Many months before a game is released, the game is feature complete and they only fix bugs. Do you believe a single publisher will delay the release of a still buggy game because of the lack of preorders? No way. They'll release it anyways, because fixing bugs takes time, takes money and if there's already low pre-order numbers, they as well can decide that this extra money spend isn't worth it.

This whole don't preorder topic is illogical. My favorite comment so far on Reddit was: " but people forget to refund". That's their issue and not of pre-orders.lol

If anything the publisher sees interest in the game from preorders and will found/agree to more DLC or sees enough interest to greenlight the sequel right away. Which both is great for the devs. Maybe even delays a buggy game, because all the pre-order could guarantee a giant success, which would only be possible if the game is mostly bug free. You see you can easily twist the argument around.

[–] CoderKat@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

They're not always feature complete. Plenty of games are crunching to finish things last minute and sometimes do last minute cuts because they can't finish things.

But I agree that they'll usually release at the announced date regardless of the game's final state. To be fair to them, advertising is insanely expensive and ad campaigns are often planned with a specific release date in mind. Some software is never gonna be 100%, too, and does need some pressure to just accept some issues or cut some things.

But usually it's just a plain old disconnect between devs and higher ups/project managers. Estimating software dev is insanely difficult and higher ups in charge of the final calls are often either not devs, too insulated from the devs, or sometimes just egoistic to listen to anyone but themselves.