RANT: Video Games and Q4

I'm going to fire up the wayback machine and bring you a tale from the distant past of November 2002. Ubisoft was on it's way to becoming the #2 third-party video game developer. At that year's E3 they had shown off two titles that had hit written all over them: Prince of Persia and Beyond Good and Evil.

Both were mostly action based titles with fairly fantastic settings.
Both recieved numerous 'Best in Show' awards and had a fair amount of publicity.
Both ended up being not just good, but excellent games.
Both were inexplicably released within two weeks of one another.

As you could have predicted one game, PoP, sold okay numbers and has since spawned several very successful sequels. The other, BG&E, had it's price cut by 60% before Christmas. All because of the Fourth Quarter Rush.

This year in particular I've dreaded Q4. Not just because even a rich guy probably couldn't buy all of the games I'm looking forward to, but because of the havoc it wreaks on the rest of the year. For huge stretches of '06 I was dying to play something, anything, new but there was nothing decent available. Now? More decent titles come out in a two week span than were released the previous seven months. I know that the fourth quarter is huge for retailers, but it's just plain stupid to release some lower profile titles then.

Take this November's Star Trek: Legacy as an example. While the Star Trek brand is still very well known, it's not what you would call a highly anticipated title. So what does it's publisher, Vivendi Universal, do with a title like that? Why release at the single most jam-packed time of the year, of course! Here are just a few of the titles being released within two weeks of Star Trek Legacy:

• Splinter Cell: Double Agent
• Phantasy Star Universe
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance
• Call of Duty 3
• Rainbow Six: Vegas
• Gears of War
• F.E.A.R.
• Brothers in Arms 3

Eight potential AAA titles slated to drop within two weeks of Legacy, and that's just on the XBox 360. What did I forget? Oh, yeah: the two brand new consoles that will be hitting stores within that timeframe, with their attendant games and accessories. Sitting here in August I can tell you without a doubt that Star Trek: Legacy will be a commercial failure, and for the dumbest of reasons: impatience and shortsightedness.

In contrast lets take a look at the release calendar for February 2007:
...... {cricket}
Okay, how about June 2007:
....... {cricket}
So instead of releasing a promising title 3-6 months later (or 3-6 months earlier) when it actually has a chance to succeed or fail on it's own merits, it gets dumped between a whole herd of 500 pound gorillas, giving it no chance at all at success. Brilliant. I'll probably still buy it, but only after it inevitably drops to $20 in early January.

My advice to all videogame publishers:

Games CAN be released throughout the entire year!

If you have a sure-fire hit, by all means release it in Q4, but if you're not absolutely sure your game will sell huge numbers, be smart and hold it back a few months. If publishers took just a few titles out of Q4 and spread them throughout the year everybody would win. Gamers would have something new to buy during the dog days, retailers would have something to pull customers in outside of Christmas, and developers would have at least a chance at success.