That’s certainly true. I’d still say that for the online stores, for which that policy applies, there isn’t a lot of upside to preordering. Because the purchase is digital, you will always be able to get a copy on release day (unless the publisher artificially limits how many games it will sell, but I’ve never heard of a publisher doing this).

Financially, preorders without a “preorder bonus” are a zero interest loan to the developer. Preorders with the “preorder bonus” are a loan with the bonus as interest. Even if the game were guaranteed to be good, you could most likely be doing something better with the money until it comes out. Since the game is not guaranteed to be good, it is a risky loan as well. Without any of the protections you get when you make an actual loan.

Couldn’t a Chromium clone relicensed under some copyleft license also be a viable option against Chromiums? Chromium is licensed under BSD-3 which Wikipedia claims is compatible with the GPL, so there wouldn’t be any legal reason this couldn’t be done, right? Other than not really wanting to split a project with excessive forks (which is only bad if you think that the Chromium project itself is a net good), is there some technical or other reason why this would be a bad idea?