Gift vouchers can be nice presents, but if you think about it, you’re paying for the opportunity to lock in your money forcing the recipient to shop at that particular company. And more often than not, the recipient will then spent a little more than the value of the voucher in order to use it all. If you’d given them money instead, the outcome would have been the same, but this way the company gets your cash in advance. I have to hand it to whoever came up with the idea, it’s a capitalist’s wet dream!
And pre-orders (I’m specifically thinking of videogames here), this did make sense once upon a time when you were buying a physical copy that may have had limited stocks. But nowadays for digital pre-orders… what’s the point? You’re putting your trust in the company that the game will be polished from the start. At least with something like a Kickstarter, you’re helping to fund development of the game. But here what exactly do you get out of it? Maybe some additional pre-order cosmetics that’ll you use once? The concept is bizarre to me.
Game pre-orders have not been good for sane people. Sure if people didn’t pre-order less games might exist overall but more good games would exist. Pre-orders have taught game companies that they can just make a game that looks pretty and has a fancy trailer and people will buy it. So now they all do that instead of making good games.