I’ve Had Enough Release Schedules

By Mike Mason

‘I’ve Had Enough…’ is a regular column by Cubed3’s Mike Mason. This time: the Christmas period has made him angry…

There’s such a thing as too much choice. This doesn’t seem to be a lesson that has been learnt particularly well throughout the gaming industry even as it has grown into the industry behemoth that it is now.  Year upon year, dozens of titles are all sent out at once in the mad rush to grab sales in the most important quarters of the year.  We’ve just escaped the most traditionally crazy release period of the year: the good old Christmas rush.

Yet it was actually much quieter than usual this time around.  SimplyGames director Neil Muspratt commented that the release schedules were the “most sensibly divided up” ones he had seen in all his time in the retail side of the games industry such in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz.  Indeed, it felt, for one sparkling moment when announcements of delays began to come in, that the world of gaming had wised up, stopped jostling for sales in the tiniest of spaces with pugil sticks and had instead decided to give themselves a little more room.  Then it became apparent that nobody was really trying to do anything of the sort – they’d simply put all their releases back a few weeks so that they could all still battle it out, only without a Christmas period at the end of it.  Oh.

A big bunch of games cleared out of the Christmas running when it was realised that they would be taking on the Call of Duty machine with the release of Modern Warfare 2.  That decision is fair enough, considering how big the franchise has become; it, along with the likes of the ‘Wii’ line of games and New Super Mario Bros. Wii, were undoubtedly the big winners the season, and it’s quite unlikely that this could have been altered.  Yet any problem with release schedules hasn’t been solved at all – it’s all just been delayed by a few weeks to a period when many people are paying off their post-Christmas debt rather than thinking about buying new games.  It just doesn’t make sense to think that there are somewhere in the region of nine or ten biggish games either just released or soon to be released on the Xbox 360 alone – Bayonetta, BioShock 2, Dante’s Inferno and Mass Effect 2, to name a few.

What is your natural reaction when placed in front of a few desirable titles and told to pick just one? You’ll poke and prod a bit, “um” and “ah” and, eventually, hopefully, pick one in a reasonable amount of time.  Now picture the same scenario with not just a few titles but a tableful.  Can you, as a seasoned, knowledgeable gamer pick just one and be fully satisfied that you’ve made the right move in the face of so many options? I wager that very few could claim as such.  Apply this to your non-gaming consumer who’s out to satisfy their youngsters.  Good luck to them, I say.  Uninformed about quality or value, they do the only thing that makes sense in the situation – they go for brand names or things that they recognise, cross their fingers and hope for the best.  Thus, the licenced titles and the few big series get the sales and the rest get left behind.  If you like animal metaphors, you might liken it to a bunch of mice all charging for one hole through which they’ve spied a piece of cheese at exactly the same second, only the majority of them get wedged together in the hole while a couple of the leaner, speedier rodents manage to get in, start battling over the tasty snack and just a few of the crumbs spilt in the fight tumble back for the others to pick at.  Replace those mice with games and the cheese with sales and you have your typical release schedule rush.

I understand that all publishers want to be able to show their shareholders big shiny numbers on their quarterly reports, but why put all your eggs in one basket? As it is, the majority of games get released either at the beginning or end of the year.  Then there’s a big blank spot where hardly anything comes out.  Y’know, that little season called ’summer’.  Would it be so wrong to, say, spread out the releases a little more and not just send them out to die on the same weeks as direct competition? It’s not an admission of defeat to put your title a few weeks later than your rival’s, it’s common sense.  Those weeks don’t have to go wasted; they can be used to build up hype and promotion to further cement the investment, or if it’s known well in advance that that’s the plan they could even be put to good use messing about with those tiny bits of polish that the timetable just didn’t originally allow for in development.

That’s just not how it is, though, and it’s the reason that we’ve seen the number of bargains and cut price games rise; there’s just too much on the market for them all to possibly succeed.  It’s an uncommon – and lucky – person who can afford to buy all the season’s big releases, but it’s doubtful that they’d then have the time to even play them all unless they literally did nothing else with their life.  Which leads me to a slightly more personal plea: seriously, with so many games out at the same time, how are they all supposed to be covered, and covered well, to the standard you would expect of a critic, by the gaming press, working on limited time? The way release schedules are heavily weighted to certain periods right now does a disservice to the consumers by throwing far too much at them and lessening the chances of fair opinions on the releases being distributed to them.  Of course, the cynic might suggest that this is exactly the plan for some games of lesser quality, allowing them to slip through the net and pull in some sales before the damage is done by the media getting the chance to shine their opinionated light on them.

I know this probably sounds more like a futile rant than anything else.  The only way the release schedules are going to get sorted out in the future is if publishers begin to actively work out the best times to put things on shop shelves and realise that they’re holding themselves back.  As opposed to the current strategy of shoving them out blindly whenever they feel like it and then having a line for the press waiting on standby that blames market conditions and – hey! – the number of competing games that came out.  With the size of the industry, faith in your product is not enough any longer. There are 52 weeks in a year, so use them.