Here's the deal: if you're going to get Brutal Legend, it's sort of important you pre-order.
If a game gets a lot of pre-orders, everybody gets excited. “Omg, we have a hit on our hands,” they say. And so the sales forecasts go up. When the sales forecasts go up, the marketing budget goes up. That gives you more TV commercials, online and print ads, etc. That leads to more pre-orders, and the cycle continues up and up until you have a runaway monster hit on your hands.Canadians: It's best to call Best Buy or Gamestop to check if they offer the pre-order deal over there; I'm trying to call them myself to ask. If you have any details, let us know.
Here's a quick run-down of recent news you might have missed, by the way: There are ten Brutal Legend tracks that will available for Rock Band (so much for that Guitar Hero sequel, right Bobby?); "Jack Black" and Tim Schafer recently held a press conference, including some gameplay videos; check out some footage from the recent Brutal Legend special from G4 (who also did the "Final Hours of Psychonauts" thing); an interview with Peter McConnell; and, finally, a list of the stores having a Brutal Legend midnight launch.
Update: Double Fine offices tour,
Source: DFAN
Bring on the PC version!
It WILL cost them sales. Maybe a relatively small amount initially, but the simple fact is that if you want to still be playing your copy of Brutal Legend in, say, three years time, the only guaranteed way you can do that is to have a PC version.
Look at any console game from a previous generation. Granted, you can play Xbox Psychonauts on 360, but you can't play Destroy All Humans 2 or Deus Ex: Invisible War. Xbox isn't too bad, but PS2 games are now all but eliminated from the PS3. Any poor sap who bought Psychonauts or, well, ANY other PS2 game has the option of digging out their deteriorating console or buying it again.
Go back another generation and its even more unlikely. Does any game from PS1 or N64 work on the PS3 or Wii? Yes, but you have to buy them again. What about the Saturn or Dreamcast? Nope, not this generation. You want to play Burning Rangers? Tough.
Conversely, I can still play the same copy of Day of the Tentacle I bought with my first PC in 1997 on my current PC.
THAT is why I want Brutal Legend on PC. If I want to play it in 2015 or even 2025, I don't want to have to buy it again or dig out my aging 360, I want to stick the disc in the gaming platform that's currently plugged in and play immediately. Even if I have to run it through that cool free program DoublefineVM.
I'm not anti-PC. Most of my gaming is done on PC. And again: get me some statistics. Intuitively I'd say they're going to milk the consoles before releasing it for PC, but that's not based on any evidence. I say that EA knows a bit more about it than you do. They decided, for now, 360 and PS3. You say "No PC will harm sales". Give me the evidence.
The thing is, you're complaining here about the amount of hassle involved. If you buy a load of PS2 games and throw out your PS2 when the PS3 is released, that's the same to me as throwing your VCR away and then moaning that you have to buy all your VHS tapes again on DVD.
And okay, so consoles break. So do kettles and cars and almost anything else. You reach a point in time where you have to pay again. So if your PS2 breaks - you can buy a new PS2 (or a second hand one) or you can buy a PS3 and re-buy your games over the internet.
I mean yes, it's another way of making money out of people. I'm just glad there is a way to do it on consoles at all - because they don't make new SNES hardware anymore.
There is a much greater amount of hassle involved in making old PC games work on a new PC, it's just that someone else has to go to the trouble. As end-users, fair enough, that's not a hassle we have to worry about. And yeah, in three years whatever PC you own will be able to run the PC version of Brutal Legend right out of the box. So will your console!
And, like it said: we haven't seen shit.