Being retired from the software industry, I will agree with you for the most part, and in most cases. With the exception of the pre-order "con". You are correct with bad code coming out because of crazy deadlines, and rush to get things to market in a certain time-line. That is everything. Especially software. I managed a ROM development lab for a major computer manufacture, as well as a system engineer (3rd level support) for IT in a major business solution software company. So, yep, we worked with crazy deadlines and sometimes were forced by marketing to put out broken code with the quote "just get it out, we will fix it later...". That is very mainstream.
Anyway.. that is NOT the reason for pre-order perks. Pre-order perks is simply to entice people to get the orders committed before the product is released. A software company would love nothing more than to sell all their product out, before the release date. That way, they will know up front if the release will be successful and makes the forecasters jobs much easier. If they can know how the product sells before it is released, then when it does release, they can quickly move on to other projects and simply not worry about how a product will do on the market. They will already have much of their numbers, so the pressure is off... Any sales that comes after is simply gravy.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lexandro
I personally think that the whole pre-order buisness is a huge con, that people keep falling for time and again. You are 90% gauranteed to get a game that doesnt work right out of the box, and people then turn around and complain about the game.
So in order for people to get suckered in to this "con" they throw them the bone of "extra" content, that in many cases is simply just a reskin of something already in the game and completely pointless.
Now if games actually game working as intended right out of the box then the pre-ordering buisness would be a sound one. But they never do, no software does. Every code has bugs that need fixing, and they slip through due to the tight deadlines, lack off funding, low level QA, and so on.
In IL2's case, it pretty much does work out of the box with no crashes and no major gamebreaking bugs. There are a few issues, but its really just tweaking rather than huge bug squashing that most titles seem to need these days. So it would have been a sound move in this game case to pre-order.
This is just my view though.
|