I never pre-order games. Developers can offer me all kinds of goodies, like exclusive content or free DLC, but I still never take them up. I’ve learned my lesson. I’ve been bu🌼rned too often.

Now I know better than to believe the hype surrounding any game. Pre-release footage can be faked or edited to look better than it is. The developers may show you something that looks great on their development rig but runs like absolute garbage once you bring it home. In rare cases, they might even outright lie to your face about features tha🧔t were supposed to be included but were cut.

The sad part is this never used to be a problem with games. Back in the day, there was something called “shareware” or “demo” discs that allowed you to try out the game before you bought it. They’d often come as super stripped-down versions of the gam🀅e on a 3.5’’ floppy disk and would only allow you to play for the first 15-20 minutes, but that was enough to let you know whether the game was worth buying or not. There was also video rental stores that would have game rental sections that let you pay 5 bucks, test out the game for a weekend, and come back to buy it if you liked it enough.

But then the internet killed the video store, and share🍒ware got too ea𒁃sy to share. Now you can either pre-order a game based on little more than prayer or you wait until release day for everyone to give you the “all clear”.

Here are 15 games that should convince you it’s better to wait before slapping down your hard-earne🌼d cash.

15 ♔ No Man's Sky ꦐ

Perhaps the post꧅er child of “don’t bel🍒ieve the hype,” No Man’s Sky’s release was like watching the Challenger explosion. Everyone’s hopes and dreams go ꩵsoaring into the grea🥀t beyond, only to come crashing down in flames moments after launch.

No Man’s Sky was supposed to be the exploration game to end all exploration games; millions of procedurally generated worlds, animals, and star systems for you to explore with your friends or by yourself. The premise was so grand that it got the attention of Sony Entertainment, who offered their services for promotion and publication. An independent game good enough to grab ꦇa real giant of the industry couldn’t be bad, right?

Wrong. No Man’s Sky had huge issues on release, with player’s reporting numerous bugs and🔴 crashes. If you were foolish enough to pre-order the game there was a game-breaking bug just for you: the in-game pre-order bonus spaceship had a chance to strand players on a pla🌞net, ending the game then and there. Even if you didn’t catch any bugs, the game just didn’t live up to the hype, with procedurally generated everything looking more of the same as the player continued on their travels.

14 ൲ Battlefield 4🏅

You may remember Battlefield 4 from our last article about EA, but if you didn’t here’s a spoiler 🅠for you: EA rushes out ga꧒mes before they’re done, and it usually doesn’t go well for anyone.

Battlefield 4 was a particularly rushed game. Released on🐻 October 29th, 2013 after being available for pre-release order for 6 months, players were met with more bugs and glitches than can♓ be counted in this brief entry. It was so bad that in order to stem the tide of angry gamers they were forced to release paid multiplayer content for free, such as camo-skins, weapon bundles, and XP boosters.

That was enough for 🌜gamers, but EA’s investors weren’t happy. They actually sued for misleading statements as to the game’s quality. If billion-dollar hedge funds areཧ starting to think twice about supporting a game before release, maybe you should too.

13 Diablo III 🍸

Diablo II was one of the biggest smash hits of the early 2000s, and would maintain its reign as the de facto a𒈔ction RPG for years afterward. Diablo III was met with incredible anticipation and millions of pre-ord♏ers who downloaded the game weeks in advance so they could play it immediately upon𒉰 release day.

And then release day came, and millཧions of players couldn’t play at all o💖wing to Diablo III’s server issues. Despite bei🅘ng a game players could play by themselves, Diablo III required every player to hav♒e an internet connection to verify the game with Blizzard’s servers. No internet connection meant no game. However, the same was true for their servers, and Blizzard had somehow💛 grossly underestimated the number of players clamouring to play their latest offering.

Blizzard’s servers buckled, then broke under the weight of millions of ♐ravenous gamers trying to log in to play, and it would be weeks before they would get the issues fixed.

12 SimCity

Never one to be outdone, EA had their own game that always required players to have an internet connection i🌊n order to play, and they decided they’d one up Blizzard with their release of SimCity.

Much like Diablo III, SimCity is a beloved franchise that can be played alone, but due to pi🐼racy concerns♛ the company decided to institute an “always online” rule in order to prevent anyone from stealing their game. And just like Diablo, EA badly missed the mark on how many servers they’d need to have up and run▨ning on release day. Millions of players who downloaded the pre-order tried to log in to play, only to be met with a sad “servers busy” message.

Gamers were furious. It got so bad that Amazon pulled the game from♏ their store a week after release. Many demanded their money back, but instead of offering refunds EA offered a free game from their online catalogue. It would be a week for the server issues to finally be resolved, but it would forever scar the hearts of SimCity fans.

11 The War Z

An early precursor to games like DayZ and H1Z1, The War Z was an open-world survival game where players join an online 🧸session to fight for survival agꦬainst hordes of zombies.

