In general, pre-ordering isn’t a great idea. Money is worth more now than in the future, and the quality and price of the game does not change significantly between the last day to preorder and the first day reviews drop.

You’re absolutely right, I’m done preordering games. I didn’t do it much anyway, but nowadays it’s just not worth it. The most recent and egregious example that comes to my mind was the latest Battlefield. My goodness was that a turd, and lots of people felt rightfully burned after preordering that game and essentially getting a totally unfinished product.

This is what happens when game companies basically set their revenue targets based on preorders, and games as a product are non-refundable.

It's very easy to imagine a bean counter saying "we hit our preorder target, let's cut back our development budget now, release it, and we've already basically maximized our profits on this.

The state of the game industry at large is pretty gross as a result of a lot of the money incentives not lining up around building great games.

The problem is TakeTwo is a shit house on fire just like Ubisoft, EA, and Activision so it feels like the entrenched leadership at Rockstar has been beating back the TakeTwo culture but it's always a losing battle so when does it finally break. (See Blizzard and Bioware)