If you complain loud enough, publishers will listen.
Square Enix announced today on the official site for the upcoming Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that it’s canceling the game’s controversial preorder program, which had people pick rewards from multiple tiers while unlocking more incentives as more consumers bought preorders. These included everything from in-game items to even bumping up the release four days earlier than its February 23 debut. The fact that Square Enix has backed off from such an ambitious but controversial program shows that all of those negative comments and tweets made by gamers do actually make a difference.
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Preorders are important for publishers, since amassing a lot of them convinces retailers to stock more copies of the game. Incentives become an important marketing tool, since they can boost those numbers. However, publishers need to tread carefully. Gamers can become easily annoyed when those incentives become segmented by platform or retailer. The Deus Ex program was even worse, in that it essentially threatened consumers that they wouldn’t get every reward unless enough people preordered the game.