I don’t think anyone should preorder. It’s a predatory way to suck a full price of the game or even higher than normal price out of customers by using often laughably cheap benefits to drum up FOMO.
For me personally, I rarely have interest in brand new AAA games, which are the most guilty of pre-order sales tactics, so the problem more or less solves itself.
Early Access games can be a different story. I’m more willing to throw money at a small studio or solo project that appears to have some passion behind it. Even so I only spend with the mindset that whatever state the game is in might be all I ever get, so match the price to that expectation. I recently played through Deathtrash. It’s unfinished and is historically slow to get updates, however for the $11 I got it for on sale, it had a lot of content and I felt happy with what I got.
Project Zomboid is another example of a “permanently Early Access” game. It might never get out of Early Access but it has so much content now that $20 is a perfectly acceptable price. The history of devs supporting it and the community around it means support for it is unlikely to simply disappear.
I mostly made models and textures, I was never a one-person team. I made assets for a number of students in game dev programming and I worked on some gamejams. Quite a few games, but nothing beyond the scope of a limited project. Currently I just don’t have the time in between other things to go back to making assets.
I often agree with this, though for Death Trash given the slow pace of major updates I figured I’d just jump in. It only took me about 10 hours to beat the main content, and a few more hours poking around to feel finished with the game. This isn’t something like Zomboid with a big sandbox element to sink hours and hours into.
Honestly, at the pace it’s being updated I don’t know if it will get a huge proper ending.
I’ll never get past the Dangerous Hunts games since some management somewhere at Cabela’s had to approve a hunting game with deep lore about a literal shapeshifting demon and chimpanzee supersoldiers.
In Wasteland 2 there is a museum of pre-war artifacts. One item is an undetonated nuclear bomb. If you monkey around with it you can find a big red button. It is obviously a terrible idea to push the button. If you still decide to push it you get a special game over screen.
I noticed you haven’t mentioned the actual quality of the content. Is it a responsibility to give money to a medium simply because it takes payment instead of using ad revenue?
The competition for what’s in those magazines is with independent online reviewers.
The idea of ranking games on a numerical scale is inherently flawed. I suspect many publications still use it as a way to make nice with game publishers. Text that’s lukewarm can slap a 9/10 score on and a lot of people just jump over the review to the “objective” score.
Not all YouTubers are quality. This is obvious. What I am saying is that I’ve found a mere handful who are quality and for my tastes they have replaced the entire legacy professional gaming journalistic media. Other people I’m sure can find similar YouTubers who cater to their tastes and opinions.