Release Date Shenanigans
Arguably my three most wanted games have had either a major reveal or a release date announced in the last month. They are
Batman: Arkham City,
Rage, and
Bioshock Infinite. What do all three have in common? They're not out for
over a year.
This is utterly insane. Why were these games announced so early? Because it happens all the time of course. And I'm sick of it.
I really want to be excited about
Bioshock Infinite, and god help me I am already. But the earliest it will be turning up is roughly 2012. They've already been working on it for more than two years at this point, and it'll be another two years at least before we get to play it.
id Software haven't released a new, proper game since 2004, so they've had six years making
Rage so far. It's coming out, probably, in September 2011, bringing the total up to a
Duke Nukem Forever-pushing
seven years. And that's assuming it doesn't slip!
Batman: Arkham City is the only one I can kind of forgive, since two years after the original is pretty standard. Still, why was it only revealed a few months after
Arkham Asylum?
Why do we have to wait so long for these games? Hype’s fine, but I don’t see why that can’t build up in a conceivable time scale. Like, a few months before release date. Then I can get good and excited
and think “yay, it’s only coming out in June (or whatever)!”
Tales of Monkey Island is a great example. Telltale were working on the fifth game in the superb Monkey Island series for years, and yet they only announced it a month before they were due to release it. They thought it wasn’t fair for the fans to have to wait so long, so they kept it quiet for as long as possible. And it did really well.
Compare that to
Alan Wake. Announced in 2005, delayed for five years, hyped and marketed to buggery, and only did moderately well at sales. Or
Too Human, announced in 1999 for the PS1 and staying on-and-off in development for ten years, before it came out and no one cared. Or
Halo, which was announced in 1999 and went on to utterly … oh. Scratch that one.
Do I think these three are going to fail? No, absolutely not. What I’m trying to suggest though is that hype can backfire into overhype. Can
Rage, for example, possibly live up to expectations? These guys created the FPS genre, and made
Wolfenstein, Doom and
Quake! It’s their first new IP since the mid-90s, and they’ve been working on it for at least six years! IT’S GOING TO BE THE BEST SHOOTER EVARRR!!!! … Except it won’t. People will either have a) built the game up so much in their minds that they will inevitably be disappointed in the result, or b) got so fed up with the constant coverage over the last few years that they made their minds up to hate it.
So when do I think games should be announced? Well, as close as possible to the release date, but if companies still want a good lead-in time… six months beforehand. If a game gets announced at E3 and proudly states to be coming out this holiday, I get excited. Coming out next year? Doesn’t get on my Most Wanted list. Only now in September am I at last thinking about
Dragon Age II,
Portal 2,
Crysis 2 and all the other many ‘2’ games published by EA coming out in the early months of 2010.
At this point I could talk about over-saturation of the post-Xmas months… but I’ll leave that to another blog.
Chris Capel
September 1st 2010
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Hookedcast #61
