First, it is a digital copy, which is almost no cost to them. It isn't like they are still worried about selling physical copies on the shelf of this game anymore. It's a year old, which is FOREVER in game years. Not to be confused with MMO years, which have a mid-life crisis and go free-to-play. Besides, getting people to play Dead Space 2 while waiting to player Battlefield 3 is a great way to bait them into buying Dead Space 3 which should be coming along pretty soon.
Second, by setting this precedent you can be sure I will not be pre-ordering anything again, at least not until the absolute very last minute. Why should customers give them early pre-order numbers if it means we will be screwed out of some incentive later on for the people who were waffling and weren't supporting the game with their pre-order dollars?
Third, they are trying to pump up Origin, their new digital store. Everybody already says it isn't good as Steam and that Valve is good and EA is bad. You buy some indie bundle on Steam and they later add a game to it, it gets added to your library automatically. This just proves that EA doesn't know what they are doing and are screwing up Origin just like they screwed up every other attempt they've made at a online digital store in the past. What is this their 3rd or 4th attempt at a digital store? Anybody else think they only named it Origin to thumb their nose at Lord British?
There are people on EA's forum have said when they contacted customer support, they were told the only way to get Dead Space 2 was to cancel their pre-order and then re-pre-order it. The sound you aren't hearing is my head banging on the table.
