Gamestop may pay devs for exclusive pre-order bonuses

[BumblebeeCody*]

You really think the gaming community is stupid enough to let something like that Mario crap scenario you made up pass? Don't insult people, the gaming community is just not that dumb. If they were, EA would be everyone's favorite company, instead of the exact opposite, literally years in a row.

Gonna have to use Psychos example but yes people will. Of course people will...and people have. The list that Psycho listed is only a small amount of the overall problem.
To put this into perspective, I was one of those who was burnt hard by SFxT due to the DLC fest.

(Copied from another forum I was on and slightly edited):
The game has:
1) 38 characters. 17 of which were locked. (Bringing the roster to a grand total of 55).
To unlock the characters you HAD to pay an additional £20 to unlock the entire pack (Both Tekken and SF side)
5 of these charatcers: Cole, Turo, Kuro, Megaman and Pacman are PS3 exclusive and WILL NEVER be on the Xbox/PC (despite being playable on modded consoles).

2)Each character comes with their default costumes and 2 additional costumes. Default costumes are for everyone but the 2 alternate costumes are locked. This brings you to another £20(ish). As each character has 2, this means there is a total of 100 locked costumes.

3)The game also has somewhere around 300 single gems for you to equip. 245 single gems (attack, defense, speed, stamina etc) with 60 assist gems. However 150 of these gems are disc locked and you MUST pay to use them. Meaning you only have 150 available to you. Another £20

4) The game only gives you 4 colours. Everyone has one colour, an alternate and black/white. Boring I know
But the total amount of colours that are DLC is an pathetic 2600(ish). I'm off by a few but that's each character and their individual colour slots. The colour packs themselves around another £20 which means so far you've spent an additional £60 on content you already own.
But there's still more

5) They locked combos. The game allows you to to perform auto-combos. I hate them but noobs use them. Each character has around 5 so we're talking 250 locked auto-combos which I think is around £10. If think if the conversion works out right, those in America pay an additional $180 for content that was in your initial purchase for the $60.

Now if I bring this all back, all of that content was already fully complete and playable in your initial $60 purchase BUT Capcom won't let you have because they say this monetisation scheme as their way to deal with the game. My friend pirated the game on Xbox and has access to all the additional content. It's ready to go.

Also, about the pre-orders, give me a break. So many people pre-order that if they didn't do that, they wouldn't make enough money off of a game.

Then we start talking about why companies spend so much money on games in the first place. No-one says that game shave to have a silly amount of money pumped into them do they? That's a huge problem that I think is missed, since people don't realise that it's not the consumers fault that games are expensive. When Ubisoft wants to, they can be smart and make a game like Child of Light which will sell well due to the right level of marketing and budgeting. But then you get the other side of Ubisoft that produces games like Watch_Dogs with that insane DLC graph just to show you what you don't have access to combined with an over-inflated budget for a game that is completely new and a marketing campaign that was absurdly over produced.

Whether the industry realizes a large portion of it's consumer base can't afford to buy a game at full price or not, there is no denying that pre-orders increase sales and they are all about how many figures they can throw out there as soon as possible. Don't forget you are talking about gamestop, not a game dev, not even really the industry much itself, but a company who sells games that wants to give extra incentive to people to pre-order from them. This may have absolutely nothing to do with the industry at all, just the distributors of their products.

Need a source for "pre-orders increase sales" but I'll give you benefit of the doubt. Say pre-orders do increase sales. Why is that? It's because people/consumers/the fans/the audience (myself included) are worried that if we don't pre-order the game, then our money or worth less.
1) £40 buying on launch gets you the basic game
2) £40 under a pre-order gets you the basic game and the additional content.
As you can see option 1 has less value despite spending the same money as option 2.
Again, if pre-orders are an increase to sales, it's not for the benfit of us, it's because we value what our money is worth. That's not a good thing.

I could also talk about why GameStop/GAME are within the industry but it should be obvious by now how much of a presence they have.
In a nutshell:
First: We buy games from retailers > retailers get money from the sale > publishers get money back.
But: If retailers aren't around > retailers don't have consumers > (therefore) publishers get no money.
So then: To keep retailers happy > publishers tell developers to cut parts of the game > retailers repackage this as pre-order bonuses > we give in because we want value for our money.
Pre-orders show publisher stock holders that a large number of people want their game which also benefits the retailers as they are able to sell more copies.

Also ignore OmegaAlphaSin. Dudes a tabloid douche. Funnily enough, while I was typing this response Jim Sterling just put up this video on the matter that might give you a more articulate insight in this subject.
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/v...er-Culture

Even Nintendo are now getting on on this. C'mon, Zelda skins that we all want held ransom behind pre-order bonuses.


At the end of the day, if you honestly believe in pre-order then fine. Much respect to you for sticking your guns and by no means is this an attack. The only thing I ask is, what do you benefit as the consumer from all of this? As someone on my level in the chain of consumerism your money should go to the best product available. Not that you deserve to have content cut from you because you didn't give in first.

Edit: Just a response to your latest reply. This isn't about developers. It's about publishers.
I also forgot to mention. I thought this was quite funny

This DLC was announced in may of 2014...for a game that is being released in November. I heard about the DLC BEFORE the game was even announced. DLC before the game has well even been finished.