God of War Ragnarok Continues The Trend Of Pointless Pre-Order Bonuses

thegamer.com:

God of War Ragnarok finally has a release date. The closing chapter in Kratos and Atreus’ journey is coming this November and will see them go up against massive monsters, angry gods, and all manner of other obstacles. Now we know when it’s coming gamers can stop harassing the developers for no good reason, right? Probably not, but we can dream.

Away from all the hype and speculation, Ragnarok’s long awaited news update also brings with it one of triple-A gaming’s worst habits: pre-order bonuses. These normally boil down to garish costumes or additional weapons that can be equipped from the off and serve to take away from the experience instead of adding to it. Yet they provide a reason for casual consumers to pre-order and add a valuable number to a publisher’s internal projections, so they aren’t going anywhere.

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I remember them picking up steam in the PS3 & Xbox 360 generation, with games like Mass Effect 3 having different bonuses locked to specific retailers, meaning that unless you were willing to purchase the game multiple times there was no way to own every piece of content the game had to offer. I know most of these bonuses were just ugly costumes, but EA knowingly took advantage of players by creating something only to lock it behind an obnoxious paywall. Several games from that era loved to offer small digital gifts to those who put their money down ahead of time, while pre-owned customers had to purchase online passes to access multiplayer and miss out on the so called ‘premium’ offerings.

Online passes thankfully died a welcome death, but pre-order culture is alive and well and arguably more blatant than ever. Look at God of War Ragnarok for example,