I got it for free in the process of paying for a game I wanted, you can't really get cheaper than free
Not to start an argument, but that makes the assumption that cost = value. I personally don't think GTA V PC = the selling price of $90-loving-Australian-dollars, and so it seems to me that I would also be paying for SA as part of that.
Just another way to think of it, though. Digital Pricing and Distribution is a very weird field.
I'm not sure if i'm familiar with such "policies", but i'm sure companies care more about themselves than their consumers and would rather get all the monies up-front rather than waiting until release day
I was making a really awful joke based on how EA went from releasing complete, perfect games to utter crap that requires more money than the base game to buy the full experience.
The only companies that want sales pre-release are the retailers, at least in retail stores. The digital market may be different since the money goes directly to the developer with a cut taken by Valve, but generally since the publisher/developer sells their retail copies to retail stores, they've already made a profit.
Also, really the the publisher/dev only want to know about massive sales on Day 1 because that figure gives them a good comparison point to tell if the franchise is marketable and whether to continue investing money into the developers. If we go by Pre-Order sales, because they can be highly staggered and influenced by various trends, there's no way to be sure how excited the market is.
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