I pledge to not buy Civ 6 until it is released

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Pre-order factors for me:

1) If I am physically able, I will play this game immediately on release. It's part of the fun for me.
2) If the game sucks, at least for my copy, I'll be out what would cost me a dinner for two. I ain't gonna sweat that, period.
3) I'd probably only regret it if I found out immediately after release that it flat out wouldn't run or crashed every couple of minutes....I consider that highly unlikely.

That's exactly why pre-ordering is useless : you could do the exact same thing without preordering.
And that's true for almost any listed pre-order "factors" I've found here.

There are only three possible legitimate reasons to pre-order a non-indie game :

1 - if it costs less than after release (but it's still risky). I can understand that.

2 - if it provides additional content that you can't get immediately after release (I won't debate why it's a bad market practice now).
In that case, experience tells me that pre-ordering is not worth the risk. If I want to play the game at release, I can as well buy it at release. If I really don't like it, I can now ask for a refund from Steam, while it's not alwas 100% guaranteed for a pre-order. If I bought a complete edition but I don't like the game... money wasted. :goodjob:

3 - if you can play earlier. I think it's the best reason to pre-order.



Pre-ordering the game just because you're a fan and want to show that is vain. Game companies have to know they need to offer something in exchange of our trust. Please, don't pre-order if none of these 3 reasons motivate you.
And in the case of Civ6, none of them seems valid, since there is no discount, no pre-release for pre-orderers, and it seems too risky to buy their -very costly - deluxe edition.
 
Alright. I'll buy this (with some caveats, maybe). Pre-ordering as a whole increases sales of bad games by some amount, which means that the publisher's cost of choosing to make a worse game is reduced. The caveat being that we have no idea how much it increases sales, so we don't know how much it factors into decisions. It is possible based on this logic alone, that it has no effect on publishing decision-making. Maybe without presale, 50% of sales would be lost but with presale, 49% of sales would be lost - there'd still be enough incentive to make the game good... Or maybe not. Maybe that 1% convinces the publisher to cut back on the budget by some amount.
Yes, the impact may be very minimal, or it may be big. Frankly, I think we cannot know and I wouldn't know of any method we could use to make an informed guess. What i do know however is that pre-ordering digital goods has no actual positive sides aside from the ones that are created specifically for the purpose of being pseudo-positive sides of pre-ordering, as its original purpose - being guaranteed to get a physical copy - does no longer exist in a virtual space where there is no thing as a limited amount of copies that you can sell (unless of course you artificially create that, too).

So the way I see it the fact that pre-ordering exists is always going to be a net-negative.

For me personally, though, if I decide to pre-order Civ VI, there is a very high chance I would buy the game afterward anyway. I'll buy it even if it is a "bad" game since my past experience is that even bad Civ games have been worth owning for me. And even if the pre-order "commitment" is stronger than I anticipate, it'll still be insignificant when compared to the emotional commitment I have to the game from other sources. Really, CFC (i.e., the Civ player community) is a much stronger influence on my decisions than the game cost. I'm excited about the game since I've been talking about it so much already (and I'll get even more pleasure talking about the game post launch even if it is bad).
Yes, I understand that argument. I would probably fall into the "It doesn't matter if I pre-order Civ, I would buy it anyway, even if it turns out to be a bad game - so there's no reason to miss out on the pre-order bonus."-camp myself, but at the same time I see that in "the bigger picture" it's part of the behavior that ultimately leads to worse games, although of course my personal influence is very small.

If I were 100% determined to be a consumer who wants to do whatever little I can to make "gaming as great as it can be" I would skip that behavior. And although on a personal level I don't allow follow through with that behavior, well, as I said... I can still see the bigger picture.

So isn't CFC, and all other gaming fan communities, the bigger enemy? They have an even stronger emotional commitment than pre-orders do a financial commitment, which means CFC reduces the cost (in lost sales) of producing a poor Civ game even more? So, should we all pledge to not post on here for the good of the gaming world?
I think that argument could be made, yes. Although it would at the same time be counter-productive because in the end not having such communities of people who want to be part of the community and share their experience and opinions would ultimately leave us with less information, and therefor vulnerable to deceptive marketing.

And of course there's more important things than "having the best games we can" - I personally would prefer a "good" game with a great community over "the ideal game" that has no other players other than me. Simply because it's fun to talk about games - and I'm not even a very socially active person.

So I think overall it's a very positive thing, with some minor downsides like helping build hype and creating more incentives to buy products that may be subpar.
 
Ash88: real quick because I gotta get back to work. But I want to clarify that I was only talking about "intelligent people" because you brought up intelligence. I'm not calling anyone intelligent or unintelligent. I'm just saying everyone can exhibit both qualities.

Second, I said that your claim is based on intuition because you said it was "self-evident", meaning obvious, meaning you didn't have to think very hard to come to it. That does not mean your claim is wrong or that you're wrong to use your intuition, but since it's not self-evident to me, the fact that it is self-evident to you doesn't mean much to me. In other words, what's obvious to you isn't obvious to me because we have different past knowledge. So, yes, you need to explain things that are obvious to you to get your point across.

So, yeah, no personal attack meant. Just understand that I and a lot of other Civ players aren't really part of gamer culture as a whole. This is one of the few videogames I play, and I never heard of this issue prior to reading about Civ VI.
 
dunno

but they did kinda screw up last time, with one of the ciV expansions being sold at discount right after the release, so I might just wait
 
If you want it to be the best game possible, you want to make sure they don't run out of money before launch and are forced to launch it early. Preorders help them polish the game rather than hurt it because it allows them to maintain a full staff all the way until the end.

