Don't pre-order games

The videogame industry wants you to buy games before they're released because it makes it easier for them to project their future earnings, and because they want your money before you find out whether a game is good or not. 

Don't do it. They won't run out of copies, I promise.

Pre-orders for Grand Theft Auto 6 go live today. It's one of the most anticipated entertainment properties ever, in any medium, and I can understand wanting to give in to that excitement, and to participate in some way with what feels like a cultural moment of real significance.

You don't have to do that by giving them $80 today for a videogame you can't play until November 19th.

Book some days off work. Replay the previous games in the series. Watch some video essays about them. Create a zine about Franklin's dog. All of these are methods of participating in the moment that don't cost you $80 for a videogame you can't play yet.

To be clear, my anti-pre-order stance is not related to Grand Theft Auto 6 specifically.

I've seen the pattern play out with more games than I can count. A new project is announced and people get excited and so they pre-order it. The game is delayed a few times, leaving people out of pocket without a game for longer. Then the game comes out and it sucks or it's broken, but it's too late, they've already got your money. People in comments across the internet swear: I will never pre-order a game ever again.

Then the pattern repeats.

Perhaps the launch of pre-orders today means that Grand Theft Auto 6 won't be delayed again. Perhaps Rockstar have a good enough track record (except for when it comes to remasters) that you're confident GTA 6 won't suck. I hope you're right.

Still, I can't think of a reason to buy it now when you could play it later, after it has been reviewed, and when it's playable.

Digital storefronts are not going to run out of copies. Stores selling physical copies are unlikely to run out either, given the expected popularity of GTA and this week's announcement that there's no disc in the box anyway, just a download code. 

It's not like pre-ordering even offers a discount on price. You are, at best, getting a handful of digital trinkets (which often make the game worse!) or maybe coughing up even more for a "collector's edition", which are often low quality or available by other means post-release anyway. In the case of GTA6, Rockstar released 60 new screenshots almost solely focused on the 'Ultimate Edition' extras you can have if you give them $100 instead of $80.

These either create artificial scarcity or cheap incentives to override your better sense. At least wait until you can read reviews or watch YouTube videos or streams, and only buy the extra cars and hats if it seems good.

I would say that, you might think, as a purveyor of reviews. It's true, I obviously want people to engage with our work.

Most games websites publish reviews, but they won't tell you not to pre-order. They will implicitly suggest that you should pre-order by writing about the announcement of the pre-orders, the launch of the pre-orders, where you can do the pre-ordering. This is a little because of ecommerce and available affiliate revenue, and a lot because of the huge pressure to keep Google fed with every possible headline about the biggest game of the decade.

I'm not entirely against ecommerce. There is real utility in pointing your readership towards good deals that help them to save money, particularly if you've already done the work of testing hardware or software to confirm that it really is worth your audience's time. I have worked closely with great writers of deals posts who cared deeply about the quality of their work.

Still, Jank is reader-supported and ad-free, and although it would have been the easiest thing in the world to make an exception for affiliate links within our articles, we didn't want to enter that long, slippery road with all its cursed incentives. We want to just write dumb posts and only think about what those posts earn from you, our actual audience.

This allows me to write this dumb post and then never mention pre-orders ever again. Don't pre-order games!