Skip to main content

Hats Off to Firaxis, for a Sane yet Attractive Pre-Order Bonus Idea

This is a really clever idea, especially after some of the total boners on pre-order ideas by other companies in the recent past (I'm thinking of the craptastic thing Bethesda tried and abandoned for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.).

The pre-order bonus for Civ 6 will be immediate access to a Civ that all other players will get for free three months later. So it's not a financial offer - latecomers won't have to pay anything. But it's still a great incentive for those of us who would buy the game anyway, to take the risk of pre-ordering.

Admittedly, Firaxis is one of the few companies that I don't feel I'm risking much to preoorder from. Even Civ: Beyond Earth, which was quite a bit weaker than I'd hoped and expected, was not such a disappointment that I felt I'd not have bought it if I'd waited for reviews. And Starships was clearly telegraphed and priced as a "lite" game.

But this approach is something that I hope other companies will emulate, and that I think they'll find reasonable to emulate. Making special preoorder content that will either never be available to latecomers is giving anybody who heard about the game late a strong disincentive to buy. Making preorder content available later as DLC is a bit blatant (almost as bad as shipping a game where chunks were obviously ripped out to be sold as DLC - I'm looking at you, Dragon Age: Origins).

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

This article didn't quite change my life, but it was the most worthwhile thing I've read in a while

I like the games I like, and I'm no longer in the business of making games, so in many ways this article is not to my address. But it was still really worth my time to read carefully. It never gets anywhere near the stupid misogynistic pseudo-editorial "defense of games" crap that I'm not naming to avoid the still-raging humans pretending to be flamebots, and it comes from the opposite, and very constructive direction. And it quotes Tim Gunn more than once, in a very on-topic way. Tim Gunn is an awesome individual, even though I doubt he's ever been in the same room as a videogame for long. http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2016-11-07-video-games-are-boring

OK, Blogger is Moribund

Can't delete a spam comment, the UI for it is gone but the hell still says to look in the old place. Mobile UI is a mess, desktop UI doesn't work on Android. G+ seems to be on its way to shutting down. I loathe Facebook as a company and distrust giving them and chance to run code on my property. Google can't be trusted to leave a working product alone and working. Sigh.

Remembering SimTex

SimTex was one of the first game studios in Austin (not counting Origin, an independent publisher until the 90s). They produced only three games, but each of them has an important place in the history of strategy gaming. Here's the list in chronological order: Master of Orion was the first 4X space game to break the "more complexity and more micromanagement is what we want/need" mindset. By reducing individual planetary management to a few sliders, they made room for a relatively rich ship design system and room for real strategic thought, long before PCs could support both. Master of Magic is a unique blend of Civilization-style gameplay with the feeling of being a serious world-dominating-class wizard in competition with others in that league. Several good games have come from trying to duplicate parts of MoM, but generally they reduce the power of the wizard-player in some way, often making them a unit on the board. A currently pre-release title, Worlds of Magic, is...