Amazon drops Prime game pre-order discount

Amazon has announced that it is withdrawing the discount on physical game pre-orders for Prime subscribers, from early August, though has not provided a reasoning behind the long-standing offer's cancellation.

Available to Amazon customers for a £79 or £7.99 a month subscription fee, Amazon Prime brings with it a wealth of benefits: Free next-day delivery on everything sold or fulfilled by Amazon itself; access to streaming video and music content; free games and in-game content via the company's Twitch subsidiary; and access to Prime Now, the company's members-only mobile-exclusive outlet which offers same-day delivery within a two- to four-hour window.

One of the Prime benefits, however, has been selected for the chop: A discount on pre-orders of new-release physical video and computer games. Previously available to all Prime subscribers, the discount took £2 off the cost of any physical game pre-order while also providing access to a guarantee that the buyer would pay the lowest price for which the pre-order had been made available between the order being placed and the game being released. While only a small discount, equivalent to less than five percent on most titles, it was enough to ensure that Amazon was typically the cheapest place to pre-order a game.

In an email to Prime subscribers, Amazon advised that the discount is to be withdrawn from August 7th. 'We would like to inform you that we will no longer offer the Prime discount of £2 on physical video game pre-orders from 7 August, 2018,' the company explained. 'You can still use this Prime discount without restriction until this date.'

The news of the offer's withdrawal comes at an interesting time, with Amazon having boasted of a record-breaking Prime Day sale period and founder Jeff Bezos' personal fortune having hit a record-breaking figure of around $141 billion - cementing his place firmly at the top of the world's richest list, well above runner-up and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates at around $90 billion. No explanation for the discount's removal has been given.