GameStop To Honor Ancient Duke Nukem Pre-Orders
doug141 writes "GameStop encourages customers who pre-ordered more than a year ago to verify their reservation with their local store. 'Provided the customer has a receipt, we will honor even those pre-orders taken long ago. At this time, we expect that all pre-order customers will receive Duke's Big Package at time of purchase, regardless of when the reservation was made.'" If you have an especially old order, though, you might want to visit the store with your original punchcard, or a daguerreotype of it.
It's news because some of these pre-orders are nearly a decade old. TF2 was announced, un-announced, went through it's own epic development hell, was released, had over a hundred patches released, all in the time between some of these preorders being made and the game finally coming out.
Not only that, but some of those pre-orders may be for ports that no longer exist - can you transfer a Saturn edition pre-order into an XBox360 preorder? A PS1 preorder into a PS3 preorder?
Not necessarily. This IS GameStop we're talking about, here. A friend of mine in SF went in to pickup a copy of LA Noire on launch day. The salesdroid rather rudely stated, "We don't have any copies for non-preorders. If you wanted to play this game, then you should have preordered it." At which point he promptly went 5 minutes down the street to the pit of hell known as Best Buy and picked up one of the hundred or so copies on the shelf. He then returned to GameStop to give them a hearty "fuck you".
The lesson here is that a LOT of GameStop managers will ONLY order enough stock to cover preorders. They do this in a misguided attempt to coerce people into preordering future titles so they can artificially inflate the metrics for their store. This is also the same company that likes to sell used copies on launch day, and shove strategy guides down your throat like a Geek Squad goon pitches dubious service plans.
tl;dr - fuck GameStop.
"So after all this, you make my case for me. To end this stalemate, you must die..."