Deus Ex: Mankind Divided's Pre-Order Campaign Gets the Axe

Back in August, Square-Enix announced a pre-order plan for the upcoming Deus Ex: Mankind Divided that managed to turn more than a few heads. It had the same hooks as your average Kickstarter, albeit one ran by a multinational company worth countless millions.

And if this news somehow escaped your righteous indignation, the following image sums it up perfectly:

Essentially, these Augment Your Pre-Order rewards amounted to the equivalent of "stretch goals." The more people put money down on Mankind Divided, the greater the bonus bounty would be—with the gold at the end of the rainbow being a chance to play the game four days early. Since the launch of this pre-order campaign, it's been nearly impossible to find any positive reactions hurled its way, and thankfully, Square-Enix has been paying attention to all of this negativity: Instead of doubling down on their marketing plan, they're washing their hands of it altogether.

Here's what the official Mankind Divided website has to say on the matter:

"At both Square Enix and Eidos-Montreal, 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 the 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 day will no longer be changed in accordance with pre-order numbers, and everyone will gain access to the game on February 23rd 2016."

On top of this, everyone who's already pre-ordered will have the changes to the program automatically applied to their purchase. It just goes to show that, if you're vocal enough, your voice can actually have an impact—so long as it stands to make something potentially unprofitable.