The politics of release dates

 Delays abound.

Finishing a game is a monumental achievement. Throwing together all those warring professional artists and egos into that vast blender of creation in order to pop out a completed game the other side- the work of majesty and magicians as far as I'm concerned. But that is unfortunately only one step in the battle to make a profit in the games industry. Because this ain't the 90's anymore. A great game alone isn't going to stand atop the pile of mediocrity and shine out like a diamond. There's too much competition on the market these days, too much daily trash to stand out from, and too many distractions to draw the eye of a potential consumer elsewhere. These days you have to deal with marketing campaigns, genre models, PR, community management and, most dauntingly of all, the release date itself. The killer of a thousands games in the flesh.

You can't just drop a game when it's done and expect it to make a living on it's own- that's just not how things are done in this line of business. You have to announce the release date to get people excited even when you're still in the making process, and you have to try and juggle the act of gauging interest in the project to keep investor money coming in, the attention span of the audience to not get sick of the project if it's been in development for several years and the ability of the studio to neatly hit that deadline with a finished product that is going to live up to all those marketing cheques that have been written. It's something of a minefield to navigate and enough to drive anyone insane- which is probably why it's an equation that so often goes wrong.

We get games revealed way too early in their development life cycle to the extent where they disappear from the public eye for years before they come out, losing all the marketing momentum and essentially wasting the cost of the reveal in the process. Then we get titles that are given release dates that are way too close for the development team to possibly finish all they need to on time, which of course leads to cutbacks needing to be made, projects having to be scaled back and- in some cases- projects been given up on altogether. That must be why the older gen ports of Cyberpunk 2077 were so unplayable that they had to be withdrawn from the Playstation store, no matter what the CDPR devs are trying to gaslight us by saying nowadays. (Can't believe they really tried the "Actually the launch was fine, people are just haters" approach.)

A popular release window that so many of that 'upper tier of video game' endeavours to follow is to try and get their game out by the month of September. Typically this is the period known as the 'Holliday window', being the time when consumers are typically coming out of the outdoor Summer fun and are edging towards the indoor months leading up to Christmas. Although not December itself because that's too late to establish the game's reputation. Of course, this does mean you'll get Call of Duty releasing in the same month as Battlefield, or that one time when EA threw Titanfall between those two releases resulting in one of the most predictable underperformances of all time. This year the big game entering that window is Starfield and you can already see the effects is having on those around it. Baldur's Gate 3, once due for late August, shot it's release window up to early August just to distance itself from the game. To quote Thulsa Doom "That is power!"

Then you have the certain days of a week that a game needs to release on in order to squeeze out those day one sales. Now common logic would tell us that the ideal time to release a game you want to be popular would be on a Friday, just before everyone goes home for the weekend- but that hasn't been the case. As it just so happens Tuesday tends to be the ideal date the releases and the reason why is actually impressively shrouded in layers of mythos and tradition. As the myth goes, back in the day SEGA branded one of their most popular game releases "Sonic 2sday" which turned out to be so successful that the industry has stuck to that standard ever since. The more logical explanation would be that the journalists who are tasked with covering these games are typically free to make their articles on Tuesdays, as Mondays are busy dealing with the left over work from the weekends and Fridays are wind-off days before a weekend break.

Whatever the case, the result is that games tend to release on the same day of the week, which makes the danger of releasing in the same month even more serious. Rather than 30 odd days to drop your game in, now there are only really four or so dates, and I'll bet there's some internal marketing politics deciding what part of the month is the most ideal time as well. When it comes to projects with this much potential capital on the line you just know there's someone out there with hyper precise flowcharts and correlation graphs attempting to discover the maths of the universe for solving permanent profitability. That's just the price you pay for being in an industry that proports the highest amount of earnings in entertainment at large. (Although if you're here to make the serious bucks, than the crappy mobile market will be your destination.)

And, of course, the general rule of any entertainment product is simple: Don't release your product around a direct potential competitor. The philosophy is inherent here; there are only so many potential consumers out there with so much free income and free time, going head to head with someone else may seem like a form of aggressive competition but the truth is that you're never going to pinch the entirety of an audience. Sticking two games in close proximity to one another just forces the consumer to make a choice about where their time should be spent and it ultimately cannibalises the potential sales of both products. Give it a couple of weeks at the bear minimum. Smaller titles just face actually killing themselves if they release at poor timed moments. The actually decent Mad Max game got stomped by 'Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain"; the 'Horizon' franchise seems to harbour a secret fetish for being silenced by Zelda- at the end of the day there are just too many games in the world, don't make it harder for yours to stand out.

When it comes down to it, these are the rules that are known the industry over; especially by the money men who make the sort of decisions about when these games are going to actually come out after being ripped from the hands of the perfectionist developers. Yet still we get collisions in the rules that lead to these disaster examples we lament across the industry. (Still we weep for Titanfall 2.) And why this is can lead back to an even higher echelon of politics. Budget constraints, fiduciary over-promised commitments, straight up corporate sabotage; a lot of the stuff we can only ever speculate on and which will never see the definitive light of day unless in the light of court. Because it is wild what we're learning about inner Xbox lately. I wonder if any new, as-of-yet unspoken, rules of release will come out? Exciting!