A friend of Zen points out this preorder promotion for City of Villians. See if you can spot the fatal flaw! (Answer after the break)

If your answer was ‘I play a female character and didn’t happen to choose Gamestop for my goodie’, congrats! A winner is you! Here’s my friend:

The box doesn’t say what the item is, or that it’s for one sex or the other. The item is a big yellow corner of the preorder box as a major selling point. Further, once you put in your preorder code, that item is locked into your account. You can’t go “oops I wanted to get a man helmet so I’ll put in an EBGames code AND they insist they can’t delete a code from your account once it’s there.They told me to start a new CoV account, even though my CoH account has all the preorder and collectors editions enabled. So if I had to start another account I’d have to rebuy that stuff if I wanted to play as a hero on that account, or pay for two accounts. The community manager told me the dev team knows about the issue and have considered allowing the items in game through quests or something after the period of exclusivity expires.

In my eyes this whole concept is giving more value to the retailer with different items per store chain, but it’s exasperated by the fact that you’ve got a useless perk if you buy it in the store without reading the website about it first. So rather than a nice perk for customer faith it’s been twisted into some bad bad thing because of selfish developers and publisher!

Done well, and it can increase both our bottom lines as well as player satisfaction in-game. But when you do it, you have to be sure your promotion doesn’t end up creating more unhappy customers than happy ones. =)

The original comments thread is here.