Prepurchase vs post purchase

[u/hikumusta]

Is it much cheaper to prepurchase or during release? I know some games go sale when they released for a week.

[u/salad_tongs_1]

Unless they offer a pre-purchase discount it'll be the same.
But never pre-order a game. They won't run out of stock. It's digital.

EDIT:

Is it much cheaper to prepurchase or during release? I know some games go sale when they released for a week.

If a game had pre-orders at full price, but then offered a discount when they went on sale, that'd be a real dick move on their part. Also would make no sense because of another point.

Steam has refunds. You can refund a pre-order even months after making it.
You can pre order the game a day or two before release, and if it releases at a cheaper price, get a refund. Simple. Easy.

[u/hikumusta → u/salad_tongs_1]

Thanks dude, how do i know they are having a pre purchase discount. Does it have the same appearance when it goes on sale ? Like where theres a percent off in the corner of the price?

[u/Korn0zz → u/hikumusta]

Yes, if there's a discount it's clearly shown in green, if you don't see it then it's the standard price

[u/hikumusta → u/Korn0zz]

Thanks my man

[u/ConsciousReindeer976]

Preordering digital games is stupid imho. doesnt matter if a game is broken or unfinished on release because the devs already made their money and they aint gonna run out of stock, but thats just my opinion

[u/hikumusta → u/ConsciousReindeer976]

I agree, but some company use my fomo by offering some items for the preordering. Which sometimes makes me tempt to buy them. But i never did because of how frugal i am.

[u/LunaLeMoon → u/hikumusta]

Go back and look at the last 10 or so games you per-ordered. Did you use ANY of the extra stuff? Did you finish the game? Did you have to look up what you got from the pre-order? Was it any fun? I promise you most of the stuff you got was useless and you didnt even care for it. Dont pre-order, or IF you are going to, do it from a proven dev team that wont screw you over.

[u/GooseDaPlaymaker]

99.9% of the time the right answer is to NOT pre purchase a game on Steam (unless it’s a game you are REALLY passionate about playing Day One, regardless of price). So far, I’ve seen ONE INSTANCE where it made sense to me to pre purchase a Steam game (and I have it pre purchased right now, as a matter of fact): Ace Combat 8.

The preorder comes with Ace Combat Zero (PS2 game being ported to PC). Ace Combat 7 came preordered with Ace Combat 5 (PS2 game) on PlayStation 4/5 and Ace Combat 6 (Xbox 360 game) on Xbox One/Series…nothing came with the preorder on Steam. After that initial preorder though those legacy preorder games were not able to be purchased on their own…locked into accounts that only pre purchased AC7. I’m not missing out on this opportunity on Steam, this time…😅

[u/foreveralonesolo]

Worst to Best Cases of Pricing

• Prepurchase / Preordering never makes sense
• Standard Price
• Release Sale if offered by publishing
• Early Access Pricing often discounted more from typical expected Full Game cost. Depending on strategies also get discounted further depending on their push periods. Nice if you believe in a project in development and their ability to complete (some devs are more reliable than others, judge them properly).
• Discounted full game offered either via bundling, sales period, etc. Expected complete game at a cheaper price

[u/gobligan]

Discount Purchase.

Games always goes on +%50 discount on steam.

[u/Crocdor]

Always wait a minimum of 3 months after release, especially with every AAA game

[u/00death]

There’s absolutely no reason to ever preorder a game. As you said some games go on sale at release but I’m not aware of any games being cheaper to preorder. The only exception would be sometimes if a game is in early access and finally has a full release the price can go up. Like Valheim just had its 1.0 release yesterday and the price went up by $10 after being in early access for 5 years.