CoH2 - Ardennes Assault: Fox Company Rangers

I'm cool with pre-ordering, I do it now and then.

But when you pay 'x' up front then the price drops in the week it's released then the company is just trolling you.

I do not agree with that. If you "pre order" a car fx are you okay with it if it sucks? Companys offer the pre order to be sure to sell something, for that reason they offer you some exclusive extras. it has been like that for ages. I dont think the majority of the gamers of CoH2 are totally invested in helping the company. Pre order has always been for the exclusive content, and i could have accepted it if they had released it some months later, but not on the same day, for practically the same price!

I don't know how old you are, but this isn't the whole story. It actually became most popular in the 90's if I'm not mistaken, when an awesome game would release and could not be found. I remember multiple times where I would call all the stores I could possibly think of to try and find the newest release I wanted and all of them telling me sold out. Back then, bigger stores that happened to sell games had NO way of giving you any kind of way to guarantee getting what you wanted. No preorder, no waitlist, no ship it when it comes in or holding, just nothing. Here in America Babbages and EB, which only sold games, did do pre-orders. So any game that you really really wanted the day it came out, had to be purchased at these places by putting money down on a reservation/pre-order. Not doing this tended to be a great risk.

The little extras that started coming with the games likely originated from Japan, where they would include a lot of cool little trinkets with game sales. As the game industry got bigger, some of the Japanese trinkets followed Japanese games sales in other countries. Here in America, there were trinkets from American games, but they were usually distributed another way (like posters where distributed in magazines).



Fast forward all the way to how we are gaming on steam. Pre-ordering is a completely stupid idea, from the initial reason. There is an infinite number of possible copies (likely not really infinite, but the number is way higher than the total amount of intelligent beings in existence on Earth), so it's impossible for the game to sell out and not be available to purchase. The ONLY way that a company selling a digital game can hope to entice anyone to put down the money first, is with trinkets, now in an electronic format. That is what Fox Company represented. The problem with Relic's implementation is that the trinket is too damn good to seal away and not try to monetize to those who didn't pre-order. TBH, the only thing that is anything close to good, is the "pre-loading" of some preordering, where you have all the product assets already on your machine and simply have to wait for an authorization to play.



TLDR: Preorders initially came about from games selling out, extras came later.

I do not agree with that. If you "pre order" a car fx are you okay with it if it sucks?

Yes, because you are paying them something regardless and in many cases entirely unaware of the substance of what you're getting.

Companys offer the pre order to be sure to sell something, for that reason they offer you some exclusive extras. it has been like that for ages. I dont think the majority of the gamers of CoH2 are totally invested in helping the company. Pre order has always been for the exclusive content, and i could have accepted it if they had released it some months later, but not on the same day, for practically the same price!

I think of it this way: exclusive content means you get it at a discount of sorts or you simply can access it early on or as a combo item.

In this case, the obvious strategy was to get sales immediately, BEFORE the product is released, to ensure people don't give second thoughts- humans tend to stick to their decisions when they pay down money for hat they believe it, from a money making perspective, pre-ordering is awesome because you're selling what people don;t even really know much about, either the product itself, what happens after, or both. What, they care about their fans enough to think about them? lol thanks for enabling their behaviour with your money.