I'm surprised by how conservative some people are around here. To me:
- There is nothing wrong with digital (Less plastic stuff to be thrown in the garbage in a few years, less money going to big distributors and more money directly to the devs.).
- Nothing wrong with pre-orders (Many of the people who complain about big publishers such as ''EA'' will also complain about pre-orders; which is contradicting considering how this is all about giving money to the devs for a product that you want even though it is not finished. Devs don't have much money of their own, it allows us the players to become the ''publisher'' and to have an influence on how they will be making the game.
This is not necessarily true. A lot of the times, this is only the case if there is no "publisher" at all. For instance: Bohemia Interactive and their store. They publish their own games, so a digital download saves them on Steam, Gamestop, or whatever.
In the case of a game like CoH2, where Relic does have a publisher (Sega), what sometimes happens is: The developer gets paid depending on certain conditions set by the publisher (AAA game quality, a certain rating to measure "success" and so on) as well as a cut off the number of copies sold. The digital distribution is probably only saving money for Sega, who was going to dish out the cash for the discs and stuff, not Relic.
So... most likely, you are not giving more money to the Devs, but to the Publisher.