Deus Ex Mankind Divided Pre-Order BS

[Mirage]

So draw the line at "non-cosmetic pre-order bonuses." I just don't see why bonuses full stop need to be annihilated or something. There's a reason pre-orders exist in the retail world, as detailed in the earlier Kotaku article.

If you want to get rid of pre-order bonuses, stop buying games from retailers. Hell, if everyone purchased direct from publishers, the price from the publisher might even drop! But it'll never happen because people like buying their games on the cheap, and retailers are the ones dictating the pre-orders, and retailers are also the ones where you get the games on the cheap.

So what if I draw the line there? That doesn't mean trout as long certain other people just drown them in money at the mere glimpse of a binary string they've been told "only a few" will be able to put into their game.

There is no such thing as actually exclusive goods in the digital world. In the real world, items are exclusive because there simply isn't enough gold or diamonds (or saffron or whatever) in the world to give everyone one. That's why someone can not get it and are therefore excluded. For digital goods, there is no limit because you can make an infinite amount of copies of anything, and things are only exclusive because the developer or publisher has arbitrary decided that "this isn't for everyone and we want to milk the rich and smurf over those who aren't as rich". I dislike one of those types of exclusivity because one stems from actual resource scarceness and the other stems from pure greed. Have you seen what they sell the "full game" for these days? It's nearly a hundred bucks in some cases. The stripped down versions are of course sold for the filthy peasants who can only scrape together enough to buy the stripped down version of the game.

Furthermore, preorder bonuses aren't exclusive to retail stores anymore. You find them on lots of digital preorders too.