How much days before release do games get shipped in store?

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The Witcher 3 is out in one week I was wondering if its normal my copy isn't shipped in store yet.

As far as I know, it's entirely dependent on what day shipments usually arrive for the store in question. They dont send out seperate special shipments (usually) for things like this. When I worked at Gamestop, everything always came on Wednesday. Most other stores I'm familiar with seem to follow a similar pattern.

Could have changed up a bit by now of course, but I wouldnt worry about it.

I think they get there a few days in advance or even the day before to make sure the shop employees don't play it early/sell it early. There was a thing with Halo a few years back where a store sold them early and people got the XBL accounts prema-band.

This, in a nutshell, is the thing I like most about Steam. That's not to say I won't be blithely throwing my money at a few more consoles in the foreseeable.

Kk I'll start to worry if its still not shipped 2 or 3 days before release.

Same.

Even on consoles I'm mostly just downloading everything. Less stupidity to deal with. Less GAMESTOP to deal with. I've been there MAYBE three times in the last 2 years. Each time, only reluctantly.

The downloading.... soooooo much better. And I dont have to worry about the discs.

You know publishers and developers can pull their games from Steam, which you will lose it from your library and won't be compensated.

Steam can also ban your account, if they feel that your in violation of their terms or did something they don't agree with.
It's very rare to get your account unbanned.
If you do get banned, you lose everything and aren't compensated.

Valve isn't above Microsoft or Sony...

Also Sony is horrible with how they treat customers on PSN.
If someone hacks your account (which happens like clockwork) and spends your money/charges your credit card, Sony will normally ban your account when you report it.
Sony will fight you tooth and nail about reversing the charges and doing anything about the person who hacked you.
If you do charge back, Sony will ban your PSN account losing everything.

Also if PSN screws up and overcharges you, Sony will fight you over a refund.
If you fight them too hard, they will ban your PSN account, costing you all your digital software.

If their PSN servers have trouble with downloading the game and it doesn't work properly, be prepared for a huge fight with Sony that may wind up with your account being banned.

When an account is banned on PSN, it is permanently deleted from the database for good!

Sony also says it cannot afford to add better security to PSN log ins and accounts.

Microsoft is kinder and will work with you if you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that something happened that wasn't your fault.
But they aren't against permanently banning you from XBL.


Nintendo on the other hand is quite nice to deal with compared to Microsoft, as long as you can prove that your Wii U, Wii and/or 3DS have had issues, they will refund and/or restore your digital purchases.

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I'd rather buy physical games at Gamstop or even Target for that matter, than deal with a digital service for the most part.
Though I do buy some games digitally.

As for shipping dates...

If the games release on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday the game will be at the store by noon on Friday, since UPS and Fedex don't ship on the weekends.

If the game is releasing on a Monday, it might come on Friday or Monday morning.

Normally games come the day before release unless the publisher ships it ahead of time.

Those problems are all easily stopped, though. My solution: Stuff everything into a backup physical drive (and recently, onto a second computer entirely). Of which I may make a second eventually. It means Steam cannot lose anything; Steam itself is not actually required to run any of the games except for those that are online-only of course (works out well for my laptop, which is often used in places with no connection whatsoever). It's actually very easy to prevent this sort of problem with that. Now as for account bans.... frankly, I have absolutely no sympathy for those that get theirs banned. None whatsoever.

Either way though, it's much better to me than using discs. The damn things just end up all over my room; in my case, discs are good at one thing and one thing only, which is getting lost and scratched. Heck, I notice the Mario 3D World disc from where I'm sitting, and I"m not actually sure how it got to where it is...


......and Sony is Sony. In their case, I.... just dont care enough. Games I wanted on PS4 were few enough that I did buy most of them on disc because PSN is irritating and I didnt feel like navigating it's stupidity. And their security really IS bad, aint it? Damn idiots.

Nintendo though, I have no problems with their store, it doesnt immediately irritate me or glitch out or something, so it's been useful.

Only if all those people who were banned on Steam actually deserve it and it wasn't for something asinine and petty.
You do know the interpretation of many of the rules are left up to those who are on duty or are initiated by publishers and developers (Valve isn't going to tell them off).
Valve is equally as evil and anti consumer as EA, Activison, Ubisoft, EA and WB.

All games you buy on Steam require you to use the Steam application, due to DRM, to prevent piracy.
They just know started letting you save and run your games from external hard drives.
Most games on Steam allow you to run them from external hard drives and in Steam offline mode.
You just have to log into Steam (Connecting to Steam servers) before you can switch to offline mode.

