Deus Ex: MD - Pre-order Program Killed @Wired

Videogame pre-orders are a mess, which is why it's a welcome surprise to see Square Enix announcing that it's going to discontinue the controversial "Augment Your Preorder" scheme for the upcoming Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.

Square Enix cited "a resounding amount of negative feedback" as the reason for canceling the program.

It's become standard operating procedure in the past couple of years for videogame publishers to offer incentives like downloadable content to fans who pre-order their games.

Mankind Divided‘s pre-order scheme was more Byzantine than most, which is saying something. It was tiered, providing increasing amounts of rewards based on the total number of people who pre-ordered the game.

The final tier even offered fans who pre-ordered a chance to play the game four days before the official release date, the "everyone has to clap to bring Tinkerbell to life" of advertising gimmicks.

In place of the old program, all pre-orders and purchases of the Day 1 Edition will now come with all available rewards, and the game will be made playable to everyone at the same time, on the official release date of February 23, 2016.

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Shutting Down Augment Your Pre-Order
2015-10-01 12:53:50

At both Square Enix and Eidos-Montréal, we've been listening to everything you've had to say about the Augment Your Pre-Order program. When it was first conceived, we wanted the program to give you more choice about what you received in terms of pre-order incentives - because we've seen in the past that when we choose those packages ourselves, and split them across regions, it has caused frustration. We quickly noticed that this approach created even more frustration than before, resulting in a resounding amount of negative feedback.

We've spent a lot of time reading through all of your comments, working to understand how we can try to make things right for you. After much thought and reflection, we decided to close down the program and make all of the incentive content available to anyone who pre-orders Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or purchases a Day 1 edition of the game. Additionally, the release date will no longer be changed in accordance with pre-order numbers, and everyone will gain access to the game on February 23rd, 2016.

Your feedback and input is of the utmost importance to us-- as it's your loyalty and passion for our franchises that gives us the opportunity to continue providing you with great gaming experiences.

To our faithful fans who've already pre-ordered: we will be taking care of everything necessary to ensure that all of the changes to the program will be automatically applied to your purchase. Meanwhile, we'd like to thank everybody for their feedback - we know this wouldn't have happened with a game that nobody cared about, and we're just focusing now on delivering a game that lives up to your hopes and expectations.

Thanks for your support!

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the "everyone has to clap to bring Tinkerbell to life" of advertising gimmicks.

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