Are redditors finally waking up?

When will preordering finally die?

Nope. People on this very board were hyped for MGSV and probably preordered. Currently they are hyped for Persona 5 and will probably preorder that too although Japanese games are little more grey area in this regard because they might actually run out of copies depending where you live, so securing an order may not be unwise.

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Pick one

I want them to stop flinging money at shitty devs so I can have my good vidya back

This

Pre-ordering was only created to avoid people not being able to get their hands on a copy of a PHYSICAL GAME during the lunch day. It's fucking stupid and was designed for those faggots who wanted to feel relevant because they too wanted the "hot new thing".

It really depends on the game or company in question. For example, I'd say there's much less reason to preorder something that's bound to be easy to find later (popular series like Final Fantasy), and in Atlus' case while they'd traditionally done small initial print runs, they've seemed prone to reprints for SMT and Persona, at least with the PS2 entries (not sure how exactly they've handled prints for stuff like Persona 4 Golden or SMT: Strange Journey, whether those saw the reprint treatment). Honestly, I wouldn't be too worried that something like Persona 5 would become really rare; Persona being a flagship of Atlus, it'll likely get a reprint even if the initial run is small.

But you're right about the more niche stuff having more reason to do so for, especially when a game is confirmed to only be getting a limited print run in the first place (though with the VC and PSN, that's less of an issue than in the past, at least for people that don't care one way or another about what format they get a game in). Also the plus that, localization quality aside (which admittedly is an issue to be worried about; part of why I'm a bit leery of Exist Archive, as Aksys is hit or miss), the western audience doesn't have to play guinea pig as to whether a game is any good or not when first released, compared to western made games, and we can hear what the Japanese audience and importers thought of it before it comes out here (if it even comes out here). Though that's mainly a perk for games that get staggered releases as opposed to being intentional worldwide releases from the start.

I remember back in the day on half/vr/, some user there was lamenting never being able to play a PS2 game called Dual Hearts (was a bit surprising to have seen brought up since it wasn't /vr/ material), as pretty much no one bothered to preorder it where he lived, so they got next to no (or outright no) copies out there.

It is like desalinating a cup of sea water - the ocean is hardly less salty for your efforts. Here the consumerbase is hardly any less gullible because a handful of people have wisened up. You can deny them your money but there's plenty of other suckers ready and happy to hand over theirs. And I expect there always will be.

No. Even people who know full well about NMS will still defend preordering.

You're a normalfag, user, nobody on this board is a special snowflake.