I learned that lesson the hard way when I spent the day in a hospital waiting room a few years ago.
The hospital had Steam banned from their WIFI because they didn't agree with some of the content on Steam.
I literally could not load any game, be it Sonic 4 or Simcity 4 because I had to log into Steam first...

I've never been able to launch any game in my library to date be it Cities Skylines (which has no DRM other than requiring Steam to use) and all the other titles I have (~10) without first logging into Steam.
(I've tried recently).

The only games that don't require Steam to run, are those you imported to your Steam library from other sources.

I'll put it this way:

I have 300+ games on Steam.

EIGHT of them. Only EIGHT. Require Steam to run (as in, ACTUALLY requires it). EIGHT. Note that I try this out with each new game, because I prefer to know about it for later on if something (windows) causes problems.
Note, that some games, to run without Steam, quite literally require you to run them WITHOUT Steam. As in, do not even start Steam up or allow it to run. Dive into their directories directly, and run it from there. But all aside from those 8 that I have can be run in this way, OR on Steam's offline mode.

Also.... no, no you do NOT have to log into Steam's servers to run in offline mode. How do I know this? Again, the "used Steam to freaking death since it came out" bit plus the part where the laptop is rarely online (also, until VERY recently, Comcast itself used to have annoyingly frequent "bad days", where it was IMPOSSIBLE to connect to anything at all; those days, it could not touch the servers whatsoever, because derp. I ever mention I hate Comcast?). I run Steam, I tell it 'no, you cant connect, sorry", it begins in offline mode. No, seriously, it's that simple. If you're being required to connect FIRST just to play UNCONNECTED, something's gone wrong (and no, I have no idea what). There's a reason it's called "offline mode". When offline, either the PC here, or the laptop, or whoever else's machine I may be on, or any machine I've tried it on, simply wants the password not to log into the servers it cannot conceivably access (due to not being connected to the net at all), but simply to load the Steam program itself.

Now bear with me here, as I decided, since Im very obsessive and this would have just BOTHERED me if I didnt do this, to make sure to PROVE that this is the case. Since you had mentioned Skylines, I decided to use that for the first test. Here is what I did:

1. Disable the internet. I dont do this in Windows or anything, I yank the power cables out of all conceivably related devices in the house. No modem, no router, NOTHING that could either connect or even confuse Windows into thinking something is there.

2. Make sure Windows is aware of this. ....yes, this IS a stupid step. Yes, I realize the derp that is here. No, I dont know how the universe doesnt collapse from the sheer stupidity of this step being required, but I've seen windows do some damn strange crap when it THINKS the connection is there but the modem itself is FREAKING POWERLESS.

3. Disable all of Steam's.... everything. Thus, it will not even run upon startup by itself. I disabled a bunch of other things too on a random whim, and because some of them were annoying me.

4. Shut down the PC.

5. Wait 5 minutes, restart. Turn on laptop as well (which runs Windows 8, while the PC runs Windows 7).

6. Wait for Windows to finish nearly imploding while trying to handle it's own bloody stupid existence (in case you havent noticed by now, I dont like Windows much).

7. Fire up Steam. I have not connected any devices at this point. Everything but the PC and the monitor have been unplugged. Unnecessary things were also disconnected from the back of the PC itself (because seriously, I'm that obsessive. Yes, I know it's dumb, but just humor me, I tend to be like this...)

8. Steam gives me it's customary "Cannot reach Steam services / internet" error. Well, duh, there IS no internet. I tell it to enter offline mode. It does this.

9. Click on library to bring up, well, the library. Find Skylines, start it up.

10. It loads. I get to the title screen. News feed on there, obviously, isnt working since there's no connection, but it's fine otherwise. That's not good enough for me though, so.....

11. Load up one of my saves at random. Works fine, game runs fine.... not only that, but I can even access the mods (that I've already downloaded from the workshop) if I want. I can load saves, save new ones, do anything that I want.... there's no errors, no issues, nothing interfering. Seriously; the game runs perfectly. Spent some time with it that way, and after I was done....

12. Tried a bunch of other games at random, again, because I"m obsessive. Worked fine.

13. Duplicate this process on the laptop. Worked fine.


And then after that, I shut everything down, reconnected the modem and all of that stuff, and so on, and now everything is back to normal. Like I said: you dont need to be connected to do any of this. It's not necessary. I've had to do this on friends' computers as well at times (for a variety of dumb reasons), and it works for them as well.


