RPS Article

Sadness is the primary emotion expressed on social media about pre-ordering games, according to one of Adobe’s marketing data arms. Their report is all very wishy-washy, but it can still start an interesting conversation: why do pre-orders make people sad, and why do we still do it?


The study put together by Adobe Digital Index about the games market includes numbers on “social emotions around pre-ordering”, looking at instances of folks chatting about pre-orders on social media and somehow breaking their tone down into five arbitrary emotions: joy; admiration; surprise; anticipation; and sadness.

Sadness came out top, at 33%.
My guess is that even the term "pre-order" conjures up the memories of all the times you got burned by a pre-order game. This is certainly one of the reasons why I haven't pre-ordered in ages.