8 Reasons Why Gaming Just Isn’t Gaming Anymore

7. Buying On Day One Gets You A Worse Product

The industry wants you to pre-order everything, right? To give them the most money up-front, guarantee your purchase, love for the franchise and commitment to the brand. Fine, to some degree anyway. If they want to throw out a whopping great Assassin's Creed statue, then if you're huge fan by all means tuck in. However, what many developers have in mind for their entire project i.e. their initial, fully-formed vision for the game before budgetary reasons settle in, is NOT what you're picking up through these more luxurious first offerings, or the base game. Not any more. Instead, as we see with parsed out 'Season Pass' content alongside bug fixes and elements added to the game from constant fan feedback, it spits directly in the face of those who put down their hard-earned cash in the first place, being everything that comes after day one is a better, more refined and thoroughly more feature-complete offering. Why should I, the consumer, spend money on something like Shadow Of Mordor's season pass (totalling something like £100 in conjunction with the base-game), only for a 'Game of the Year' version to come out the following year, including everything previously locked away for a fraction of the price? It used to be these re-released special editions were reserved for games that truly deserved them, and not that Shadow of Mordor doesn't, but as soon as the advertising for a game starts touting "Six months of content!", anyone with any sense of foreboding knows all the 'exclusive content' will be packaged together somewhere later down the road.
Gaming Editor
Gaming Editor

WhatCulture's Head of Gaming.