Hold To Reset
Building a new game, a new studio and a new life from the ground up
Alex Hutchinson on the slow death of preorders. (Do preorder)
Preorders are live! You can now put in an order for Journey To The Savage Planet and guarantee yourself a copy on day one! Of course, if you don’t want a physical copy you could guarantee yourself a copy on day one by just buying it on that day, but let’s not dwell on that. In our defence, we will give you a digital bobble head that is pretty funny. But still, this step in the road from concept to retailer to living room is feeling more and more like a vestigial limb on a creature that has long ago evolved beyond needing it.
In years gone by, preordering made sense: it guaranteed you a copy without any hassle, and you didn’t have to worry about your local game store running out or a conservative print run denying you a copy. Better still, you’d sometimes get a bonus for showing your loyalty. Then at some point the wheels came off. Preorder bonuses began to be split between retailers as each one demanded something unique, and then digital preorders made a mockery of the concept of a shortage.
The splitting of offers irritates me the most. While working on Assassin’s Creed III I remember seeing how the various offers broke down across all territories and platforms, and realising the average person would need a spreadsheet to compare them. Worse, it basically meant that there was no way for even our most excited potential customer to buy a version of the game which included all the content, unless they wanted to buy multiple copies, which is obscene. Something needed to change.
And yet, preorders are live! We seem incapable of escaping them so long as physical retailers exist in some form, and we have no better way for publishers to plan their marketing spend – those preorder numbers are still the best predictor of sales prior to release. People fumble desperately for ‘impressions’ or ‘pageviews’ to try to get a handle on what will happen, but so far none of that has any direct connection to reality. High preorders, however, generally mean high sales. Shockingly, people watching something is no evidence of purchase intent, whereas giving you their credit card details is tangible.
I think this may be the last game I ship with a physical edition – something that makes my inner hoarder cringe, but at this point seems inevitable and may even be part of a larger shift. The goal of preorder offers, retailer deals, and everything surrounding it is to get as get people to commit as early as possible: preorders get your publisher to put more marketing dollars in, which can become a virtuous loop that drives more people to buy your game. Without it, we have no current metric to achieve the same goal.
Some people point to streamers, but we have no evidence that they do anything at all outside of some anecdotal evidence. Do they appear when your game is as popular as
Overwatch, or did they help make it happen? Nobody can prove anything either way, although considering Blizzard had built hits long before streamers existed, you can guess my opinion. I’m sure at some point a few will become capable of moving the needle, but I think they are more akin to TV hosts than advertisements, meaning people are fans of
them, not necessarily the content they play.
None of which may matter at all if the future arrives the way other companies within this very issue imagine. In a world of individual sales, preorders matter, but in a streaming or a subscription world, individual games matter less than making sure you have a hit in every genre, and that you’re adding more games at a steady clip. Your job as a developer is to bring more people to the service, not just to your game, and to exist as part of an ecosystem of games and services.
Gears 5 had, apparently, three million players on its first weekend, which makes it a hit in anyone’s book. But how many were bought and how many were played through Game Pass? For the team who made the game it doesn’t matter as The Coalition is a wholly owned studio, but for an independent developer there is a significant difference. A full-price sale is magnificent, while the kickback, either upfront or on the backend, for being played as part of a streaming service is far less appetising.
Thankfully these are problems for the next game, so we at Typhoon have a good, ooh, three months before we need to worry about it. For now, Savage Planet exists as a living dinosaur, hanging its shingle outside the Typhoon offices so we can make enough cash to make another one. Which means that, with a straight face, I am obliged to inform you once again that preorders are live.
In a streaming or subscription world, individual games matter less than having a hit in every genre