Now as for DRM, and note that this info comes directly not from me, but from the mouth of an actual developer that has about 10 games on there, the sort that end up on the front page's central display when released (and no, I didnt get this from an article, this was told to me directly by that dev), it's actually NOT Valve's decision in most cases. The developer themselves decides on if they want to use Steam's DRM; most do not, because it doesnt really accomplish much (though obviously there are exceptions) and irritates consumers. ....and of course you get some groups (like Ubisoft) that'll just use their OWN DRM, which just makes it about a million times worse.... Have you used Ubisoft's DRM before? If not.... be glad you didnt. Be very glad. ....no seriously, it's THAT bad.


Understand, Steam pretty much IS what you could call my own central gaming.... thing. The 300 games I have from it are just the tip of the iceberg; that count (and also all of the things I'm saying here) doesnt include all the OTHER things that I've since manually attached to it (for convenience, because i'm lazy). So yeah, I've used it alot. And again, I'm not just making this stuff up: Anything I say in here, such as running the games offline without any connection or without Steam itself, is something I've already done many times. I dont ALWAYS use Steam, you see; there's times when I want to be able to just not appear online to friends AT ALL (because I dont want to be pestered when I'm not feeling up to being social), so I'll just run the games directly from their own seperate directories without allowing Steam itself to load. This also makes it much easier to diagnose problems that a given game may be having; when issues are being had, Steam can actually interfere with the process of fixing stuff; this fact is.... very annoying. Very very annoying.


Now as for things like account banning.... I've seen this occur, and I've seen what typically causes the banning, and.... yeah. When I said I have no sympathy, I absolutely and completely mean it. It's very easy to follow the rules on there, and of the admins/whatever I"ve met, I've not run into a stupid one. I'm not saying those guys never make mistakes, no no no. I dont think there's any group of admins and such anywhere that THAT could be said about. But still.... I just dont have any sympathy, not after everything I've seen over the years.

Now I'll admit, part of that could just be me and my typically negative.... everything, as I tend to usually not have too much sympathy for this sort of thing. So that could be a huge factor. But that bit is just my own opinion anyway. I think I can understand why others would totally see otherwise.


....also, before someone mentions it: No, I dont ONLY buy tiny indie games or some crap like that. I just buy whatever happens to look interesting at the time. It varies wildly and can range from the huge AAA titles, to some tiny 2 dollar thing that some random guy threw out. I have many of each.


....of course, ALL of this stuff is totally moot if WINDOWS decides to interfere. That's where *I* run into problems, entirely at random (usually wiht things other than games though). And that's where you get the true value of the consoles: NO WINDOWS. That Wii U? Perfect every time! It doesnt crash! Ever! And honestly, using that or the PS4 can be a pleasant relief from the usual nonsense that Windows flings at me at random.

Yeah no... that's not worth disrupting my internet.

I always have my laptop connected to the internet by default, granted OS X is my primary OS.

Also my Macbook Pro runs Windows 8.1 without any major issues... there is the occasional minor issue.
Can't wait to upgrade to Windows 10 this July.

I rarely have an internet issue when I am at home...

For all I know my shared account has already been banned, for all I care it could be. I only bought GTA4 on there anyway, maybe Portal 2... It's water under the bridge and I'm so busy working and studying lately that I'll just go nuts with consoles when I have the time, money, house & stereo to do so. After all, I just spent 3 hours at a hackathon building an Android game I'll probably end up publishing...

Yeah, even my internet has been stable recently (and I typically have mine online by default also; unless I'm at a hotel, cause those connections can get a little odd). I'm not sure why. I mean, it's Comcast. It must be a ruse. Surely, they are up to no good!

And Windows 10 is July, eh? I'd been wondering about that. I havent seen that much about it actually, so I dont really know what the feature list is. I've heard it's supposed to be pretty good, but yeah, I've not seen much detailed info on it. I'm not too fond of Windows 8, so here's hoping that improvement really is the case.

4 days and 2 hours left before release and my pre-order still isn't shipped in store

AMD leaked the release date a earlier this month.
There are a lot of new features such as Cortana, Full digital App Store ala OS X, smaller foot print, new dynamic start menu that blends old style with 8.1 style, option to turn the titles on, more efficient OS, streaming between Xbox One and PC, most apps will be cross compatible with 10, 10 mobile, and Xbox One, and other features...

I personally love 8.1 and I like how 10 is turning out too.

It should ship the day before and be ready on day of release.
Games normally don't ship early due to street dates and contracts.