Gears of War 2 pre orders now available on Amazon.com

Yeah, you read that right, and no, I have not lost my mind. Continuing their long (and arguably harmful to the industry) tradition, they have begun taking pre orders on their site at this page.

disclaimer: sorry in advance for the following rant, please know these are my own views I thought I would add in to the news, and not 360sync’s as a whole.

I personally think they are getting a bit carried away with the whole pre order thing they have been doing. More and more Amazon is beginning to offer them up on games long before the publishers even set a quarter, let alone a date, for release. For example, Gears 2, according to them, is slated for November 15th 2008. Now its been long suspected the game will launch in the late fall of 08, that is a given, however they are more or less just pulling a number out of their ass and we know it. The problem with this is, while they can easily just change that number as they need to as well as when Epic releases official word on the true date, this is not a good thingâ„¢. Places like Amazon and Gamestop are the BIG go-to places for release date info and reservations. When they begin to pull numbers out of their ass, without conferring with developers, they are going to put the developers in a bind. As a level headed reader, we both know who to believe first. However the collective consumer population as a whole will begin to doubt the ability of Developers to make target dates based on this, because the storefront side of things is who they see and hear from the most. This is their informational sources, not the Studios who make the games, that generally only a smaller percentage of serious customers follow. How long before they start to do this with EVERY new title, and not just big, highly anticipated hits?