... lol
I have put some thoughts into them, hell even linked some videos that further illustrated them, you view those?
My mmo history started with EQ in 99. Played most of them since, some early access, some not. My statements on pre-orders were on a broad level, not just mmos. Mmos have some merit in terms of early access, but I have also seen early access being eaten away with bad stability (FF 14 for instance I think extended their initial early access due to the bad server stability at launch).
I also remember back when every company was like Blizzard in terms of "It will be ready when it is ready". In the 90s, games went from "coming soon" to released within weeks. It wasn't until console sales exploded (around the Playstation / Xbox era) where we started seeing launch dates mentioned long before the actual release. This happened because as big business took a hold over it, you no longer had small developer studios making games, but huge publishers putting in work orders for them, with shareholders demanding timelines on when they can reap the rewards for their investments.
Small trinkets being added to give gamers the belief that there is value in purchasing a game before they know what it will be like. Games like Kane and Lynch and the Alien example (also in the TB video) would not ever hit release without pre-orders, because once released, people would not buy games like that. However, pushing marketing campaigns, embargoing reviews and information until the end of release, they try to get as many people to buy their games through pre-orders as possible. The mmo equivalent to review embargos is a long lasting NDA.
The people who gain on pre-orders are the shareholders, publishers and developers. Not the gamers, and in the long run it isn't good for us at all as it allows studios to ship worse content, as sales often can be tied to the namebrand and marketing alone, not the actual merit of the product.
Pre-orders now give value before the games even are released, acting like the derivatives of gaming. Derivatives broke the world economy, they are doing no favors for gaming either.
