Author: A.K.H.

Pre-ordering video games is a touchy topic in the community. In general, it is agreed that pre-ordering games these days is a bad idea, because no matter how reputable the game’s developer is, there is no guarantee that a game will launch without any performance issues or will actually be enjoyable to play. The opposing argument for this is simply, “it’s my money and I will do what I want with it”. In this episode, let’s look at why pre-orders are a thing in the first place, and what are the pros and cons of pre-ordering video games.

In this video, I’ll be trying a different approach to presenting information, but there’s also a reason why there’s an old game playing in the background. I’ll get to that later. For now, let’s go into today’s topic, which is patient gaming.

I’ve been working on this video for a few days, and co-incidentally, it is coming out at the same time when there is a fresh debate happening in the industry about the feasibility of game subscriptions. But let me not get into that right now. The purpose of this video is not to talk about whether game subscriptions are good or bad. There’s no right or wrong answer, because every consumer has their own needs, and every developer has their own results from using these subscriptions. So let’s not spend time discussing that. This video is simply to list the sheer number of choices a consumer has in early 2024. Just one note before we start, since we already have a lot of subscriptions to cover, I won’t be going deeper into each tier of each subscription; most of the time I will just talk about the highest tier available for each subscription to look at the best value it offers.

I’m currently working on a video about the different video game subscriptions available in the market, and during my research, one subscription seemed quite interesting and also odd. The name of that subscription is GTA+, offered for $5 a month by Rockstar Games. I’ll speak a bit more about why this subscription is odd in the episode about subscriptions, but looking at it got me thinking about how Rockstar Games maintains a special status in the industry. As seen recently during the reveal of the GTA 6 trailer, if Rockstar announces something, the entire gaming world stops what it’s doing and pays attention. Rockstar releases games very rarely. They believe in bringing a game as close to perfection as possible before pushing it into the world. And very rarely do their games suffer from any of the issues that games by most other studios have at launch. The only exception was perhaps the launch of Grand Theft Auto Online in 2013, where there were a few bugs, but that was quickly forgiven because that was the first major online game released by Rockstar.