Alright, here's the actual fallout
http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/10...ial-deus-ex-mankind-divided-pre-order-program nothing 'opinionated' there, simply the fact that this attempt was so particularly egregious that even video game fans were no willing to stomach it. We're seeing a slightly different but still abusive practice play out at this very moment with NBA 2k18, where portions of the game have now been hidden behind microtransactions in an otherwise full price game. Any time you give the industry as a whole the chance to exploit the consumer they will, without fail.
A failed pre-order scheme doesn't prove the practice is bad, just that that scheme was poorly implemented and/or planned. The bit about microtransactions in NBA 2k18, while I agree is very annoying and just one reason I avoid EA sports titles, is entirely orthogonal to your argument about pre-orders. If we can bring in any bad behavior and say that it supports our argument about this specific bad behavior then every bad behavior becomes proof. You could next claim that bank robberies are an indictment of pre-orders because offering incentives to open accounts just encourages bank robbers angry they don't have enough money to get the free stuff by opening accounts. It's silly.
Secondly, I can think of no games, not even one, that has "prepared" for launch day as a result of pre-orders. This includes industry giants like Blizzard which saw their entire battle.net system crumble back when D3 was released, so I am incredibly suspicious of this claim. The more pertinent concerns from the company are that most games have a very short window for most of their sales, and pre-orders allow them to proactively extend that in addition to the other perks of the practice.
I can trivially disprove this. Bungie, with Destiny 2 pre-orders, began downloading files to pre-order customers 2 weeks early and in measured packages. I didn't have to download a single thing on launch day because everything was already pre-installed, a move that meant that Bungie (or more precisely, their parent company) reduced load on their download infrastructure on launch day. Because my son would have bought it on launch day if he couldn't pre-order it and then sat there waiting for downloads.
Steam does this as well. And if you've never noticed a slowdown of download speeds during rush at open for digitally delivered games (or just for release day patches), then you're incredibly lucky or very unobservant.
As for Xanathar's itself, I disagree. Much of what we've been given is developers talking about it but not actually showing us hard numbers. While this is expected, since doing so would lower the value of the book itself, it does mean that we really have no clue if the cavalier is good or not, for example. Until we have critics/reviewers actually covering the content in full, there's still a heightened level of uncertainty regarding the value of the product. It certainly wouldn't be the first product we hoped was good but ended up disappointing.
There are whole class previews out there now. They handed some out for a few cons. Yeah, sure, you don't have exact numbers for everything, but we have an extensive history with the design envelope from UA and previous releases and we have concrete examples of said design from Xanthar's, and THEN we have the developer information. This it pretty much akin to a demo level and some gameplay video. If you don't have enough information, that's fine, everyone has a different threshold and yours seems pegged to 'must be able to see the whole product', but you can't claim there isn't a large amount of information already out there on Xanthar's.
Lastly, there's no such thing as a 'good' pre-order incentive, merely a scale of how detrimental it is. The core premise of my argument is that buying a product before you know its quality is a bad idea as a consumer. That statement doesn't really change no matter what is offered or how it is offered, because it will always be entrenched in the idea of denying customers information.
And we're back to pure opinion. To bring up Destiny 2, for my son, he was very happy with the pre-order bennies he got. He purchased the package that includes the season pass at a discounted price and also some limited-time exclusive cosmetics and weapons. These items are limted to pre-purchase for a few months and then go full access. i've seen them and they're interesting but not overpowered or significant to gameplay. None of the items are in the current PvP meta. But he likes them and, since he was buying at first availability to play with his friends doing the same, he's tickled pink to have a few things thrown his way for something he'd have pre-ordered without bennies. And I'm happy he saved a few bucks on the season pass.
For the record, he's in high school and did this with his own money.
Look at the example we're arguing over right now; they're tempting you to buy a book you don't know is good on the basis of 16 homebrew feats of indeterminate quality that are almost certainly AL illegal. If you wait for the book to be out and it gets rave reviews, are you going to weep over the missing feats? If the book turns out to be crap, are those feats going to justify the money spent on a sub-par product?
What incredibly odd questions. There's some strange space your in to think that those questions get to the nub of this issue rather than just reaffirming your already clearly stated biases and assumptions. Again, pre-ordering is a risk/reward analysis. You, obviously, heavily weight the risks, and, for some products, i do as well. I don't kickstart, for instance, except in rare cases where I either have great faith in the product manufacturer or I don't care about the product. Example of the former is CMON kickstarters, where I'm buying the minis and not the game and the minis have always been high quality, and the latter the Reading Rainbow kickstarter, where I wanted to give Lavar money even though I was never gonig to consume the product. For video games, I preorder a select few titles, but that's more because I'm perfectly happy to wait a year or two and pick up my video games at a discount - I don't usually get much from getting in early. Exceptions here are Civ games and Fallout games, where I trust the execution enough to want it have it as soon as it's out. And I missed both of the most recent release in both series because I didn't have time at release to justify the expense. But had I the time I'd have pre-ordered regardless of the benefits.
For Xanthar's, I've already bought my print version. So, I've already preordered. I'm not on DDB, but if that was my content consumption vehicle of choice, I'd have pre-ordered it there. That just because i do want this material soonest, and I don't care about the preorder incentives. In fact, the preorder incentive for DDB is utterly worthless to me -- I'm not interested in homebrew feats from 3rd parties. So that doesn't even enter into my calculations. And, since it doesn't, your questions make absolutely no sense, because the value of something I already hold to be valueless in the event Xanthar's is crap isn't relevant to me at all. I'd have preordered without it (and did), so it's presence is entirely extra and not a justification.
And, that's where I think you've gone off the rails -- in claiming that pre-order incentives are the defining decision point for those deciding to pre-order. I think they're far more just something nice for people that are already interested in pre-ordering, like my son and Destiny 2 or me and Xanthar's. Their availability isn't a factor in my decision, because making a decision to purchase based on ancillary things is silly. If you're so caught up in what you get free that you're ordering things you don't really know if you want, the problem isn't the free things: it's you decision making.
