[jijikuya]

1. That's Valve's prerogative, not the developer's. If they're not partnered with Valve they may not have had the option to enact pre-purchases. [1]

2. The game has no DRM and Steam preorders (in my experience) download the game files so people can play instantly on launch day. (They call it 'preloading'). For a game as highly anticipated as this, it'd likely just be cracked, leaked and pirated the moment preorders came live.

[1]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/prepurchase

[brandon]

You don't believe Team Cherry's prior sales of Hollow Knight would reach the bar noted in the docs you linked?

Aside, your second point is incorrect. The SteamDB folks have a public write up on analysis of the preload system: https://steamdb.info/blog/steam-download-system/

[NobodyNada]

#2 seems like a technically solvable problem: AES-encrypt the preload and distribute the key on launch day.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

I thought they already did something like this. I recall some people complaining because the naive decryption process would double the required hard drive space while the bundle was unpacking on release day.

[jandrese]

There is no need for the decryption to double the needed size. You can chunk it to something reasonable and effectively rewrite the file in place.

[Hamuko]

Pretty sure they already do it. I've also noticed that if you have a fast connection (like 1 Gb/s down), it might be faster to download the game when it releases than it is to preload it and then decrypt it, since the decryption process is quite slow.

[semiquaver]

Of course they do. GGP has no idea what they are talking about.

[rbits]

They could've enabled pre-orders on Nintendo and Xbox