I'm not saying story is a bad thing. It's not, but it seems like a lot of devs focus so heavily on coming up with an engaging story and good visuals that they forget to actually make the game fun to play.
I think about some of the games I've played over the years, and a lot of my favorites either had fairly limited or even downright absurd plots that basically boil down to an excuse to make the gameplay loop happen.
Just a random musing.
I'd say 'kind of' as with graphics the front load it for trailers and demos with how great they look but when you see the game streamed (as I never buy day 1 and forget pre ordering nowadays) they turn out average or even worse with quite a few Western games. The Asian ones are better because they need the graphics to be good throughout as how else are we seeing the female butt jiggle the entire game.
Story is a different thing altogether. A lot of studios try the 'subversive, interesting take/ direction' but they forget we've had Bioshock, Stanley Parable, even the first (and only good one) Last of Us so we've HAD interesting stories before so that won't immediately make us drop money anymore. This is made worse with ideology injection which is like suddenly hitting a wall since it removes you from the setting with the injection of current day politics.
Both of these though are the focus over gameplay as many of these devs don't play games OUTSIDE their work so aren't experienced with different mechanics to know what's fun and what can get dull and/or annoying used too much.
TLDR; they focus on graphics/story because they're not gamer enough to do gameplay but shit at both.
I've only ever preordered two games, and somehow got lucky with both; Ghostbusters: The video game in 2009 (basically a third-person shooter but with the proton pack), and Deadpool in 2013 (Think arkham asylum-style fighting sequences, but with a more forgiving combo system, also killing, lots of killing).
generally speaking though, yeah. preordering always seemed like rolling the dice even before the woke garbage got forced into gaming without gamers' consent...