Will Absolver have crossplay between the GOG and Steam version?

Sounds about right. No matter how you spin it, pre-orders for purely digital items with an infinite supply make no sense for the customer whatsoever.

That the publishers and/or distributors try so hard to push these offers, before customers have the chance to read some reviews or test the game, just makes me suspect the game is probably going to be a disappointment.

What's more, why is it the standard for digital game pre-orders, that you pay up front and then receive the game a few weeks or months later? When I pre-order a game or other item on Amazon, payment isn't due until they actually ship the item, and that's for physical products, which take up shelf space, have a limited supply etc. ... What gives? Most of the time the digital versions aren't even cheaper, and the physical ones sometimes come with physical extra goodies ( soundtrack discs, small artbooks etc. ).

I did Pre-Ordered Warhammer Total War 2 knowing what I would get, and I have been following the game on Twitter like a hawk.

And if its buggy at launch I'll wait for it to be patch because I know it will be patched. Rome 2 was the most Broken Total War game ever at launch and now its patched to perfection, heck the game runs better now than Shogun 2.

Which raises the question, if you know that it will likely take a few months worth of patches, until the game is feature complete and all the major problems have been fixed, what's the advantage of pre-ordering? You're only sending the devs and publishers the message that it's OK to release broken, rushed games.

klj

Only until they don't patch a game to perfection will no one buy their next game.

And besides you say this as if there was never a broken game released before the time of Pre-Orders.

Community participation? This goes quadruple for a game like Absolver, where multiplayer is supposed to be well-populated on launch.

Before the time of pre-orders, publishers could get away with broken releases because it was a time wen most of us didn't have internet access. So your only source of information about the quality of a game was the advertising on the back of the box, and maybe articles in some gaming magazines. Nowadays we have all this information available to us, yet many choose not to take advantage of it. By pre-ordering and throwing your money at them, you're giving publishers a blank cheque to pull off all sorts of crap. At least with traditional physical pre-orders it still makes some sense from the customer's point of view, but digital pre-orders have zero advantage for the customer, which is why they have to resort to all these bribing tactics, with their "pre-order exclusives" etc.
How does that require a pre-order, though? It's not like they have some closed beta or such going -- You're only going to be able to play the game once it's officially released. In other words, once it's available to everyone, and people will be able to write reviews, upload ( unbiased ) gameplay videos etc.

So one could just as well wait for a few days after release, and then decide whether the game is worth buying, based on the information that's available by then. Unless you're saying that "community participation" is worth the price of admission, no matter how broken the game is at release.

( Besides, for a multiplayer game the quality and balancing is even more important. If it turns out to be a buggy mess, or even just mediocre, the player count will drop quickly, and then you're stuck with a multiplayer title no one else is playing. )

They want many people playing on launch day. If everyone decides to wait for the secondhand opinion of some e-famous fart, multiplayer will be stillborn.

If they whip up sufficiently impressive trailers and promise people the moon they will line up for the pre-order anyway.

And since you pre-order because you are worried about money, but are willing to wait months for the game to be patched... why not wait those months without buying the game, and buy it fully patched and almost certainly discounted and save money?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf5Uj4XIT1Y

Before promoting Furi as a pre-order incentive, how about getting that missing DLC here?

I sometimes think, that preorders are the last-resort funding for last-chance patching and fixing of a game before its official release.

I know, I'm mean and venomous, but pretty much only that make sense to me when we're talking about normal edition preorders (digital at that). Were it Collector's Edition (or any other truly special kind), preorder here IMO makes sense because those are mostly in limited quantity, so you can "reserve" one for yourself eariler.

Neat this being "cross platform" (isn't that sad to see? We're all on PC after all :/).

If I did preorder and liked fighting games I could let myself be tempted.

Anyone got a spare Furi to give away? :D

I remember the pre-order for Necropolis. The promise GOG made was online multiplayer, but the day it released the store page quickly changed to Single-Player.
Just like that :)
GOG stated the multiplayer will be available in the near future - and that was over a year ago.
Sorry if i´m cautious this time.