So, my copy of Dark Souls: Remastered arrived on Friday, and it is absolutely brilliant. I’ve just finished ringing the second Bell of Awakening and it’s off to Sen’s next for some swinging-blade action.

But that’s not the point of this.  The point is that, along with the disc, I got an email from Amazon telling me that they’d charged me $39.88 and that I had saved 0.11 with their pre-order price guarantee.

This… seemed odd.  One of the reasons I order games from Amazon is that, as a Prime Member, I generally expect to get 20% off on pre-orders.

So, I went to their chat support expecting to get an apology and an $8 credit and maybe a free month of Prime added on to my existing subscription.

Instead I got linked to this page of “cases where the 20% pre-order discount does not apply”, which I have reproduced below for your convenience.  Note rule #6:

So, apparently “re-masters” are now not eligible for the Prime discount, which is a weird and arbitrary rule.  It also doesn’t seem to be applied consistently – for example, I looked up the impending Switch version of Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker and that is showing me an available discount.  So this rule probably only applies to games that actually have “remaster” in the title.

This is the second time in a row I’ve had a bad time with their customer service, which historically has bent over backwards to make me happy.  The last time was when I had a $300 processor delivered to my neighbor two houses over, and the chat support agent told me that it had probably just been marked “delivered” by mistake and that I should wait a couple of days before talking to them about it again.

Anyway, it’s a small enough thing that I’m not going to go down to Best Buy and buy a copy with my GCU discount to return to Amazon to get my 40 bucks back, but it’s apparently annoying enough that I’m going to write a snarky blog post about it.