Years ago I would preorder expansions pretty early in the build up to their launch. There was a practical reason for this, of course, as shops would sell out of copies of the expansion’s box and mail-order copies might fail to turn-up on time. We would generally go grab our copy of the latest World of Warcraft expansion, or Guild Wars 1 box from a Game Store somewhere in the city.

At some point online shopping took over, maybe it was Warlords that we bought physically but from Amazon. I guess I even have an emails somewhere to prove which were bought through that channel. More recently buying an expansion feels more like subbing, its an account feature that you buy through the store and ‘unlock’. So there’s no real scarcity issues to deal with and I can choose to buy the expansion just before the launch…