Civ5 was hurt by massive layoffs during the Q&A phase.
 
That's exactly why pre-ordering is useless : you could do the exact same thing without preordering.
And that's true for almost any listed pre-order "factors" I've found here.

There are only three possible legitimate reasons to pre-order a non-indie game :

1 - if it costs less than after release (but it's still risky). I can understand that.

2 - if it provides additional content that you can't get immediately after release (I won't debate why it's a bad market practice now).
In that case, experience tells me that pre-ordering is not worth the risk. If I want to play the game at release, I can as well buy it at release. If I really don't like it, I can now ask for a refund from Steam, while it's not alwas 100% guaranteed for a pre-order. If I bought a complete edition but I don't like the game... money wasted. :goodjob:

3 - if you can play earlier. I think it's the best reason to pre-order.



Pre-ordering the game just because you're a fan and want to show that is vain. Game companies have to know they need to offer something in exchange of our trust. Please, don't pre-order if none of these 3 reasons motivate you.
And in the case of Civ6, none of them seems valid, since there is no discount, no pre-release for pre-orderers, and it seems too risky to buy their -very costly - deluxe edition.


Yea, I never make little useless moral stands, unless it's something a heckuva lot bigger than a game of all things. My reasons fall into your acceptable range in the sense that I get the discount on future DLC which I would absolutely buy anyway. I feel there is no risk here, or at least by the time I pre-order I will have more than enough information.
 
That's exactly why pre-ordering is useless : you could do the exact same thing without preordering.
And that's true for almost any listed pre-order "factors" I've found here.

There are only three possible legitimate reasons to pre-order a non-indie game :

1 - if it costs less than after release (but it's still risky). I can understand that.

2 - if it provides additional content that you can't get immediately after release (I won't debate why it's a bad market practice now).
In that case, experience tells me that pre-ordering is not worth the risk. If I want to play the game at release, I can as well buy it at release. If I really don't like it, I can now ask for a refund from Steam, while it's not alwas 100% guaranteed for a pre-order. If I bought a complete edition but I don't like the game... money wasted. :goodjob:

3 - if you can play earlier. I think it's the best reason to pre-order.



Pre-ordering the game just because you're a fan and want to show that is vain. Game companies have to know they need to offer something in exchange of our trust. Please, don't pre-order if none of these 3 reasons motivate you.
And in the case of Civ6, none of them seems valid, since there is no discount, no pre-release for pre-orderers, and it seems too risky to buy their -very costly - deluxe edition.

There's one more reason (my case). If your income is not fixed (I, for example, am a recently graduated freelancer), you might have money now that you're not sure you'll have on release. I bought because I had the money then, and I'm not great at saving, so it was the best way to absolutely guarantee I'll have it on release.
 
If you want it to be the best game possible, you want to make sure they don't run out of money before launch and are forced to launch it early. Preorders help them polish the game rather than hurt it because it allows them to maintain a full staff all the way until the end.

Civ5 was hurt by massive layoffs during the Q&A phase.

It's common policy to lay off workers in the months before a game is launched. Most companies do not keep a dedicated staff. I don't think that has anything to do with the amount of pre-orders that are coming in.

I certainly don't agree with the practice but that's how it's done with Firaxis/Greedy 2K games.
 
To be honest, I do not quite get the concept of pre-ordering. Why would anyone pre-order something he/she knows almost nothing about? There are literally no benefits to pre-order.

Pre-ordering = buying a pig in a poke.
 
It also depends where you buy (which store, which country etc.)
 
I will not pre-order as well, because i don't see the point of giving them money before i can experience the game. I'm also a cheapskate, so i try to get as much info on the product as i can. I mean, it's a Civ Game, the first view videos are pushing me to the "YES BUY IT" decision, but because i'm a cheapskate, the question is "Do i buy it at full price or wait for a sale?".

I kinda feel bad waiting for sales, because good developers deserve people buying their games at full price. But me, personally, can't justify spending 60 euros on a videogame, not when i don't have a fixed income :(

If Firaxis releases a demo of Civ 6, i'll try it and i'll probably like it, which in turn leads to buying it on release, even if 50/60 euros for a game it's a bit expensive. If they don't provide a demo, i guess i'll wait for Let's plays and then decide whether to buy it at full price, or wait for a sale.

At least this sounds reasonable to me and respectful for the developers.
 
I loved civ4 and enjoyed civ5 and i'm pretty sure I'm going to like civ6 more than civ5 based on what we've seen. I'm preordering this, locking in my DLCs for months(?) to come, and trusting Ed to make a product worth buying
 
I don't like preordering because it rewards companies leaving their products unfinished. So many games recently are crap on launch, and part of the reason for that is that devs know they can fix things after launch and get away with it, because as consumers we're too willing to give away our money.

That said, I do like the sound of the Aztecs...
 
I'd pre-order... if the game was avaliable here :p Seriously, though, for some reason, Civ6 is still not avaliable in Commonwealth of Independent States ragion, as well as, afaik, Russia, Turkey and South Africa. Come on Firaxis, give us the ability to pre-order already. I'm starting to worry we won't get the pre-order at all :undecide:
 
Does preorder + DLCs cost more or less than game + DLCs after release?

Deluxe costs less then the game plus DLCs, at standard pricing. Other than that, currently the preorder is the same price as the post release.
 
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