» Fri Nov 27, 2015 6:58 pm I could barely contain my excitement in hearing that Fallout 4 was announced, and the Pip Boy Edition itself was the golden prize for many, many fans out there. Sadly, like many I'm going to miss out - and of course I am none too happy at not being able to secure a copy.
But it got me thinking about the "Limited Edition" releases, pre-order bonuses and all the other types of exclusivity we frequently see as gamers, and why not only are they frustrating, but ultimately divisive between gamers, retailers, producers and developers.
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I can honestly say that I rarely pre-order anything these days. Unless it's a triple A title with an unmatched pedigree, and comes with it's own food bowl and collar, I usually wait.
Waiting means I can save my hard-earned cash, check out the reviews, find out what users think (not just reviewers - in some cases paid reviewers) and decide whether a full price game near release date is worth it. Some titles look brilliant but turn out to be fairly ordinary; and I want to avoid being on the hook for a full price purchase if I can be certain that I could pick it up on sale later when the price matches the quality - or oddly it's metascore rating - and spend my money on another title.
Pre-orders are like Kickstarter for big companies. This gives the retailers a swift injection of cash, and advance orders from the producer/distributor of the game title. Sounds great? Sure, if you are sure you want to back this title, and are sure it'll be awesome, that is fantastic.
But then come the pre-order bonuses. The limited editions. The endless array of stuff you get if you arrange a contract to buy at full price. Honestly, I see two major problems with this model of marketing:
The first issue is the purchasers commitment, sight unseen, of a product.
Sure, it prompts action on the part of the buyer to force them to part with their money on a given date - but lets face it, the only people who gain any real tangible benefit on that week are the retailers. They don't need this massive turnover in a day; they will get their piece of the pie based on the figures that they sell from stock orders if this option wasn't there. There are very few products out there that we need to pre-order; and usually those are custom made or somehow tied to the requirements of the user. Think about it - the closest industry would be the TV, music and movie industries. If you want to buy any product of those, the closest you come to not having a good idea of whether it is worth the purchase would be a movie premiere. Even so, there is almost never any exclusive items (read more on that below) to seeing it on the first day of release, aside from the lack of spoilers. But if I want to purchase a movie, or an album from my favourite artist, or a TV series on DVD, or anything like that, I would have probably had the option to check out parts of it before hand (radio, TV, etc). The experience they offer is often not as interactive as a computer game, sure that makes it a little more black and white, but if I want to pre-order the next series of Mr Whatsit's Medieval Killing and Nudity Spree, then I already know I want it and that I will enjoy it.
The second issue is the Exclusivity Creep.
Like Kickstarter, if you're not ready with your cash, and free and available to get to the store/go online and make the transaction, you are going to miss out. It doesn't matter whether this is physical media, in game items or any other sundry; it means that people are disadvantaged if they can't spend half a day messing around to get what they want. I'm middle aged, have a hard-working wife and three lovely kids. I have a pretty decent job. What I don't have is time to drop everything, travel to the nearest place I can pre-order the item I want to get my Super Limited Edition Numbered Day-one Exclusive Reserved version (or S.L.E.N.D.E.R.) on the day of release. Sometimes, it is just a fact that I don't have the money on hand to pay for it right then and there.
This isn't something that needs to be limited in number, as that is an artificial construct. We aren't filling a stadium to see a rock band that has a limited number of seats. We aren't using a finite resource to create the item (unless there is a worldwide plastic shortage that I'm going to be surprised about in the next few months). There isn't a limited window of opportunity to see the alignment of three planets on a specific day. This is just a marketing engineering decision.
Furthermore, the "this retailer stocks this special edition, but that retailer stocks a different one" is an extremely poor decision as it was with the Fallout: New Vegas release. The one fixup of the Couriers Stash was, in my opinion, acknowledgement that They Got It Wrong.
Effectively, penalising people because they can't be at a specific place at a specific time is bad marketing.
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So what's the end result? My experience just the other day:
My wife and I agree that this can be my birthday present from my kids. It's a fairly large expenditure for us, but not insurmountable by any respect. Also, no matter my birthday falls a few months before hand - my kids don't know my birthday date yet so we'll just have my birthday in November instead of August.
I hop online after arriving home from work. When I finally find out who is selling the Pip Boy Edition of FO4, I go to their website, and see the product is sold out. Well, that could only be the online store, so why not try the bricks-and-mortar store?
I have the next day off, and I arrived at the one store within a day's trek to ask if I could get a Pip Boy edition, only to be flippantly told without even getting eye contact "Nup, sold out." Upon politely asking further if this meant the store itself was sold out or the company itself, the store clerk (who was obviously exasperated at the bizarre one-two punch of being asked two whole questions by the same person) replied "Worldwide. They are all gone.".
There were four people lined up behind me. Three of them all walked out, money still in hand. That retailer had the better part of A$800 walk out the door in a split second, because they couldn't fulfil the request of four people. Note: our lira-pence translates to about $500 Mighty American Dollars (or M.A.D.) for those of you playing along at home in the US.
I walk around the shops, with nearly two hundred invisible dollars on a plastic card, and somewhat annoyed and a little saddened that I missed out. Thankfully, there is no "in-game" business with this model, or I'd have been quite the angry little vegemite*
It also tells me one more thing - you didn't allocate enough to Australia.
I await the inevitable eBay trickle of overpriced Pip Boys with no game later; the enterprising people who know there is money to be made. Yay for arbitrage! Retailers and distributors 0; scalpers 1.
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My proposition? Either coupons or upgrades.
Hell, there are a handful of games (Pillars of Eternity springs to mind) where you can go in with the base game, and upgrade it later. Why not do that here? It doesn't solve the pre-order problem, but it does solve the exclusivity problem. This model also gives the distributors an exact figure on the number of physical extras they need to manufacture, not just guessing and finding out they have too many or too few. Ask around all the people who missed out on the Pip Boy Edition of FO4 if they'd still pay the difference to get the extra stuff, and I'll bet my house (and the mortgage too - you're not getting away that easy) that to a person they'll all be ready to hand over the cash to upgrade to a Pip Boy Edition.
You could even ship physical copies of the game without the extras, and add a coupon into it that allowed you to "purchase" the extras. That way I could buy a copy with the additional price worked out months later and just go online and redeem the code from Amazon or something, and just pay shipping. Retailers would love it.
Also, quit with the exclusive retailers. Or, pick someone who is the biggest around.
I had to travel quite far only to be told to take a hike. If the deal had been struck with JB HiFi in Australia, I could have been told to get lost *much* closer to home! Why go with EBGames? Is it because they were a worldwide deal? Why not just let all the retailers sell your little SLENDER? I might have even got a copy.
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Before the inevitable cries of "waa, cry more" and "lolz I got my copy sux to be u", am I upset?
Nope. First world problems - this ain't the worst I've endured; and despite my initial excitement I can accept that it's not the most important thing in my life. I will survive without it, I am sure. But as far as marketing goes, there can be more items shipped and more money made by Bethesda if they thought about what they are doing.
For now, I saved myself a hundred peso-cents which I'll spend elsewhere. So did three other people today. And across the world, probably many more.
Best thing Bethesda can do is crank up the production run again, turn out another run of these units and cite "Unprecedented response from fans" and release a whole load more to capture that opportunity in the market.
