Turtle Rock Studios wants $60. This shouldn’t be surprising: $60 is the going rate for a modern AAA game, and Turtle Rock is making one, namely, Evolve, its upcoming 4 v 1 asymmetrical shooter. Their only problem is that they don’t want to have to wait until they’ve actually
made a game to get your $60, which just sounds like a pain. So they’ve cooked up a little pre-purchase bonus, wherein you can skip all of the normal progression mechanics in the game and unlock some top characters right off the bat. It comes with the tacit implication that everyone who
doesn’t pre-purchase the game is playing a more boring or, at least, less fun version of the game, but if we need to cripple
games to incentivize pre-ordering, then so be it. It’s like F2P, minus the F.
Not that any of this is remotely new. Turtle Rock does has some interesting verbiage: “pre-purchase” instead of “pre-order,” meaning you can’t plunk down a deposit at a Gamestop for this one — it’s the full $60. but it’s very much of a kind with the pre-order bonuses that we’ve seen for years now. This has come up at Forbes before, but it bears repeating. Pre-ordering games is a terrible idea, and you should never, ever do it. The very fact that we’re seeing things like this “pre-purchase” scheme should hammer the point home: publishers are needing to get more creative in order to get gamers to act against their own self interest.
Evolve, from everything I’ve seen so far, looks like a pretty cool game. It’s got a fun style, an interesting take on party mechanics, and all in all it plays like a fun update to what can sometimes feel like a pretty tired field of first person shooters. The intense multiplayer focus might run into the same problems as the largely forgotten Titanfall, but we’ll see. That’s just what I’ve seen so far: best thing to do, like always, is to wait until it comes out and see what it looks like. It might, for example, be completely and utterly broken, as was the case with nearly every online-first game that came out this fall. It doesn’t really matter that you’ve got access to bonus characters when none of them work anyway.
Last fall, we saw the logical outcome of the pre-order industry: a raft of broken games that were profitable before the first copy left a store shelf. When even disasters like Battlefield 4, SimCity and Diablo 3 can sell well, there’s little incentive to actually make gams that work. For publishers, it looks good in the short term, because they’re insulated from their own lapses in quality, but its going to hurt everyone in the long term if we keep going like this. No industry can survive on hype alone: even Hollywood has to make sure that its movies actually play before it makes money. If pre-ordering games is bad, pre-purchasing them is worse. Can’t stress it enough: just don’t do it.
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