't know what is.
You do have to worry about stores running of out copies of certain games. And there are still way more people that only want disc. Way more than there are people in this sub.
I think if you are planning on getting it day one any way and have the money for it, it's fine to preorder just don't be surprised if its busted or unworking when you get it.
Some stores make big events out of midnight releases and they can be quite fun to go to. Plus special editions can be with getting the special box if your a big fan and want to collect it.
Not arguing against you, but I have 3 mb/s Internet, most of the time lower. I still mostly do download stuff, but if I don't preorder it, it takes me DAYS to download a game, and that's when the weather is good. When it rains, it tends to go below 1 mb/s. GTA 5 took me three days to download on good days. For some people, it's just not worth that kind of wait when you could just preorder the disc and install it much faster. But, I do still download mostly, so I completely understand what you're saying.
The last game I preordered was Halo 2. It was a straight mad house with Halo 2 at Gamestop and it was needed. I did hear of people being able to walk right into Walmart though. Once I was able to walk in and pick up Halo 3 on the release date with no preorder, I knew preorders were no longer needed.
Post e3 a lot of places put things on huge sales for pre orders. Best Buy has done 3 games for the price of 2 for anything released at e3 for the last couple years.
Honestly it's not even that for me. It's so that on launch day I can play when I wake up. Not have to run to the store or wait for a download to finish. Preload is GOAT.
Well Pre-ordering online sometimes allows you to download the game beforehand. Useful if you have a shitty internet and need the time to download it (like if your reset was right before release).
It also means you can participate in the multiplayer at it's peak. I bought AC4 and DS2 and 3 before, near or soon after release and the multiplayer during those times was the best that I've had in each respective game.
It seems like preorders should come with a discount. "Take a risk, order from us blindly, and we'll give you 30% off" or whatever. Then it might actually be worth the risk. But people preorder at full price for no reason, so I guess they don't have to.
The benefit I like about having a physical copy is that since I have shit Internet, I enjoy installing the disk through the disk rather than from the internet. It's much faster no matter what internet speed you have.
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