Pre-Orders: What is best in life?
I struggle to think of many positives for AAA games. As was said, pre-orders used to be because of limited availability at retail brick and mortar stores before digital purchase became the way of the future. Eventually when pre-orders started falling off (i.e. not selling out before release) publishers started feeling the need to incentivize people to pre-order with the gimmicks we're all now familiar with.
Pre-orders have always really just been a chance for publishers to start recouping their money faster (since they take their cut first in most publishing deals), which I suppose means developers can start recouping profits sooner.
In reality, I think publishers are just ravenous to know if a game will meet their (often wildly optimistic) sales goals. This is an industry where if a AAA game doesn't make back 5x what was invested within the first month (or even weeks), publishers consider it a "disappointment." Think about that timeline as it relates to other publisher-backed industries. Pre-orders are also a way for publishers to forecast sales so they can plan ahead of a game's release what they'll do with a particular IP or dev house. Games take years to make so if you're going to do a sequel to a successful game, you start thinking about it early. So the pre-order numbers look good? Give them more money if they need it or if you're already greenlighting more. Numbers look bad? Decide very quickly how soon you will discount the game and possibly close the dev studio down if it's a child of the parent company. No sense in continuing to invest in a dud right? Especially for unestablished developers or developers who are just shifted around a huge network of linked studios.
And that's just the business side of it. As a gamer, pre-order schemes are confusing, almost universally a bad deal when you consider most of that will show up as DLC that will be on sale within a year or two once preorders and Season Passes have run their course. (Season passes btw, almost entirely a bad investment. The implication is the game will content season...after season...after season. Except that amounts to a year or less of new content before the game and the hype dies off.) Pre-Orders are there to exploit your inability to wait, your need to play after being fed so much hype. For some people, they can afford to impulse buy, and as like Shadow of War pre-orders show, there are whales that will buy insanely expensive pre-orders. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, it's just that the huge sliding scale of privilege and price has a bunch of knock on effects. It dictates the approach to selling the game for devs and publishers, what to parcel out to what. And that in turn forces developers to slice their game up, and/or spend resources on things not everyone will see rather than pouring all their effort into the core game experience everyone is guaranteed to have. (I.e, QA, polishing, bug fixing or just giving content more depth.) Sometimes this is a trivial exchange (some weapon skins and tweaked stats do not take an eternity to do)....and sometimes it's not (whole DLC side missions, areas, content and/or game modes.)
So for me I have to feel very comfortable with a game to preorder. The perks just generally aren't worth the risk to me. I'd rather wait a day or two after release to see what the shell shockers are (Mass Effect 4, ha. Ha. Ha.) before I commit to paying for yet another game I probably won't, in the end, finish and which will totally crowd out other games I have been playing, since it's the new hotness. If I was 15 but had the money I do as a 30 year old, pffft. I'd grind through games non-stop. But I'm not so wealthy or overflowing with free time I'm cool with spending a ton of money for benefits only to back log the game, ultimately. (That's what Steam sales are for >.>) For the person with tons of free time and money, sure, Pre-Orders are grand. For the average consumer I think they're mostly a trap, because very few devs or publishers want to give something truly worth a shit as a pure preorder exclusive. You're never going to see 1-time Pre-Order only content you will actually miss. If it took any amount of money to make, both developers and publishers have a mandate to use it to sell to everyone over time.
And I dunno, maybe this is just me but....I do not consider Kickstarters are pre-order, as I understand them. There's tangible, demonstrable gameplay you can see with most AAA games, and there's almost never any doubt that a AAA game that is offering a pre-order will actually get made.
Kickstarters.....are far, far riskier than a pre-order. I tend to judge games immediately on their aesthetic for whether they're a fit for me. And there's plenty of Kickstarter games I've backed where, in the final analysis, I didn't like what I paid for. That doesn't tend to happen with AAA games, which there is some ability to research what you're actually going to get. With how many notable failures and no-shows there've been with Kickstarter, I think it's risky to mentally equate the two. Kickstarter isn't an investment, and it isn't a pre-order. It's a donation with benefits.