Activisions explanation of Pre-Order Declining.

So, Activision recently announced the Declines in the Pre-Order Business. They used the typical excuses to explain to shareholders how it had everything to do with everything but the quality of their games.

They also used this as an excuse to extremely allocate their Special Editions of Destiny. It seems the Beta may have had a bit of a back fire on them and people began to cancel.

No I firmly believe this is nothing more than a ploy for them to force people who wanted these special versions into ordering special Digital Versions by making the physical ones unavailable.

BUT What really bothered me was how they eluded to share with stock holders the reality of the situation. Which I believe is as follows:

The Gaming Consumer is the most educated consumer in the world. Not only is he tired or being burnt by buying $60.00 new releases only to be disappointed by them never living up to the hype. I firmly believe he has altered his purchasing schedule to coincide with taking advantage of buying the COMPLETE Version of the game or "Game of the year" edition that includes all the content released for a fraction of the price. I know I have been doing this the last few years. Spending $39.99 to $19.99 for everything in lieu of half of the game at launch for $60.00

But no one wants to tell their shareholders that their customers are through being ripped off and have smartened up and have stopped falling for it!

There are SO many games released now there isn't even enough time to play them all so buying them all new @ 60.00 just does not make sense.

Wheres The Sauce ?

And my first preorder was a major BackFire and I haven't preorder anything else since. Thats my reason.

BTW... That game was Bioshock Infinite.

People are finally realizing that buying the game first day is a huge gamble and isn't necessary to pre-order since the publisher prints a million plus copies.

Good, glad to see these "AAA" fuckers losing face, they sure need to. Quality certainly isn't their focus, it's obviously quantity they are worried about and quantity makes me a sad panda.

Agreed, I do believe the basis of the pre-order in it's earliest beginnings was legit and honest. It started around the N64 and those could be truly difficult to find at launch. In my job the pre-order is pretty crucial as well (I work for a Video Game Distributor). So basically we get the orders 45-90 days in advance, reports those numbers to the Publisher as do the Walmarts and Best Buys and Game Stops of the world. That gives them a basic idea of how much to manufacture.

But like you mentioned, there is no shortage of product anymore. Not since we went from Cartridge to Disc has there been a shortage of product manufactured!

What has changed over time is the Retailer's have taken this from an honest approach of figuring out Supply & Demand and gauging to maximize sales and satisfy customers to a way of holding onto hundreds of thousands of dollars in advance. Collecting interest and using this "cash" to help facilitate their businesses in a way it was not intended.

The other thing that bothers me is these quarterly calls to investors. For YEARS THQ railed against the used game industry, blaming it for all of their woes & financial failures. I mean, I get it, they can't tell the truth and the truth was THQ had made sub-par crap games for 5 years that no one wanted to buy. They weren't going to tell investors that "Our games suck" - Instead they blamed it on the used industry.

Seems Activision is now doing the same. What frightens me though is I see an intentional shortage of physical media in our future to "push" people towards digital.

And that sucks ballz.

Good news is with Digital now being Pre-Downloaded for people it is just a short matter of tume befoe people start getting it and releasing it to the world for free.

Publisher's are freaking insane, do they not realize they will be the first to go under when everything goes Digital?

I think sales will be high I mean its like WOW.

WOW loses 3m subs. So what have 7m left no big deal compared to rest of market.