Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Controversial Pre-order Campaign Ditched

You might remember that, together with the game’s release date, Square Enix announced a surprisingly convoluted pre-order campaign for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at the end of August, which gave customers who pre-ordered a copy of the game the chance to mix and match their own rewards, with more of them being available as soon as a certain number of copies of the game was pre-ordered.

The fans weren’t pleased at this development, and that’s to use an understatement. The fans have been so vocal, in fact, that today the developers have announced the campaign has been dropped on their official website. All the pre-order bonuses minus the early access to the game will now be included with every pre-order and day 1 purchase:

At both Square Enix and Eidos-Montréal, we’ve been listening to everything you’ve had to say about the Augment Your Pre-Order program. When it was first conceived, we wanted the program to give you more choice about what you received in terms of pre-order incentives – because we’ve seen in the past that when we choose those packages ourselves, and split them across regions, it has caused frustration. We quickly noticed that this approach created even more frustration than before, resulting in a resounding amount of negative feedback.

We’ve spent a lot of time reading through all of your comments, working to understand how we can try to make things right for you. After much thought and reflection, we decided to close down the program and make all of the incentive content available to anyone who pre-orders Deus Ex: Mankind Divided or purchases a Day 1 edition of the game. Additionally, the release date will no longer be changed in accordance with pre-order numbers, and everyone will gain access to the game on February 23rd, 2016.

Your feedback and input is of the utmost importance to us– as it’s your loyalty and passion for our franchises that gives us the opportunity to continue providing you with great gaming experiences.

To our faithful fans who’ve already pre-ordered: we will be taking care of everything necessary to ensure that all of the changes to the program will be automatically applied to your purchase. Meanwhile, we’d like to thank everybody for their feedback – we know this wouldn’t have happened with a game that nobody cared about, and we’re just focusing now on delivering a game that lives up to your hopes and expectations.

Thanks for your support!

PR spin aside, this is a good development. All pre-orders and early purchases are rewarded regardless of the store chosen, and there is no pressure to pre-order to unlock new rewards. Sure, it can be argued that the “Augment your Pre-order” campaign shouldn’t have existed in the first place, but at least now it’s gone.