

Back in the early 2000s I met some guy who had once sold a copy of edit.exe to some store as if it were some software he had written for managing orders and inventory. The folks at the store used windows, but they would open up edit.exe and it looked just like the stuff that the larger store chains used to manage their own orders… The guy just made a sample file and instructed them how to input data in a specific format that made it all look like a table, but it was just a text file with no validation of any kind.
Only case where I consider pre-ordering is if there’s a decent discount for doing it and I know that I’ll definitely want the game at launch (for example if most of my group of friends will be playing it at the same time).