Dear Gaming Industry, This Is Why You’re Losing Money.
Summer is just around the corner and the gaming industry finally releases a whole bunch of big titles for us to play during the holiday. But what’s this? All the games are releasing on the same day? Oh that’s just great.This is the same problem that causes gamers to go insane right before Christmas. All the good titles release either at the same time or with only a week’s difference. Next week, on the 29th of May, we will see the release of inFAMOUS, Fuel, Guitar Hero: Metallica and SBK 09. What’s that you say? Guitar Hero: Metallica is already out? Well not over here in the magical land of clogs, tulips, drugs and brothels. Then the week after that we see the release of Prototype, Red Faction Guerrilla, Sacred 2, The Sims 3, Star Ocean 4 (again the whole Netherlands/Europe thing), Street Fighter 4 for PC. Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10, Guitar Hero: Smash Hits (which I’ll discuss later), Arma 2, Overlord 2, Rock Band Unplugged, Tales Of Vesperia (EU), Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood and Fight Night Round 4 following in the few weeks after.
If you were to buy all these games on their release date you’d be out a good €700 within a span of two months, money you won’t be spending on food or rent or other bills. Now the movie industry figured this problem out a long time ago, that’s why you will never see two blockbusters releasing on the same day. It’s bad for business to be in direct competition with each other and it also draws away attention from independent studios who seem to stick to the same release dates. Would it be so hard for publishers to look at other games releasing on the date they picked and maybe pushing their game forwards or backwards for the sake of selling more copies?
And I assure you they will sell more copies. Their demographic will have the money they haven’t spent on other games on the same day, and will feel more inclined to try a title that hasn’t been released on the same day as a title they were more excited about. Of course if you apply this theory to the Christmas season then you could argue that less money will be spent on games around that time. While this is not true, I’d like to point out that one of the biggest selling titles of all time (GTA4) was released in April of last year, away from the holiday season. The industry might not make as much money around Christmas, sure, but instead they’ll have a higher income all year round.
Which brings me to Guitar Hero. Who in their right mind thought it was a good decision to release two games from the same series with only four weeks between the release dates? And if I know Europeans (the Dutch at least) they won’t buy both. That I think people will even buy Smash Hits is a big compliment from me, since I think that asking full price for a game featuring old content is just a slap in the face.
In the end it doesn’t matter when games get released. Like a blockbuster movie people will spend their money on a good product no matter what time of year it is. Games are entertainment and humankind will always want to be entertained come rain or shine. So publishers, if you release your games around the competition instead of against it, your customers will reward you.
