Eh, I always appreciate the early adopters who provide feedback and pressure on devs to fix the games so that I can play a much better game 6 months or a year later.

Well yeah, same here. But seems like CDPR is happy about preorders. That's too many adopters to be called "early".

8 million of preorders, how could they not be happy?

I've had zero problems with it on PC.

Fantastic game with maybe 2-3 bugs

RDR2 is fantastic, 77 isn't that good yet.

I don't mean the performance, it's clearly just had so much stuff ripped out

Larian does a great job with their early access releases, soliciting the community to report bugs, play testing etc. I put like 70 hours into the new Baldur’s Gate on different builds and it’s only like a third of the game. There were a lot of bugs and some crashes I reported, but has otherwise been a blast. Don’t understand why CDPR couldn’t have done the same.

is the inverted side of "no preorders" also "No epic games"? Something has to fund development and at a certain point investors will not risk the lack of sales. Versus a preorder is an actual sale.

That doesn’t make sense as most of the money is invested long before a release date is even announced.

Preorders aren’t used to invest development, but rather recoup some costs. They also provide a signal to publishers that allows delays to happen.

You’ll still be in the “red” during your marketing push, especially since marketing is so expensive.

Not really, I'm going to give the worst example of all - Star Citizen (aka Scope Creep The Video Game) - which was IIRC crowdfunded, and according to the wiki page below remains the most expensive game in terms of development cost.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_video_g...

These games rake in hundreds of millions of dollars. Games are bigger and fancier than ever because they have reached mainstream appeal and accessability. It has nothing to do with preorders.

Preorders just allow them to release buggy games in a beta state and patch it later.