Pre-Order Pain or Pleasure?

Are you a fan of bonus pre-order content? Do you think it's rewarding the faithful for putting money down on their favorite franchises or are they merely being exploited by promising content that varies from decent to worthless?

Today Deux Ex: Mankind Divided's pre-order bonuses were announced. It's unique in that you don't just get one pre-order bonus, you get several, in different tiers. This graph should explain better than my words can: 

As you can see, there are different tiers that offer different rewards, with the grand prize being able to play the game 4 days early. How do you unlock the other tiers? It's not anything fun like beating a flash game or demo or completing some kind of challenge. It's dependent entirely on the hope of other people pre-ordering the game. That's right. Aside from urging, some would argue bugging, your friends to pre-order the game there's not a thing you can do.

At the very least this isn't like Watch Dogs, which had so many pre-orders and versions of the game spread across so many different retailers that a graph had to be made just to clearly show what versions had which pieces of DLC attached to it.

That's not even touching on the fact that sometimes there are console exclusive content. The first time I remember this was with the release of Soul Calibur 4, with the 360 getting Yoda and Vader going to PS3 owners. If you had both systems, congrats, pick your favorite character. But, if you only have one console (or, if you happen to not own the console that comes with the console exclusive content), tough luck. Granted, we know now that those two characters would later be offered as paid DLC, but at the time we didn't. 

Sometimes the content is already on the disk (which kind of defeats the purpose of downloadable content. It's supposed to be downloaded.). And the only way to unlock all the content is by simply pirating the game In an effort to stave off piracy, or drum up hype for game by getting you to promise your dollars upfront, publishers may have inadvertently made piracy much worse and thus resulting in less revenue not more.

What do you think? Do you like Pre-Order bonuses or do you think it's a fad that needs to die?  

- Fel