The Quarter Four Supposed Safety: Why Video Gamers will be Poor for Christmas
by Stephen Taft, SUNY Cortland, October 19, 2004
Ah! It’s almost that time of year again. That’s right: the fourth quarter of the stock market is closing in fast and that means a big deal to many video game designers and companies. The holidays are supposedly the safe time to release a new game into the market, and most companies would like to have a sales boost on their stock portfolio. However, this may not be the case this year.
As a gamer myself there are a lot of titles I am looking forward to getting in the coming months (Sept-Dec). The problem is I have these annoying things called rent and electric that I also have to pay for. That limits my budget for games considerably. Now that would be all fine and well if there weren’t so many good games being released in the next few months. In fact, when I look at all the games I would like to have in September alone the total comes somewhere between $300-500. There is no way I am going to be spending that much money on games. What it does mean is that I will be renting a lot of these, which is definitely not what the developers were hoping for, I’m sure.
Now why the hell would companies do this? It seems to be hurting them more than helping them all to release at this time. < ahref="http://www.penny-arcade.com/" target="_blank">Penny Arcade recently asked this question in one of their recent news posts, and as they have some connections in the game industry they got a few answers from developers. I think this quotation just about sums up how developers feel about the situation.
Now I know what you’re thinking ”What? How is ‘getting your title buried in a shit heap of other games so that it doesn’t sell nearly as well as it could have’ playing it safe?” I have this theory called “The Christmas Decoration Phenomenon.” As nearly as I can tell, there are legions of trolls that sit in marketing offices all day crunching numbers. They are really sensitive to patterns, even ones that the normal human eye is incapable of seeing. It would seem that, at some point, some clever marketing troll said to himself ”hmmm… a lot of games sell around Christmas. I know! If we sell our games at Christmas, we’ll make tons of money!” And it worked. For years, it seemed that the maxim was “let’s push this game back and get it out the door at Christmas.” And, like the decorations at department stores, the definition of “Christmas Time” keeps getting pushed back sooner and sooner and lasting longer and longer. Now “The Holiday Season” begins in September and ends in January.
Well this year, I think what happened is that everyone did as they normally did – scheduled for Christmas – oblivious to the fact that everyone else was doing the same damn thing, and all the sudden there’s a crisis. “Oh shit, you mean GTA4 (Grand Theft Auto: San Andres), Half-Life 2, Metroid Prime 2, Halo 2, and our GameX are coming out in the same week? Crap! How did this happen? Let’s shuffle some deadlines… release a week later... a week earlier… a month earlier… and so forth.”
It really just comes down to some crappy planning based on the stagnancy of marketing philosophies. Releasing during the holidays is “safe”… even though tons of other games are coming out… I don’t know if you can hear it but my eyes are rolling in the back of my head right now. (1)
So what does this mean to the average college video game student? Mostly it means you better start saving if you want to be getting any of these games. I myself just sold off a good chunk of games I owned to pay for some of the games coming out this month. In the end three games only cost me around $35 with all the games I traded in. Problem is I traded in most of my games to do this. So that’s all fine and well for this month but what about next month and the months of November and December? I have nothing to trade in so those new games are going to be costing me full price. This does not bode well for me, or anyone who’s into video games. I’m hopeful that game developers will release sooner rather than later and know that if their game is good, gamers will buy it regardless of what time of the year it is.
Souces:
(1) http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2004-09-06
DESIGNER: Heather Cheetham, New Media Design, SUNY Cortland, USA
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