A Start to My Capstone: Research on Pre-Orders and DLC from the Video Game Industry

I began the base of my capstone project with an idea about something I despise about the video game industry, and I hope I can shape the idea into a project that will inform others about the dangers of pre-ordering games, and purchasing downloadable content. For those unfamiliar with the term pre-ordering, it is to order an item before it is commercially available, meaning to purchase before it is reviewed by others or available to rent. Some may justify this kind of purchase to make sure that they get a copy the day the game is released, but experiencing the game itself may turn out to be unworthy of the money spent to acquire said game. Allow me explain.

An ad to entice people to buy the new Call of Duty. Take a look at the price on the top right. Crazy. 

Above is an ad for pre-ordering a new Call of Duty video game set to release this fall. This ad was launched months ago, slowly gaining pre-orders before the game's release with a *slightly* discounted bundle price that comes with extra in-game content. According to the scholarly article by Xuying Zhao and Kathryn E. Stecke called Pre-orders for New To-be-released Products ConsideringConsumer Loss Aversion, this strategy is called Moderate Advance Selling (MAS) and the article goes into deep details on how businesses use it to maximize profits on their product that I'm deducing and applying to the gaming industry. By the way (fun fact), the additional content (DLC) that people pay in advance for usually HASN'T BEEN CREATED YET. That content (which for Call of Duty would be new multiplayer maps), will be worked on and released over the course of the next two years, at least. This is a standard business practice in the gaming industry, and it only has gotten worse as the years go by.

Let me share a personal story about a pre-ordering mistake I made that sparked my dislike of the practice back in 2011. Above is a picture of the game Brink, which was released in 2011. The game looked incredibly interesting to me back in the day, so I saved up money from my part-time job at a fast-food joint to pre-order it (my first pre-order ever). I pre-ordered, I received the game, and to my surprise, I did not enjoy the game. Apparently I wasn't the only one, because others online, including reviewers, were not impressed by the game either, despite the hype. That day I made a promise to myself to not purchase a game before release until I hear a general consensus that it is worth checking out, or if it's heavily discounted. This same event has happened to other people for multiple games the past couple years, and as I said before, I wish to create an informative project that breaks down how the gaming industry's consumers are suffering from this business choice.