We must have many games, for baby Jesus has his birthday soon! But Orange Box, BioShock, Mass Effect, Zelda DS, Zack & Wiki, Metroid Prime 3, Super Smash Brothers, the new Phoenix Wright, Sam & Max Season 2, Super Mario Galaxy, Assassin’s Creed, and hey even The Simpons Game, all attacking at once? That’s cruel.
Note to self: write one perfect rant about this, then recycle it every year.
Guess how many of them will sell well?
Game publishers: “Oh yeah! I have a brand new game, and I want to sell like Half-Life, and so I’m gonna put it out in Christmas when all the big names are out, you know why? Cause summer is empty and no-one is putting out games then, so the competition then must be terrible and my game will surely flunk! No, I’ll just put it out with everyone else and blend in with it all and not sell!”
Kroms
October 10th, 2007
Yeah, once again the autumn & winter season is filled with high profile releases.
This year has an unusually huge amount of high profile games coming out very soon during the next 2-3 months, or at least it seems like that to me.
So many good games will be drowned in the mass and won’t get huge amount of sold copies like they should.
The games that have a low profile compared to these BioShocks etc. should come out during summer, they really would make a huge difference when thinking about business results.
It just doesn’t make any sense why companies decide to release all the games of the industry at once during a short time period around Christmas. Everybody gets their share of damage with this release schedule.
Kolzig
October 11th, 2007
I’ve talked with friends about how “This year has an unusually huge amount of high profile games coming out” for the last four or five years, now… I think the same amount of epic humongous releases hit every Winter, and our long term release-date memory generally sucks. This exact same thing happens every year, and it’s totally ridiculous, *but* it must be working for someone, since people keep doing it.
I’m sure there are many many smaller games every year whose publishers bank it all on a successful holiday release, and are crushed to dust by the robotic foot of AAA releases, like that skull at the start of Terminator 2, but for the big boys it’s clearly a hugely successful strategy… otherwise sometime in the last five years there would have been at least a *couple* PowerPoint presentations with flying line graphs indicating that a change of plan would be a good idea.
Jake
October 11th, 2007
I mean, it’s fun and I like to snarkily attribute it to epic games industry hubris “Ho ho, there’s Microsoft and EA and Take2 all releasing their games at Christmas right on top of each other because they’re all sooo important!” type thing, and while it surely is that a little bit (marketing departments frequently get into a horrible cyclical pattern which ends with them deluding themselves into thinking that what people actually care about is the marketing instead of the product marketing is trying to support and… market) but on the other hand, Christmas is always going to be the time of year when mom might actually ask her kid to list off the 3 or 4 games they’ve been yammering about in the car all year, because she might buy one or two of them.
Jake
October 11th, 2007
Yep, I once talked about this with a sales guy at a publisher and Christmas was like +400% in sales for them at least. So I’m sure it’s working out for most publishers. But it’s not working out for me. And I’m sure it’s also not working out for any games that aren’t Halo 3 or Super Mario Galaxy or Madden NFL 07. But mainly, my point was that it’s not working out for me. ¬¬
Marek
October 12th, 2007
Right now, I’m having this problem with all the TV that’s on. There’s easily an average of three hours a night of unmissable viewing on our screens…quite often at the same time!
adfegg
October 12th, 2007
Somehow I am missing all of it but 30 Rock…
Jake
October 14th, 2007
That’s weird. You basically just rattled off my entire wish list.
Except you left out Brot McGronsky’s Big Game Bowhunter 2007.
Ryan Henson Creighton
November 1st, 2007