If there's one thing that game developers and publishers want, it's for gamers to purchase their game before it even releases. This is made evident with the over abundance of extravagant pre-order campaigns that accompany almost every major game release.
There's the sold out Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 pre-order, the Juggernog Edition, that comes with a mini-fridge, season pass and more, there's a Star Wars Battlefront pre-order that also comes with a mini-fridge, there's the sold out Fallout 4's Pip-Boy Edition — basically, if the game has been announced – you can buy it now.
Some might think the game industry is suffocating itself with pre-orders, but it looks like pre-orders are suffocating game fans more than than the industry itself.
According to Adobe Digital Index's US Gaming Trends 2015 report, based on aggregated and anonymous data from more than 20 million "engagements" on a variety of social media platforms, pre-order campaigns bring more sadness than any other emotion.
When it comes to pre-orders pre-orders, the majority of fans expressed sadness (33%), followed by joy (18%), and admiration (18%). The rest of the emotions concerning pre-orders were made up of surprise (9%) and, the emotion that most pre-orders intend to produce, anticipation (2%) came in dead last.
An interesting thing to note with the sadness would be to see if the 'sad' expressions were correlated to the sold out pre-orders. Fallout 4 and Black Ops 3 pre-orders sold out within minutes, leaving a huge portion of the fanbase without the items they wanted most – this could very well skew the data.
I have reached out to Adobe for more information on whether or not this was taken into account.
