If you haven’t heard about this one yet, please advise us as to which rock to send information to.
Destiny was a hype train that just wasn’t going to stop. A thing that everybody knew about, a new property from the creators of Halo? Sign us up, right? It set up expectations of an ever evolving world and seamless blending of shooters, loot, RPG elements, and MMOs, and it was going to be the game to end all games.
Ooooohhhhh….That’s gotta hurt.
Let’s not get the wrong idea. I’m not saying an average of 77/100 makes Destiny a bad game. At least from an objective standpoint. But suffice to say that it’s hardly the second coming. And with news coming out that Bungie had $2.5 million dollars on the line if this thing got received at a minimum 90 average, It’s hurting them just as much as the burned gamers who ended up disappointed with the final product.
Many are enjoying Bungie’s latest work too, so this isn’t really what todays ramblings are about. Destiny, regardless of quality is a reminder of the dangers that come with preordering a product. Destiny was never in danger of selling out. You could walk into a store and purchase the game right now, and even if you couldn’t then you could still download it.
The point was to offer little bonuses, and get as many people riding the hype train as possible, and thus to grab as much of money as possible before the word got out that it wasn’t ready for primetime.
Preorder bonuses have gotten more and more desperate in recent years, such as Alien Isolation cutting the cast of Alien out so it could be sold at a later time. These little slices of content are being divvied up and publishers are trying to use this to instil fear that by not preordering, and locking yourself into a purchase before the actual quality of the game becomes apparent. Content can even be split between retailers, making it impossible to actually get all the content. None of it is to the benefit of the gamer.
There are reasons to preorder. Niche titles like Persona that one might be unable to find otherwise are one of the very few exceptions. We should sit back and weigh whether or not we’ll be able to carry on without a shiny spear for the new Assassin’s Creed game.
Sometime, a degree of skepticism can be healthy. So why don’t we all take a step back and ask ourselves “What’s in it for us?”.
After all, to grossly paraphrase the 90’s, you wouldn’t prepay for a car you knew nothing about, would you?
frozenthumbsticks.wordpress.com 