I'm rarely pre-ordering games for various reasons but the main reason is: I don't want to buy a product that is not released and I don't have any clue about what it is. You can take some research about released games, several other people played it already and all you have to do is to look up what their experience was.
unreleased games give you no measurement about this, all the information comes fromt he developers or (most of the time) the publisher themselves, so of course the information is biased, they want to let the product shine in the right spotlight. Of course they won't tell you is something is off with the game, why should they? No one would preorder/buy it then.
The rare cases where I DID preorder a game were very memorable.
There was the South Park game (Stick of truth). really good game, awesome, very close to the show. However, in Germany (and I think in one or two other countries) there was a problem with the release, where the physical copy of the game had uncut scenes of Nazi-Symbols in it (which is forbidden in Germany since WW 2), so the game was on hold until this mistake was fixed, for both physical and digital version despite the digital version just needed a patch that was already there but was left out because of a mistake. The reason for holding back the digital version as well was because the people who bought the retail version shouldn't feel left out. But this does not make much sense because the whole world could play the game anyway, so we were left out anyway. And it was hard to avoid any spoilers until it was released, some genius thought it was funny to spoil the final endboss.
Another example is XCOM 2. Great game but it came out unoptimized and buggy, alot of people have perfomance problems on their expensive systems. The developers acknowledged, that XCOM 2 may have some starting problems and they tried to fix it but still haven't done very much (a patch came out but even Rock Paper Shotgun said it literally did nothing).
And then there is A Hat in Time. God, how I hate this game now. I welcomed this game with open arms. i was one of the first people who preordered right at the day when it was announced. This was three years ago. This whole game might become a new Duke Nukem Forever. The developers are totally blind toward thwe fact that people are waiting and are getting annoyed about the fact that there are no new information about the game.
The developers publish once a week a new screenshot of the (unfinished) game ont heir faceboo page without giving away what the screenshot is actually about. It's like some random crap that people on steam do (like me, I do this a lot). Rarely they show something useful, like what features are in the game, screenshots of the new menus or how the world selection will look like.
when we reordered, we were promised to play an alpha version of th game. And after that a Beta version. we got both but we expected, well, more. What we got was a very unrefined game that had nearly nothing of the amount the game should have (the game shall have about 7 chapters with 10 levels/missions per chapter, there were only 3 chapters in the Beta which weren't even complete). I fear this game might never be complete because the developers show always the same three chapters 8the one from the Beta but not the levels we got to play fromt hem), so if they still are struggling on chapter three, I think they take too long. Sometime their money must run out and what then? early release? they take way too much time to do a single thing, their time management is aweful. And it also seems that they are actual clueless what the player should do in the game, there were some missions int he Beta that weren't really inventive or fun to play (one mission was only to reach a certain person which was easy to do in 2 minutes).