At least, that was what it was supposed to be. The alpha seemed acceptable, a✨nd pre-orders for the game were lining up. Then on release day it turned out to be a complete dumpster fire. Many aspects of the game that were advertised as features turned out to be blatant falsehoods like skilled based leveling and 100 player servers. Worse still were the numerous micro-transactions for in-game loot or to𒐪 bypass the ludicrous hour long respawn timer.

Many players would demand a refund, which the game’s developers Hammerpoint Interact🍨ive wouldn’t provide. Eventually, The War Z was pulled from Steam altogether, and Valve offered full refunds. If you ordered direct from the game’s we💙bsite though you were out of luck.

10 Assassin's Creed Unity ꦍ ✱

With downloadable content becoming the norm for games in the 2000s, developers started add💮ing the season pass to their pre-orders. Essentially this gave players future DLC along with the game, often without even a hint as to what that DLC might be. If there’s anything worse than pre-ordering a game, it’s pre-ordering the season pass.

The eighth installment of the Assassin’s Creed franchise released to some of the most ridiculous bugs gamers had ever seen. D𒀰espite the fact Unity had been delayed three months from its initial release date, players were greeted with a game t♎hat looked literally half done.

In response to the 🍬furor, EA offered the first and largest DLC for the game, Dead Kings, for free to those who bought the stand alone game. If you were unlucky enough to hav𒀰e bought the season pass, all you got was access to a downloadable copy of an EA game you probably already ow༺ned (or didn’t want), and a heartfelt corporate apology.

9 Fin🐓al Fantasy XIV

Squa🎃re Enix has had a rough time in the MMORPG world, but nothing was as rough as the original release for Final Fantasy XIV in 2010. The controls were a mess, the UI was incomprehensible, and heaven help you if you wanted to buy anything because there wasn’t a single sign to🐎 tell you w♏hat a store was selling. To top it all off, there was a system in place that caused players to gain increasingly less experience on weapons the longer they played. Those who pre-ordered the game rightfully felt a little cheesed.

Both the game’s director and producer were removed after the game’s dismal release, which was the modern equivalent of the emperor demanding seppuku for their failure. PlayStation 3 users were spared as the game was so bad it never got beyo♏nd the PC release. The game was eventually taken down entirely to be rebuilt from the ground up, re-releasing as Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn nearly three years later.

8 Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfa❀re 🌠

Call of Duty is a wa🎃rgame franchise that has gone l𝄹iterally everywhere. With Advanced Warfare the🌠y finally go into the future, and the next logical step is clearly Call of Duty: Outerspace.

What? The🐎y’re going back to World War Two for the next one? Pfft. Whatever.

Anyway, If you pre-ordered Advanced Warfare you were in for a nasty surprise. Both PlaySt𓆉ation 4 and Xbox One versions had game breaking bugs that made the game completely unplayable. For PS4 the only solution was to re-download a patched version of the game since the autopatcher wasn’t working. For Xbox One it was even worse: the autopatcher would work, but if you installed from disc it would hang your system indefinitely. Players had to manually turn off the autopatcher, install from disc, and then turn it back on in order to download the patch and play.

It’s issues like these that tell players it might be a better idea to buy games a month💦 or so after release.

7 World Of🔜 Warcraft

The largest and longest running MMORPG to date, World of Warcraft has seen over 100 million players since its release in 2004. Since then it’s been updated with ꦫnew content ceaselessly, with each expansion allowing you to pre-order.

If you pre-ordered the original game, however, you were a bit shocked at what you got on release day. The game was filled with glitches and bugs,🌄 and that was if you could 🐲even play the game at all. Most of the time players were relegated to a login queue as Blizzard’s servers struggled to keep up with the massive number of players. It would be nearly an entire month before the server issues were resolved, and at that point why would you bother pre-ordering at all?

I guess you got a fancy mount. Hope it was worth 🦋the wait.

6 💎 Batman: Arkham Knight

When a game is pushed back eight m♓onths from its p🍎rojected release date, that should be a warning sign to everyone that pre-ordering is likely a bad idea. If you still bought it anyway, you practically deserve whatever you get.

Arkham Knight was released to generally high reviews for PS4 and Xbox One. The PC version got reviews so negative that Warner Bros. E﷽ntertainment actually suspended sales for them to work out the bugs. Months after the June 2015 release the game was still suffering from horrible frame rate and lag issues. Immediately after rele▨ase, Warner Bros. gave refunds to anyone who purchased the game for PC, but after months of patches and persistent performance loss, they also offered refunds to people who’d owned and played the game to completion.

To summarize, Warner Bros. essentially paid the player to play their game by giving them a refund after they were done. All 🧜you had to give them in return was your♛ time and sanity.

Personally, I still w🧔ouldn’t have taken them up on it.