As an employee of Gamestop, pre-orders are very important to us actually keeping a job. We don't get any sort of commission or anything (which is a huge misunderstanding for some people). Because of marketing expenditures and etc, we have to stay in a certain percentage of our employee tier group on a weekly basis. If we don't get reservations a particular week, or for several weeks, we risk losing our jobs. At times it is very stressful trying to explain the positives of pre-ordering a game while in the back of my mind I'm thinking "please pre-order so I don't get fired".Often times the misconception is "well I don't have to pre-order a game because they'll have extra copies". Tell that to our customers who walked in a few Tuesdays ago to get a copy of UFC 3 without having it pre-ordered - we had one extra copy that was sold at midnight. We didn't get extra copies for several days, so customers went without.Furthermore, I can say with all certainty that the pre-orders I personally took for customers on AC3 in the past week was directly due to the fact we had the steelbooks available as a pre-order incentive. Usually, if we have a physical incentive to give out (a game case, t-shirt, bandana, etc), we get more reserves. People love free stuff, and it's smart business sense to give it out as a pre-order incentive.

Agreed wholeheartedly. DLC should add interesting and fun gameplay to a series, but it shouldn't add major plot points to as big of a series like ME in the way the past DLC has. The fact that Liara is the new Shadow Broker is a HUGE plot point, let alone the fact that Shep kills 300k batarians. I had no idea why he was relieved of duty at the start of ME3 and until I read this article, I STILL didn't know. I guess I missed the conversation in ME3 where it was reiterated the reasoning for him being court marshaled. These aren't plot points for DLC that the majority of people aren't buying anyway - it should be clearly spelled out in the main game, not DLC or other media (comics, books, etc).

@Kevin75 While I'll agree with you that companies need to stop fluffing up games, saying how much fun they are in previews, then reviewing them at a score of 5-7, I think you're way off base with Dead Island and Dark Souls. Dead Island was an amazing departure from the usual stagnant and generic games that most zombies games have turned into. The fact you could play the entire campaign in co-op and upgrade your character were amazing additions that other games of the genre lacked. As for Dark Souls, the story may have been a little lacking, but the action was very well done. We need more games like Dark Souls to challenge gamers. Challenging games are fun, we don't need to be spoon fed more quick-time button presses or [insert the usual complaints about Call of Duty here]. Dark Souls was a brutal game. It was incredibly challenging, but that made the eventual success more gratifying for me personally.

I think the issue with the current generation (and future generations) is how well online gaming has developed over the years. Many devs tack on multiplayer to games that really don't have very fleshed out single player experiences to begin with. Instead on devoting more time to creating a great single player experience, they sacrifice by having a mediocre single player experience with a mediocre multiplayer experience. Obviously, single player experiences aren't dead by any means. Take a look at Bioware - their games have been triple A award winning single players that have redefined genres at times - Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Knights of the Old Republic. You can also look at Bethesda with The Elder Scrolls and Fallout, or games like Metal Gear Solid, Legend of Zelda, etc. Single player games are far from finished, we just need more companies willing to invest into really awesome immersive single player experiences, not half assed single player with multiplayer tacked on as an after thought.