Playstation Network Now Pre-Ordering DLC, Why? August 10, 2011

Sony has started to take pre-orders of online downloadable games through their new Playstation Network PLAY inititaive.  Four games, including Bloodrayne: Betrayal and Street Fighter III Third Strike Online Edition are being offered for prepurchase.  Other than the fact the games are discounted to Playstation Plus members or by downloading all four of them you’ll get a free gift, there really is little incentive to preordering a digital game.

The concept of preordering something digital, opposed to retail, is quite different.  In this day and age, preordering a physical copy of something actually does make sense.  Someone is going to put a pre-order down for a retail item in order to reserve it for themselves.  There is a physical limit to the amount of retail games that can be sold.  By reserving the game early, you gurantee that you will have your game set aside for you in advance so on release day you can simply pick it up without any hassle.  But in the digital world, an infinite amount of copies of something can be sold.  There’s no concern all the copies are going to be sold before you get the chance to buy it.

I have talked in the past about this subject.  GameStop was offering preorders for the first Halo Reach downloadable Map Pack a few months ago.  They were offering Power Up Rewards Members a free avatar goodie as an incentive.  While this option for purchasing DLC turned out to be much slower than someone who simply purchased the content through Xbox Live the second it came out, it did provide players who didn’t have access to a Credit Card a chance to pay cash for the content, and gave users a free goodie to boot just for preordering that one map pack.

I can only think of two valid reasons why someone would want to preorder something online.  Pre-Orders through STEAM, for as long as the service has existed, has allowed the user the chance to download the game in advance of release.  With the content already downloaded, the user could literally have the game the second the game released, which, trust me, when Half-Life 2 released, was a really big deal.  If Sony decided to release these games the same way, preordering would be a good idea.

The other valid reason is used by Telltale Games with their episodic game releases.  Instead of buying all six episodes of a game series individually, you could buy all of them in one lump sum at a fairly reduced price, and be e-mailed whenever the new episodes came out, so you could download them immediatly upon release.  Now, Sony isn’t going the episodic route with these games, you can only buy them individually, and you’re only getting a discount if you’re a Playstation Plus subscriber, so this won’t be an option.

My guess is that anyone who preorders any of these games will have them unlocked in their download queue upon release, so you can download and install them the second its released.  This is what Sony did for subscribers to the Playstation Qore Magazine before it became a Playstation Plus incentive.  Really, if they do it like that, you’d have the same experience buying it the second it comes out.