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.
Square Enix wrote that its original intention was to "give you more choice about what you received in terms of pre-order incentives." For instance, the choice to pressure your friends into buying a game that might not even be good so that you can get the best trench coat.
