Preorders were originally a pretty good way of predicting overall unit sales - the correlation was pretty good. When the publishers figured that out, they tried to juice the preorder numbers in hopes that it would juice the total sales numbers - this was happening sometime in the late 2000s and early 2010s. This was back when you got all kinds of special preorder bonuses and some stores made games unavailable at launch unless you preordered. Because they artificially juiced the preorder numbers, the actual correlation broke and the predictive quality of preorders basically vanished. This is also why pushing hard on preorders doesn't happen anymore.

That said, preorders and pre-loading really doesn't much affect us here in the trenches. We have our final ship date (which is set before the preload date), which results in our pencils-down "gold master" equivalent - the final digitally signed install package for the game. This package is what we submitted to cert and got approved for whatever platforms we're shipping on. This package is also what gets preloaded to players alongside a lock that shouldn't be opened until the time of release. By then, the package has been ready for distribution for weeks (in order to make sure we had time to go back and fix any cert-blocking issues) and we're usually already either working on the next content updates or moved on to another project entirely.

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