8 Video Game Pre-Orders That Made You Say WHAT?!

In this day and age, the "pre-order" bonus is a common sight. With developers and publishers determined to get back their investments as quickly as possible, what better way to do that than make people pay for a game you've not yet released? Well, at least we're incentivised with a few (often exclusive) goodies.

Now before you think I'll be planting a flag in tat mountain that reads "all pre-orders suck" don't worry, as there are a fair few gems that make the process actually quite appealing for many.

However the games we're going to be detailing today are examples of balls that weren't just dropped, they landed in dog feces and were picked back up and sold to us with smiles on corporate faces.

These weren't for the fans, these were for the chumps, made by chumps who absolutely chumped up the market in the process. So take these tales to heart and maybe be a little more cautious about where you throw your hard-earned cash.

For a game all about improving the human body beyond it's natural limitations with cybernetic upgrades and augmentations, the pre-order system introduced by Square Enix for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided felt like trying to decipher code post lobotomy.

Just look at any of the images provided by Square Enix on what you could hope to get by pre-ordering and from where and tell me any of it makes sense. Easily the dumbest thing about all of the whole process was that Square Enix stated that the amount of pre-order content that would be gifted to players depended on how many people actually pre-ordered in the first place.

This lead to a huge backlash from consumers, pointing out that they were already doing the publisher a favour by pre-ordering at all, so locking content off and teasing them with potentially more was a terrible move.

Plus according to their wonderfully gold chart, no one single version of the game included every pre-order bonus, meaning it was literally impossible to get everything without multiple pre-order juggling, which is a feature precisely no-one wanted to do.

Thankfully the campaign was cancelled pretty shortly after.